Letter #47: Happy Transformational New Year!
The last dawn of 2024 at our Tea Tree House in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Dear Friend
Here’s to a self-empowering, transformative, life-affirmative 2025 for all of us!
In 2025 I’m going to take you all a step up from this year’s Letters. All will be revealed in next week’s Letter, the first of a brand new year. Exciting times! But before that, let’s check out of 2024 with a real big bang…
Illness Busters and Wellness Boosters for 2025
So, this is our last Letter for 2024, and I wanted to end it as a clear example of our theme for the whole of 2024, which has been about learning and understanding for ourselves how life works - out there and inside our own skin. And, crucially, how the two interact, intertwine, interconnect.
Do you remember my equation for life? IE + EE = Me
where IE is inner environment, namely your body, mind, soul and consciousness
where EE is external environment, namely everything beyond your skin, and that includes social, psychological, media and other ‘invisible’ environments
where Me = your body + mind + soul + the whole world around you acting as a holistic whole
I consider understanding to be liberating. And I consider the sense and inner feeling of ‘freedom’ to be the highest expression of being human. It’s what gives us full joy, fun, and meaning, and it’s when the magical energy of ineffable love for all of life fills our consciousness and flows through our blood.
Freedom can be defined in many ways, just like all evocative words in our language, but for me it’s the sensation I have when my whole being is in alignment with my own true nature and with the laws of nature. I am the 4Is person: I am living as an integrated intelligent interconnected individual. This allows for my own uniqueness, and for the bits of me that are the same as for you and all other human beings, to express themselves.
And if you want more than the odd fleeting moment of freedom, joy and fun, then I think you’ll need to be living with your own unique PURPOSE, and pursuing it with PASSION. What is it that you were born to do? Born to love doing? Born to be skilled and talented at? What did you automatically become attracted to as a young kid? That holds the clue to what your own pathway should be in life… before the voices of society started shaping and moulding and conditioning you into its box of uniformity and conformity…
[Never forget, it’s undertaking your own spiritual revolution that firmly gets you out of that box and into the real true you.]
You have your own unique ‘footprint’ or DNA, and the big thing is, are you attuned to it? Or are you inadvertently resisting it? Probably a massive majority of people never find their purpose, nor even do they look for it. Such is the suppressive and devastating ways of our schooling, which seeks to squash us all into the society box of uniformity and conformity.
It literally conditions us to live a life of perpetual stress and conflict, against our true self. We are nurtured, not to fit into our own true nature, but to fit into a tiny box in an infinite universe… to be like everybody else, to say, think and act the same. And should you not keep in line, should you stick your head above the parapet, you will be knocked back down like a nail that sticks up from a floorboard. We are all not only conditioned to fit into this box, but to police each other should somebody try to get out of it.
Crazy!
Anyway, you and I are on the path away from that. And just as soon as you are ready and able you will find yourself trying to guide others along the same pathway towards self-empowerment and transformation. When we empower ourselves, we WILL find our own unique purpose in life, and we will want to help others do the same. This is the joy of being human, making good, life-affirmative things happen to ourselves and the world.
But… this is where your health and wellbeing is SO important, because to live out your purpose, and with passion, means you need ENERGY! You need a body with energy, a mind with clarity and a spirit of vitality.
And therefore this final Letter will revisit and expand upon a Letter from earlier in the year, which brought to you my list of ‘Illness Busters’ and ‘Wellness Boosters’ from my book.
Get yourself healthy, get energy, vitality and clarity into your being, and you are ready to conquer the world. And I don’t mean with bombs and bullets! I mean with zest to drive your quest to be your best and the real true you, and to follow your own adventure. In this way you will be able to share your energy and vitality with all others who come into your life.
Making Health, Harmony and Happiness THE objective in life
So, here is a list of things you can practically do in your routine life to support your health and wellbeing, and to stop unwittingly or addictively attacking it. I’m sure you will already have some of these as part of your routine and healthy habits, therefore it’s time to build on them and include more. Often, I have found, we know things to be true but forget them and need reminders. So this list will serve that purpose too.
If you like writing, I suggest you copy them down into a beautiful notebook. In fact, I suggest you make sure you have a beautiful notebook if you don’t already. I know I recommended this to you a year ago, but I also know how we can forget to do something if we don’t do it right away! And make it beautiful, because beauty is motivating.
Or if you are organised digitally, copy these boosters and busters somewhere that you can easily access them, to remind yourself of them through 2025.
We begin with illness busters, because it’s so important for us to stop poisoning ourselves in a world that is packed full of poisons, such is the mad state of our societies everywhere. Some of them will prove to be the opposite of subsequent wellness boosters, but that’s great, it doubles the chance of you making it a key ingredient of your life!
Illness Busters
Stop consuming corporate-made foods and drinks Do this to the fullest extent possible in the context of your own life and where you live. They are just about all toxic and harmful to both our body and mind. This will include junk foods and pretty much all packaged foods in the supermarket. If I want things like pickle or jam or curry sauce, anything like that, I can buy jars made by local companies and choose ones which have no toxic chemical additives, flavourings, preservatives and all those INS numbers and strange long words.
Ditch refined foods from your diet This is an extension of #1, but needs to be highlighted on its own. Refined seed oils (the cheapest ones in the supermarket sold for cooking) and fats such as margarine, refined table salt, refined white sugar, refined flours are all contributors towards breeding cancerous cells, and taken in enough quantity over time will most likely lead to an outbreak of cancer. These really are ruinous to our health and should be almost entirely avoided. The only time they get into my body is when we go out to restaurants, but as with all my health rules, they are made to broken, not to be obsessed over. I must admit to a bit of an indulgence this year for danish pastries, but to counter that in 2025 I will be making bliss balls regularly.
Limit or eliminate toxic media Mainstream media is full of lies, bullshit, fear-mongering, and negative energy in general. We just don’t need a single atom of it. If you can’t find any positive, educational, entertaining media online, get the joy of reading books into your life. Or, start up your own blog or video channel and make your own media!
Limit usage of your smart phone (and other devices) If you are addicted to it, like so many are, then choose certain times of the day when you will not look at it. For example, first thing in the morning until you’ve had your breakfast, and/or no more screen time after dinner. Fill the time instead with something else, preferably nature-based, or read an educational book. Turn off notification sounds, because this is like being Pavlov’s dog!
Corporate-made creams, sprays, cosmetics are filled with toxic ingredients What you put on your skin goes inside your skin. I remember reading of the Australian healthy golfer who somehow got cancer. It turned out that he most likely got it from using so much suncream as his job was outdoors all the time. And just think of all the sunbathers who lather their bodies with dozens of toxic chemicals and then go swimming, sharing their poisons with all the marine life. You can easily make your own, check it out online. Online has answers to everything!
Limit or eliminate time spent with toxic people Ideally you simply move away from them, but perhaps it’s at work, or at home where this is difficult or maybe not even possible to do. However, the more proactively positive you become from your own self-empowering journey, the more able you will be in acting as a role model or mentor for others to become more positive too. Everything is energy flow, and even if you are with a toxic person, you can hear their negative words, but you need not accept their energy. I like responding to complaints and blame with positive ideas to counter them. They either listen with surprise, or give up with their negative stuff because I’m not accepting and their moaning is falling on deaf ears.
Don’t go to bed late at night unless you have to Sleep is vital! Keep all electronics out of your bedroom, save for a small digital clock if need be. Certainly no wifi devices. Need your phone for an alarm clock? Turn off the wifi and all connectivity. Better still, get an old-fashioned clock with hands on it and let that do the job. Even better, go to bed at 10pm and you will be unlikely to even need an alarm clock.
Get rid of peer fear “It’s none of my business what you think or say about me” and, “I can’t control what you do or say but I can control my reactions”. We have this peer fear because we are in the society box, and we feel that if we step out of it we are likely to be admonished, or perhaps even socially ostracised. This is a fear only when we don’t know who we are. But part of getting to know who we are is getting rid of peer fear, learning how to not be bothered what others may say or think of us. Speak and act with confidence, be you. The two quotes (I don’t know who they come from) can act as a guide for you until you simply don’t care any more. Interestingly, once we stop caring, and start being ourselves, others like us genuinely for who we are because they can see we are being authentic, living with integrity, and all humans, deep down, desire to do this. And if a friend rejects us? Well there’s a few billion other human beings who would like a new friend!
Stop blaming the world We blame others, we blame situations, we blame bad luck, we blame the government, we blame anything we can for our woes, our mistakes, our troubles, our perceived injustices and slights we think are being aimed at us. Blame does two things, and it does them very very well: it renders you powerless to change anything, and it blocks solutions to your problems in life. Blame is you abdicating your own responsibility for your own life. We blame others, but our problems are in fact our own reactions to life out there. Change our reaction and we remove the problem. Maybe somebody else really has caused you angst in life, but blaming them just perpetuates the negative energy. Everybody who has found it within them to forgive others is well aware of the tremendous power this gives us. Blame is a lame man’s game and such a shame!
Slow down Enough said! Eat slower, walk slower, drive slower, think slower, work slower, live slower.
Wellness Boosters
Consume only whole foods, or minimally processed foods Whole foods are those which Mother Earth gives us - fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, herbs, leaves, flowers, mushrooms, grains, eggs from free chickens, dairy and meats from free animals, not ones living in prisons. Minimally processed might mean, for example, locally made jams or chutneys or sauces, but without chemical ingredients. Drinks can be teas, good quality coffee, juices, smoothies, herbal teas, home made lemonade or limeade or ginger beer.
Include herbs and superfoods in your default diet Grow some if you can, find local sources if not, but if you have to, get them in supermarkets. Bee pollen, ashwaganda, maca powder, milk thistle, triphala, amalaki, moringa, pennywort, ginkgo biloba, apple cider vinegar (with the mother in it), cold-pressed oils such as coconut and avocado and sesame, are all some of my favourites. At any one time I might be taking one or two of them. Consider them all as health tonics, boosting your immune system to do its work. Think of them as illness-preventatives too. Small size packed with lots of nutrients - vitamins, minerals, amino acids and so on, much much much better than supplements which are all made by corporations anyway.
Do oil-pulling Look it up online for a full range of benefits. Normally you do it first thing in the morning before all your ablutions, and I swish a mouthful for about 10 minutes then spit out and dispose - do not swallow it! I use sesame or coconut oil, must be cold-pressed.
Promote proper and enough sleep Ayurveda is very clear about this: our main deep sleep takes place from 10pm until 2am, so do your best to have a 10pm or 11pm bedtime. Make your bedroom as dark as possible, have air flow through open windows, no EMF devices in the bedroom. Don’t trade your sleep in for anything! If you lose some, then find the right day to lie in and make up for it. Get used to an early bedtime. It’s much easier to get up earlier the next morning.
Create regular time and space for yourself I call this doing alone time. This might even be the #1 wellness booster of them all, because you get to slow down, you get time to reflect upon life and ask yourself why you have this or that problem, what the root causes are. It is a time to check out of the madcap fast-paced world and give your body and mind a rest from almost constant external stimulation. You can go inside and learn about yourself, practise mindfulness and meditation, observe your own mind in action. You get your deepest learning from this regular time of reflection.
Keep a life journal By creating regular time and space for yourself, you can really practise the super useful skill of reflective thinking by writing things down in your journal - about anything and everything, whatever is on your mind at the time. Writing makes us think first so that we know what we are going to write. I have kept ‘food and feelings’ diaries for months at a time, to learn which foods and other things work for me, or against me. This wellness booster also gives you a chance to listen to your body, which has innate intelligence that our society-conditioned mind often overrides, with negative consequences. Listening to your body, and your instincts, will increase your harmony and good decision-making in your life.
Go for regular walks or cycle rides This also gives you a rest from external stimulations, and allows you to connect with the life-affirmative properties of nature. In such a situation, you will find that your mind gets creative, and comes up with ideas for you. Also, it may suddenly ‘download’ into your consciousness a solution to a bugging problem. This is similar to #5 in that it produces lots of positive stuff for you to learn from and evolve by your own learning and life experiences.
Create a regular schedule of exercise I do between 30-60 minutes most mornings (I plan to be much more rigorous with myself for 2025, trying hard to never miss a morning). Half an hour is a walk near our house, but the other half hour is all done in four square metres, meaning anybody can do such exercise and nobody can claim any excuse about not having a gym near them or whatever else the mind comes up with. Exercise for me includes deep breathing (check out Wim Hoff), stretching my muscles so that they expand (desk work contracts all your muscles), doing squats and other movements, doing such movements with 1 kg weights in my hands, rebounding (like a one metre diamater mini-trampoline) which is brilliant for moving your lymph (blood is pumped by the heart, but lymph fluids rely upon our physical movement to move them), and so on.
Remember my Living the REAL DEAL guide REAL stands for living with respect, empathy, awareness and love. Choose your own mindset, and make it oriented towards these core human values which are our true human essence. You need depend on nobody to live REAL. Do you recall DEAL? This represents the four quadrants and areas of your life that directly impact on your health and wellbeing: diet, exercise, attitude and lifestyle. These illness busters and wellness boosters all fit into one of the four quadrants. Make improvements to one and it helps with the others, make improvements to all four and you will fly with health.
Build a balanced lifestyle The human life is characterised by three kinds of activity or ways of spending your time: work, rest and play. If you work well and smartly, you will rest and play better. If you play well and smartly you will rest and work better, and if you rest well and smartly you will work and play better. There is a fourth area, uncommonly mentioned, but essential (see #12): learning. Fit learning into your life. Most adults blank it, subconsciously thinking that learning is for children and while at school, and finishes when we become adults. Bad call, very bad call.
Practise attentive, compassionate, active listening The best leaders are excellent listeners. All those we look up to, who we feel are mentors, role models, good leaders, motivators and educators are all excellent at listening to you and make you feel heard and valued. When you do that to others, you are showing that you value them, respect them, have time for them, and they will love you for it. You are giving them space to be themselves, to tune into who they really are, without fear of being censored, slapped down, made to feel bad and so on. You also gain many different perspectives on life this way, instead of resisting them through society’s harmful ideologies and beliefs it pushes into us. And when you listen to others, you will learn to listen to yourself better too. And another booster arrives: feeling much more gratitude towards life.
Consciously choose to be a lifelong learner. This means making learning a daily activity. For example, when something goes wrong, you get into a conflict, something happens that’s no good, look for the causes and then change those. If something good happens, look for the causes and keep them! Listen lots, observe lots, read lots, and most importantly, express yourself without fear, articulate your understandings, and in this way you can learn how people react to what you think, helping you constantly refine your understandings in life. Lifelong learners are always in pursuit of understanding, not trying to fit all knowledge into a pre-existing box that society and school systems have mandated upon us. Learn to communicate and communicate to learn.
A random bunch! Look them all up on the internet, or find some good guide books and buy. Grounding or earthing, aromatherapy and essential oils, reflexology through acupressure, saunas or herbal steam baths, cold showers in the morning, oxygen therapy, foot baths with epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) or even whole baths if you have a bath, oil massage yourself or have your partner do it (especially around any joints that bring you pain; and in Ayurveda they recommend oiling your feet), use coconut or sesame or castor oil all cold-pressed.
And that’s your lot!
To be honest, when it comes to the crucial learning, listening and communication skills, the only true way to begin mastering them is by joining some kind of class which is based on plenty of tasks and collaborative learning. Such as in one of my upcoming live learning and communication skills courses which simultaneously develop students’ self-knowledge, meaning you learn about your mind. Your mind is the centre of the universe, and being ignorant about it, as our schools made us, is the greatest cause of all our pains and sufferings, our arguments and conflicts.
To be honest again (!), there are very few classes on offer like this, and that’s because nobody learns the learning and communication skills during their school years.
So, therefore, the obvious thing to do is look out for my courses coming up! 2025 is the year that A Spiritual Revolution breaks through big time. The whole ecosystem is almost in place now, and I’m itching for action stations! It’s time for all adults to get the chance to empower themselves by becoming skilled in learning and communicating, the mother and father of all skills, upon which all other skills depend.
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So, it only remains for me to wish you a wonderful, purposeful, meaningful, productive, creative, transformative, healthy, happy and harmonious New Year!
Our next Letter will bring you a new format and a different kind of content, albeit still with the overriding theme and objective: understanding yourself and life better. And understanding comes with learning.
Be a lifelong learner!
Oh, don’t forget that all the Letters you’ve had from me during 2024 are all collated and stored in one convenient location on my website on this page here.
I definitely recommend you read them all again, perhaps two or three per week. I read many things for a second, third, fourth time after a gap of time, and because I’ve evolved since the last reading, reading stuff again brings me even more clarity about life. Try it, go back and read the first couple and see what happens to your brain…
Philip
