Letter #15: Love Inside Out
Buddhist wisdom in Chiang Dao, Thailand
Dear Friend
Many apologies that this week’s Letter is a day late, but I really wanted to get my first masterclass up and running without any more delays. I have a summer of fun learning to be offering, and that means getting things done in Spring beforehand! More on this later in the Letter.
I’d like to turn our attention to matters of our heart and mind for a couple of weeks at least. For me there is no more important ability for us human beings than being happy and healthy. It is most definitely a skill, which needs knowledge, confidence and practice.
And I don’t see how this is possible without activating the energy force of love…
Today’s Letter is about LOVE
A small four letter word, yet one which symbolises the most powerful, beautiful and inspiring energy force we human beings can experience.
Let’s look into this thing called ‘love’, let’s understand exactly what it really is (not what the songs mislead us into thinking it is), let’s investigate why it appears to be in such short supply in our human family, and let’s see how to make it the engine room and driving force of our life.
They say ‘LOVE is the answer’ to all our problems and sufferings in life, and I totally agree. In fact, what it really does is prevent nearly all problems from even arising in the first place.
True love—available to each one of us as our birthright—enables us to move mountains, makes us feel on top of the world, gives us inner peace, and drives so much negative energy out of our life, gone forever. That leaves us with loads of space in our mind and heart for positive, productive, creative energy to be called upon.
True love is not reserved for sharing with one person, it is for LIFE itself. All of it. From within you, and out into the world.
True love is not an occasional thing, because once we’ve activated the real version, it’s with us for life; when your heart is opened wide it’s open for life.
Our guiding question, then, for our exploration in this Letter is:
How do we engage in heart-centred living and make it the default approach for the way we go about our life?
Because it is heart-centred living which releases the whole LOVE energy force within us. And be sure about it, we are talking about the love which is inside you and which you direct outwards towards all of life.
Because if we can do that, our experience of life is most certainly transformed.
We stop sitting on all our amazing potential, talent and power, and instead start manifesting it into our life; we stop hiding it from the world (and ourself), and instead we share it with the world.
Without self-doubt or a perceived lack of self-worth blocking us any more.
Such thoughts of being unworthy, not good enough, may still rear up in our head from time to time, but with heart-centred living we feel grounded, connected, happy, and so we can overcome them every time they pop into our head out of conditioned habit.
When you give to, and share with, others (I’m talking your consciousness, your time and energy, your compassion and attention), and when you give and share because you want to give and share, not in anticipation of anything coming back to you, you discover the secret to joyful, happy living where life affords you many blessings. You discover gratitude for your own life, for those in your life who you can love, and for the whole cosmic enterprise of our amazing world and universe.
Because love is an ‘inside-out’ job, we have to find it inside us first. We can call it self-love if you like, but unless you have found the energy of love for yourself and your own wellbeing how can you love others? Unless you can, and do, care for yourself first, how can you care for others?
And when you do care for yourself, you realise you care for all of life. It’s a magical discovery.
Can you see how living with an active expanded heart puts us in charge of our own life? We no longer are enslaved to our emotional reactions to the triggers going on in the world around us. Suffused in the love energy force that is our very human essence, we become incapable of resentment, hatred, intolerance, envy, entitlement.
Instead gratitude, an inner calm, joy, peace and LOVE for LIFE arise.
I don’t say such negative emotional thinking is extinguished, rather we are no longer caught up in a negative attitude towards life. However, after many years on my own spiritual path, I have to say that I seem to be immune to hating anything. My weakest point is when I see unfairness and injustice in action. However, I’m generally able to not get triggered even by these any more. I will take action to protect life if I can, but not out of any emotional meltdown!
And it’s fair to say that our world gives me plenty of reason to be triggered these days!
~~~~~
To begin answering our guiding question—How do we engage in heart-centred living and make it the default approach for the way we go about our life?—we first must start with another question (or perhaps tackle it at the same time):
If love is our birthright, if heart-centred living is our birthright, then why is there so much conflict, coercion, intolerance, cruelty, hatred, resentment, loneliness, unhappiness and depression in our human family? And why so much anxiety, worry, fear? Why so much emotional pain and mental suffering?
(okay, it’s more than one question!)
An Anti-Love School System
“Today’s society is yesterday’s classroom, today’s classroom is tomorrow’s society.”
~ Philip
The short answer to the above three questions is ‘our schooling’.
I make no apologies for returning to what is one of my constant themes in my professional work of writing and educating:
99% of adults are living with the harmful consequences of having endured 12 years and 14,000 hours of schooling which is demoralising, disheartening and disempowering. I would also say we are disconnected and even dehumanised from this so-called education.
Look at those words: the prefixes de- and dis- mean the negating of, meaning that our schooling takes the morals, heart, power, connection and our very humanity out of us while we are children…
It’s an anti-social anti-education. It narrows our mind, denies our heart, and crushes our soul.
Confidence, curiosity, creativity, compassion, and a child’s innate desire for fun, play and learning is systematically suppressed in us. We are sat in rows and columns looking at backs instead of faces. Only the face of the ‘external authority’ do we see.
There is no collaboration with our classmates, no facial interaction, no body language. Yet we are social animals.
Furthermore, we learn nothing of how our body works, nor how our mind works, nor how we are intricately interconnected with the whole world out there, including, therefore, each other.
Our ‘nurture’ separated us from each other and antagonised our nature, instead of complementing it.
It’s devastating for humankind.
We have a gigantic misunderstanding of who we really are (and we are intelligent integrated interconnected individuals) and how life works (everything is energy flow, a relationship, a connection), and this negatively impacts on just about everything else in our life.
This misunderstanding—that we are separate beings cut loose in a dog-eat-dog human world of scarcity—drives our subconscious feelings, actions, thoughts and emotions (FATE).
Dr Bruce Lipton, an outstanding human being alive today, tells us that neuro-scientists have determined that we spend over 90% of our time acting out of our subconscious—and society-conditioned—mind.
We have been ‘nurtured’ to underachieve, hide our real self, and to suffer and struggle. Lack of self-worth and plenty of self-doubt (and self-sabotage) are the inevitable outcomes.
We are living in a ‘wrong relationship’ with everything and everybody. We subconsciously take it to be true that we are separate, but by the law of nature we are interconnected and interdependent.
And then we become adults, and in short order we are the next generation of parents and teachers and leaders. I call it an intergenerational vicious cycle of harmful anti-education.
2020 was the human volcano erupting after decades (centuries?) of bubbling away, pressure building, building, building.
Our ‘norms’ were suspended, and in fact will not come back as they were, and nor do we want them to, because it’s those very norms that led up to 2020.
During those unbelievable lockdowns people found time and space to reflect (that wonderful self-learning skill we’ve covered recently!) upon their life, and all aspects of what it means to be human. Collectively speaking, the self-awareness of humankind increased, and that’s a great thing because now we are tapping into our conscious mind, increasing our collective level of consciousness, and this is our route towards LOVE.
Of course, it’s for us as individuals to cultivate our own conscious awareness which leads into heart-centred living, and which emerges from heart-centred living. As with many things in life, it’s a two-way flow, giving us two pathways to evolve ourselves. As usual, take both if you can!
It’s our HUGE opportunity to look at and listen to ourselves, to reflect, and to learn.
To overcome mental stress. To emotionally liberate ourselves. To reconnect to our roots, to each other, to the planet and universe which birthed us. To stop eating junk, to stop treating our body like a trash can. TO CARE FOR OURSELF. Then love flows, and once it starts it won’t stop.
How to Engage in Heart-Centred Living
We live in a heart-centred way by first learning in a heart-centred way.
We need to learn this because we were denied it during our upbringing. The very energy we all want is blocked from our schooling. Madness.
(I perhaps ought to say that obviously I’m not talking about 100% of people, because some were lucky enough to have a love-centred mum or dad or a rebel teacher or some kind of mentor during their childhood to get them on the right path. Yet, society at large is so love-depressed and suppressed, and every single one of us has room for real improvement, and not just now, but for all of time. Despite three decades on my own journey of proactive self-growth I still have to practise, and I still learn new insights all the time.)
I know from my classroom teaching experience that the most important thing for me to do, at the start of every new group of students (I teach adults and adolescents), is to spend the first two lessons completely focused on creating and building a non-threatening and inspiring learning environment which supports everybody emotionally and psychologically, making their heart feel at ease, yet still be one which challenges them cognitively.
The environment is so important. And as in the classroom, so at home, so at work, so in life in general.
With a happy heart, the student’s mind is no longer preoccupied with anxiety, boredom or fear of looking silly in front of one’s peers. Instead, with a freed-up mind and an opened-up heart, collaborative learning is the norm, with students spending much of the time doing learning tasks and activities in pairs or small groups.
This is the perfect environment to learn in, and students absolutely flourish. Often this is the very first time they’ve ever experienced any kind of learning situation like this. They are sat in a U-shape, so everybody can see and interact with everybody, and there’s no hiding. A positive and harmonious group dynamic is established right from the off. Everybody, no exceptions, buys into it.
Learning, listening, communication and reflective thinking skills are constantly practised, and students soon master all of them. The key is realising that you are being listened to, and you are able to express yourself without feeling negatively judged.
Can you imagine how liberating this is?! Can you imagine how our human world would look if this were the norm? (And so it’s up to each of us to make it the norm!)
Being able to master the learning and communication skills in a supportive environment cultivates compassion, courage, confidence and creativity in the students, and then they take this newfound mindset and expanded heart back out into the world and it looks a different place.
Furthermore, one realises, we as individuals can have a big influence on creating right environments, simply by cultivating and having right relationships.
Now, clearly I’m talking about classroom and group learning here, and while it holds certain key advantages, one can still, by oneself, take this knowledge and awareness into one’s own mind and heart, and work on expanding both at home, work and play.
But undoubtedly the key to developing heart-centred learning is listening to others and expressing oneself.
We can do much of that on our own…
We learn by learning to listen to ourself.
We learn by expressing ourselves, through either speaking or writing (journals, social media, blogs), and gauging the responses to what we are communicating.
We learn by asking questions of ourself and of the world. For example: Who am I? What am I? What is my purpose? What is karma? How does the mind work? Why do I always do this and say that? Where did I get that belief from? What is my first step to transforming myself? etc etc.
We learn by listening and reading especially carefully when we disagree with something or somebody - this is a great opportunity to reflect upon what our beliefs are, and where they might have come from, and to expand our understanding. With an open heart, our mind is opened, and no longer stuck in it’s narrow society-conditioned guise.
We learn by challenging our answers and those of others (ask questions, question answers).
We learn by giving ourself regular alone-time and space to reflect upon our day, the events and situations that happened, what people said, what we did, how we felt, and all the rest of it.
We learn by going about our daily lives committing random acts of kindness, and observing people’s reactions.
We learn by taking a proactive productive approach towards life, instead of being passive or reactive to what others are doing.
And in fact, when we have activated our human essence by expanding our heart, we are now, automatically, lifelong learners. Conscious awareness guides us, and our life is largely spent in harmony and good health, but only because we constantly work at it. We need to be lifelong learners because achieving and keeping wellness in our life is a constant work in progress.
But, undoubtedly, the superlative learning experience is doing all of the above while being part of a group of like-minded open-hearted people, where heart-based, collaborative, communicative learning is taking place.
I’ve been lucky enough to teach language students and language teachers from 35+ countries (I’ve counted them!) in all five continents. Most of my teaching has been in Bangkok and Chiang Mai in Thailand, but also in Brighton and London in the UK. Often my classes are multicultural in background and yet with the heart-supporting classroom environment I create, we find that this heart-based culture fits everybody’s needs and desires.
I actually think of it as human culture.
We are then able, in lots of discussion activities, to explore our similarities and our differences, and to learn and gain understanding from each other. We gain perspectives way beyond the tiny mould our society tried to cram us all into.
These discussions and other speaking activities give us excellent practice in mastering our listening and speaking skills. Such skills are the bedrock of successful, healthy and strong relationships with others, and as we are social animals whose lives are built on the relationships we have, this is seriously good news!
My experience in teaching about 4000 adults and adolescents is that every single person wants to feel good about themselves, and in the right environment that’s just what they do. One day, while teaching one of my Master’s groups, and while they were all focused on a discussion activity in small groups, and I was reflecting on how the lesson was going, it hit me, and it’s now one of my favourite quotes:
“When you discover the joy of learning you discover the joy of living; when you master the skill of learning you master the skill of living.”
Experiencing joy and with mastery of the key human skill, love cannot but flow within you and out of you! Heart-centred living is now a reality.
It is also abundantly clear to me from all my time in education that there is nothing that has more power to influence what kind of person we become than our schooling experience. It is also a huge influence on the kind of society we all live in, wherever we are in the world. I coined another quote to capture this inextricable link, which is a direct pointer towards where our solutions are for the healing of humankind, and for our own individual healing:
“Today’s society is yesterday’s classroom, today’s classroom is tomorrow’s society.”
My definition of ‘classroom’ is wherever learning is taking place. Traditionally, of course, it meant in the schools, colleges and universities. Looking at the meltdown of 2020, and all the crumbling systems in developed nations, it’s clear that yesterday’s school system is responsible (it is we human beings who are melting down!). Yet, for the most part, it seems the schooling has been getting worse during the last two or three decades, which mirrors my time in education.
I have always been working and educating in an opposite direction, as you will have gathered from this Letter! It is now my central mission in life to be an active player in the total and radical overhaul of the way we do education, based on the way I’ve been doing it. It’s actually called Task-Based Learning, and it originates in the field of second language learning. However, it’s not widespread even in this field, and is rarely seen anywhere else, least of all in the schools.
I know from my experience and from all the feedback I’ve had from thousands of students that heart-centred learning, where communication is the central aspect to collaborative learning for developing independent learning and communication skills, is a total game-changer.
It’s my view that the healing of humankind only comes about from the healing of millions of individual human beings, and this needs each of us to open up our mind, expand our heart and activate our soul, and then we become whole.
Unblock your mind, unlock your heart, unleash your soul-spirit!
That was my catchline at the start of the year, if you recall.
We can do this on our own.
This is how I did it, yet it took me many years and tens of thousands of hours of reading, researching and reflection on my hammock (!). However, I’ve loved the whole journey, and my life I fell into here in Thailand afforded me so much more time and space for my explorations and investigations into the human mind, the soul, consciousness, and the whole web of life. I recognise most people, especially Western people, don’t have this time.
But you can do it faster, and with deeper results, by finding courses of learning concerned with holistic living, which are conducted in small groups, giving you loads of practice in the skills of collaborating, cooperating, discussing, expressing yourself, articulating your understandings, questioning, clarifying, and always seeking understanding.
And to feel motivated to do this, not reluctant or fearful of negative consequences.
Understanding opens the mind the heart and the soul, and is our very liberation from the burdens we all bear from a psychologically and spiritually harmful school system.
But it needs to be led by transformational educators who train and inspire adult students to learn how to educate and empower themselves, and who create learning spaces which make hearts happy to open.
And that’s my job…
Philip’s Mission and Masterclass #1
I am right now about to launch my vision of bringing such an education out of my university classrooms and into the wider world. I’m giving myself five years to achieve the target, which is to put task-based heart-centred learning into the school systems.
And then I’m going back to my hammock on the white sand beaches of southern Thailand!
I must train and inspire countless adults—parents, educators, leaders, world-helpers, people who care, soul-seekers, etc etc—who can then spread the love of learning and the learning of love to the children of the world.
Which neatly brings me to my first ‘offering’, and it’s coming to you first.
It’s my first official masterclass, and it’s open for up to 12 participants. I gave you a working title last week, but it’s changed, and it’s now going to be called:
Masterclass #1 Self-Growth Series:
Introduction to Conscious Learning for Heart-Centred Living
The focus is on learning and communication skills, and our topic is Ayurveda, the great science of life given to the world by great Indian sages of ancient times. There is nothing out there from all my research that gives us ordinary human beings greater insights, confidence and knowledge to prevent ill-health, promote our wellness, and to fix most of any ailments that do occur.
I am excited! It’s been a long hard road to get here; life is so much easier just going to the university and teaching my classes!
As a really valued subscriber to my Letters, you have first call on joining this LIVE masterclass.
I’m going to run it on Saturday 27 April at 9am UK time, 3pm Thailand time. I am limiting it to 12 participants, but will fit in an extra 3 if need be.
If any spaces remain after Friday this week (19th April), I will open enrolment up to others in my field of vision. We will be meeting up with each other using the Zoom platform.
Click on these words or on the button below to get all the information and to enroll.
Weekly Task for Letter #15
This Letter has already filled its space, so I will return to this theme next week, and what I was going to write next becomes your weekly task ahead of hearing what I have to say!
Make some notes in your notebook. The question for you to ponder upon is, ‘What practical steps and mindset shifts can you take to increase the role your spiritual heart has in your life?’
You should consider the good things you can add, and the bad things you can remove.
See you next week, and I certainly hope to see some of you on the Masterclass a week after that!
All the best
Philip
