Letter #1: Unleash Your Spirit in 2024
The lotus flower emerges out of the mud…!
Dear Friend
Know thyself >> heal thyself >> healthy self
This is it! Step #1 of the most exciting journey for the whole world for all of 2024 is upon you! It all starts now…
Are you ready? Are you ready for Challenge 2024: Unleash Your Spirit? Ready for an amazing, educational and transformative 2024?
Let’s rock and roll then!
Today is Letter #1, and this is to set the scene, to get you started, to let you know the format and content of this learning adventure, and to get you prepared to relish doing each week’s Letter.
Before you get stuck in, being as I’m an educator, I have some reading and general instructions to enhance your interactive learning experience with each Letter. These guidelines are super important to get you off on just the right footing, with no room for slipping up...
Guidelines for getting the most out of each Letter
1. Buy yourself a beautiful notebook and a nice pen (beauty is a motivator), and do all your tasks and written work in this notebook throughout 2024. This will be a seriously good resource for you during 2024, and in following years when you can read back through it and learn all over again! You will be recording your whole year’s experience in this notebook.
2. I strongly suggest a real notebook and pen, but if you feel you want to do it all digitally, then of course this is your choice.
3. If you can invite and persuade a friend, your partner, a family member, or anybody else in your life to do this Challenge with you, then this will enhance all the tasks you carry out, and the whole educational experience. Get them to sign up and join you each week. Here’s the page with the Challenge 2024 information and sign-up form.
And then each week you can arrange a time to meet up (in person or online) to compare your answers to all the tasks. This will give you added speaking and listening skills practice.
4. Each Monday the latest Unleash Your Spirit Letter will arrive. This gives you seven days to interact with each Letter.
Pick a day and a time for reading and interacting with each Letter, and make it a regular slot. Routines are important for humans to get things done. I would say do it as early as you can in the week, to allow yourself some wriggle room if something stops you from doing it in your usual time slot. However, you may wish to wait until the weekend when you are not working, and that’s fine, but please make a note of the skimming and scanning instruction just below.
5. I recommend never missing a Letter, but they will all be back-catalogued in one place at www.aspiritualrevolution/letters .
[If you are reading this Letter #1 and joining in during the year some time, then this will be no problem, but it will be most beneficial to try and create the time to work your way through all the previous Letters up to the time you join in. Click on these words to take you to the catalogue.]
6. Read through the Letter two times (more if you wish):
First reading is to skim and scan the Letter, to get a feel for what this week’s content is, and to ensure you know what the weekly task is: this task may ask you to do something for the full week.
Now read the Letter again with your full attention, doing the reading tasks that come with the texts or videos.
Don’t skip the tasks, they enhance and improve your reading and listening skills.
Do your best to avoid any distractions.
7. I anticipate, at least to start with, you will need an hour or two of time each week. It won’t take anywhere near that long to actually read the Letter (!), but you will have reading tasks to carry out and to write your thoughts down in your beautiful notebook. There will be the weekly task to carry out too.
However, I certainly encourage you to spend longer if you are motivated and have the spare time. See how things transpire for you. There’s a truism I always told each new group of my postgraduate teacher students (where research and reading is an integral part of the learning): the more you put in, the more you get out.
And that’s it for the guidelines.
Strong foundations are essential
So, you are now reading Unleash Your Spirit Letter #1, and it means your self-empowering, self-transformational journey throughout 2024, to reimagine and repurpose your life, begins NOW!
So many of our efforts to make beneficial, healthy and longlasting changes in our life fail because we were never taught the core skills and knowledge we need to optimally navigate life with. The absolutely worst omission was the skill of learning itself.
We will be rectifying all this during the year.
Just as a good building needs strong foundations to weather all storms, absolutely so do we human beings; yet our schools did not help us build them. In fact, they stopped us building any at all.
As we shall discover in future Letters, the school systems are damaging to every single one of us, stealing or blocking our curiosity, creativity, confidence and self-belief, and suppressing us from developing essential skills and self-knowledge. Energy and enthusiasm are discouraged, not encouraged.
It’s why there is so much struggle and stress, conflict and division, distrust and disharmony in our human family.
Our mission is simple: Letter by Letter, week by week, step by step we shall learn to overcome the negative consequences from this schooling (many of which we are unaware of until we focus our attention on them).
The foundations? There are 5 Pillars: learning and communication skills, holistic health, self-knowledge, self-belief. Oh, and a new mindset to carry you along. By taking on this challenge you have shifted your mindset already, so you are on your way. We will be talking a lot about the mind, because your mind is the centre of your universe.
The 5 Steps to one’s transformation
There are 5 steps to your journey in A Spiritual Revolution, which is an evolutionary concept, framework and process which I have created to guide you through the journey of your self-empowerment and transformation.
We shall repeatedly go through these 5 steps throughout the year. They are:
Situation Analysis - raise awareness of the problems, pains and suffering in your own life, and those faced by humankind in general (the solutions we seek are the same for both), and of the root causes
Needs Analysis - raise awareness of your dreams, aspirations, goals, and of your natural talents, skills and positive traits
Reset your Mindset - until we change our thinking, we cannot change our world; this is the essential precursor to success, setting us up for our forthcoming learning journey
Learning Journey - learn what you need to learn to make your life the life you want it to be, and to contribute positively to the world; the best way of doing this is to find one person or one source of guidance and let them facilitate you in your quest (and you have found me!)
Autonomous Learner and Mentor - now you can take on the role of facilitating others to optimise their own life; you will have done what Gandhi asked us to do: “Be the change you wish to see in the world”!
Maybe now you get a greater feel for why my Challenge to you is for a whole year! However, do remember, that all the work you put in during 2024 for one year will benefit you for many years to come.
~~~~~
I think I should also point out (as per my information page) that, while all these Letters are free and will do the job very very nicely for you, during the year from time to time I will be letting you know when any new product I’m building—as part of my whole venture—becomes available.
One kind of offering will be various live learning courses, and these will obviously bring people together into a collaborative learning environment which we can’t do with these Letters. This is my main joy and profession, offering such courses of learning. I’m also planning on various ‘discussion clubs’ and other kinds of shorter challenges, and many other exciting resources for joyful learning!
However, always be aware I’m putting my maximum effort into making sure those without any budget can benefit greatly from these 52 Letters! I have lived my whole life desiring and trying to do my bit for a better world for all of humanity, and finally I’m starting out on my own venture and challenge, namely to bring A Spiritual Revolution to millions! Thank you for being one of the original pioneers for me!!
Topic matter of the Letters, Action Research
Examples include, but are not limited to:
education, learning, mentoring, motivation, leadership
conscious vs subconscious living
emotional and spiritual living
love, joy, freedom, peace, fun, camaraderie, tyranny, hatred, distrust, division
building healthy strong relationships
exploring how the mind works and what it is
learning how the body works
diet and nutrition
holistic health
external environment
energetics: Ayurveda and epigenetics
language and meaning
soul and the self
and anything relating to the human condition, human behaviour and human potential.
I will be sharing tales, stories and experiences from my own journey in life (chockfull of changes and my evolutionary transformation!) as the basis for your own action research. It is the case that while we are all unique individuals (and this is worthy of full celebration, even though society doesn’t want this), we do share many values, principles, traits and patterns of behaviour on account of us all being human.
If you like, you can think of this whole Challenge as one where you learn from me and my experiences, and then you do your real learning by applying it all into your own life. Challenge 2024 is experiential and reflective learning, and it’s based on real people and real lives: yours and mine! Action research, in other words.
When it comes to the main article each week, usually this will be my own writing, but sometimes I will bring you key texts from key masters who have contributed so much to humankind’s evolution and understanding of life.
Format of the Letters
In each Letter you can expect:
the main article and topic matter, with reading tasks
Word of the Week
Sentence/Quote of the Week
Health Tip of the Week
the Weekly Task
And then let’s see how things organically develop. I have a YouTube channel and have made over 100 videos so far. So my plan is to include videos in some of the Letters at some point early in the year. I also have my Witness page on my website, to which I usually add one or two entries each week. These are usually shorter articles than usual blog-length writing.
Health Tip of the Week
Why don’t we start with a huge one?!
It’s on diet, and to sort out one’s diet is the biggest and most impactful change we can make to leading a life of much improved health and wellness. I will have much to say over the coming weeks on food and nutrition, as I did, literally several thousand hours of research on the topic, starting 2008, and it went on for many years.
This is the tip:
Eat only whole foods, and avoid corporate-made foods and drinks, so far as is possible for you. Just about all of them are toxic to our body and mind. When you fix your physical health, the mind starts become clearer and more joyful.
Whole foods are those which grow naturally: unrefined grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, superfoods, herbs, and so on. Eggs, unprocessed meats and dairy qualify as whole foods, but what the quality of them is, is another story for another time.
Word of the Week and Quote of the Week
For Letter #1, they are linked, and I would like to set your first weekly task (just below) relating to them.
Word of the Week
learning
Quote of the Week (one of mine)
“Today’s society is yesterday’s classroom, today’s classroom is tomorrow’s society.”
The Weekly Task
Task 1
This task is designed to get you thinking consciously about learning and education. Write down your thoughts in your new beautiful notebook. We will then return to this in Letter #2 next week.
What does ‘learning’ mean to you?
What was your learning experience like during your schooling? What did you learn?
In what ways did your schooling help prepare you for all the challenges of adulthood?
Have you ever thought about the causal relationship between the wellbeing, or not, of society and its education system? Assuming my quote reflects the truth of life, what actions can we all personally take to improve humankind’s collective wellbeing?
And, define ‘classroom’ according to your thinking.
Task 2
In your notebook, write a few sentences that reflect your feelings after reading the first Letter. This is for you to reflect upon the reading experience and the content, and how it makes you feel for the upcoming journey.
I certainly welcome any communications you would like to engage in with me, so always feel free to reply to these emails!
And that’s all for this opening week of our journey together. If you want to know more about me, and my work, you can read my bio page on my website.
~~~~~
PS A final word on the name of the Letter
I have called it Unleash Your Spirit because in my life’s journey—as an educator, traveller, and a lover of learning—I have seen that a good 99% of us never fulfil all our amazing potential we ALL have unless we do precisely this, unleash our spirit. To do this, we first need to unblock our mind and unlock our heart. That is our whole purpose for 2024. Enjoy!
All the best, Philip
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