Letter #5: Living the REAL DEAL
Soul food from Chiang Dao in Chiang Mai Province
Dear Friend
Another Monday, another week, another Letter!
How are you getting on with the Letters? Please feel welcome to email me any time with your questions, suggestions or progress reports, or just because you fancy connecting with me directly, and I shall get back to you.
Super quick task before we go any further. No need to write anything down unless you prefer to:
What do you think is the #1 most essential skill we adults need to navigate life with?
What do you think is the #1 most essential area of knowledge we need for our journey in life?
I’ll let you know my thoughts in a moment.
(Also, if this week’s Letter looks longer here on my website, I’ve used a bigger font! I think it makes it more readable.)
Our Tea Tree House
Tea Tree House, Chiang Mai
Here in Chiang Mai we’ve been enjoying a really special winter, lovely temperatures, so much sunshine and really clear and clean air. All the colours of nature are a joy to behold, and the views of the surrounding mountains (Chiang Mai is situated in a valley) are pure soul food.
This comes off the back of a great rainy season, but before that we had a challenging summer and winter, which were much hotter than usual as it was El Nino year.
So our weather is gloriously back on track, and riding around on my motorbike is so enjoyable and liberating!
And I’ve been doing more of that in the last couple of weeks in and around our Tea Tree House (set in the rustic delights of Chiang Mai countryside), doing lots of photography. Why?
Well, my wife Air and myself have just converted our Tea Tree House cafe into accommodation for couples or singles! Do you like the look of our place?!
I’m taking lots of photos and getting together a guide book for those who come to stay. Click on the link or the photo above to see for yourself!
And if you should come to Chiang Mai for a holiday, come and stay at our amazing getaway, for a tranquil and authentic Thailand experience. You’ll have it all to yourself, and you will get to sample Air’s Thai food which nobody ever seems to forget!
And for sure, as you are on my email list, we’ll have a discount waiting for you!
I have digressed!
And bear with me for my thoughts on the super quick task.
Living the REAL DEAL
So, what is the REAL DEAL, and how can you get it into your own life? And why would you want to?
We have a couple of preliminary steps to take.
Step 1: The problem we don’t wanna talk about
In exploring the answer to our questions—over the next several weeks—we will first have to visit the elephant in the room, which for me symbolises the macro-problem that lies behind all the problems, pains and conflicts we experience in our lives.
Once we understand the nature and root cause of the macro-problem, we can then practise becoming skilled in both solving all kinds of problems and preventing their reoccurrence.
This is at the heart and art of intelligent, harmonious living, which is what we are all about in these Letters. Less stress and more balance is good enough in anybody’s language!
But… I can tell you, from years of observing and reading about human life (including my own), we don’t like pain (physical, emotional, or mental), so when pain comes to us (the problem) we do anything to get rid of it. We:
flee it
numb it with booze, drugs, pills, comfort foods etc etc
pretend to ourselves it doesn’t exist
tell ourselves it’s just part of life and nothing can be done except take a pill.
But the very thing we don’t do, but which is the solution to our woes, is ask ourselves what the root cause is. And, be sure about it, when you find the root cause you will find the solution sitting right there beside it.
However, there’s a very good reason why we are not good at preventing and solving our problems (and often, not even realising we have a problem).
We are beginning to get back to the #1 skill now.
Step 2: We were all dealt a raw deal in life
[NB I don’t usually beat about the bush in life, yet nevertheless always living with and promoting compassion; and I definitely don’t beat about the bush when it comes to education.
Doesn’t mean I’m right, but it means I think I am! My view comes from spending most of life looking into and observing the human condition, both in ‘real’ life and in my classrooms. I live to learn and I learn to live. And I have found that our schooling is not good at all, to be polite!]
The unpalatable truth is that 99% of adults (roughly speaking) were ill-served and psychologically and spiritually harmed by our schooling, which suppressed us from developing and mastering the very skills and know-how we need to navigate life harmoniously with.
That is crazy, but true.
It’s as if Mother Eagle clipped Baby Eagle’s wings and said, ‘Fly darling, fly’, and of course, poor old Baby cannot fly.
This has had disastrous consequences for our own psychological wellbeing and the health of our relationships, both at home and at work.
It’s why there is so much unhappiness, systemic loneliness, conflict and distrust within and between individuals, families, communities, societies.
From my perspective, it’s why 2020 happened, humankind was a volcano waiting to erupt, no longer able to stand the pressure of so much negative energy from all our stressed relationships.
Anyone who finds themselves both stressed with other people at work, and at home, will find no respite from their emotional and mental suffering (except for the solace gained from booze or drugs). I’ve seen friends and others in a real state because they just get no break from conflict and unhealthy relationships.
But we are not to blame. There’s nothing wrong with us. Just the programming. And once we know about it we can overcome it.
Our nurture antagonised our nature, rather than complementing and developing it. The school systems bring us an anti-fun, anti-human, anti-life, anti-health anti-education.
We are not enabled, encouraged, empowered, we are instead blocked, discouraged, disempowered, and disconnected from our roots. It’s no surprise that many struggle with a lack of self-confidence and self-esteem.
And, most likely, the schooling is worse than ever for today’s generation of children.
There is only one way out for each of us and for all of us.
Which brings us neatly back to the super quick task you did before.
Step 3: Learning the Learning Skill and How to do Holistic Health
“Discover the joy of learning and you discover the joy of living. Master the skill of learning and you master the skill of living.”
~ by your friendly Letter writer
For me learning is the mother of all skills, the #1 essential skill.
We can fix anything with this skill.
We can create anything with this skill.
We can live with courage and confidence with this skill.
It is how we can empower, transform and heal ourselves.
And this mother is a wonderful mother…
She also has many wonderful siblings…
By learning how to learn you find yourself learning and developing multiple super important communication and thinking skills and traits:
listening attentively, deeply, compassionately
articulating yourself, expressing your views, and being understood
collaborating and team-working
task-solving
reflective thinking
doing research and self-inquiry
self confidence, self-esteem and self-belief through self-awareness and self-knowledge
integrity and responsibility
and many many more
Hardly any, if any of them, not the mother, nor her siblings, are taught to us by the school system.
I know well about life-enhancing, self-empowering and motivating learning because I’ve been training and inspiring my adult students in it (including about 400 language teachers) since the early 1990s.
I am almost a lone wolf! Almost the whole focus in the education world is on what we learn, rather than the actual process of learning, and what the heart and mind are doing.
For me the #1 know-how we need is holistic understanding of our world and ourselves and therefore how to live with health and wellbeing.
The reason behind these Letters you are engaging with is getting my big mission started. This mission of mine is to train and inspire adults all over the world through the online medium to become skilled in learning and holistic living.
Once we do this, we can now do what Gandhi suggested we do and, ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’.
I have much work to do on this mission, and lots done already. However, I’m teaching nothing new, for what I taught at the universities is what I’m bringing to the world.
Step 4: Living the REAL DEAL
So this is our aim, and it can only be done today.
Instead of making the primary focus of our life future goals, we make the primary focus of our life being the healthiest happiest person we can be. This means a shift in our whole approach to life.
Consider this: life is only lived today, in the current moment. Tomorrow is just a concept of our mind and our thinking. When you wake up in the morning it’s simply another today. In fact, life is just a bunch of successive todays!
So, Living the REAL DEAL. Can you recall from last week what this acronym stands for?!
(By the way, I said in the last Letter I would begin with D for diet in this Letter, well, I’ve delayed that by a week, I wanted to outline the background to it first.)
We want to live true to ourselves, true to others, and true to the world, and we do it the REAL way: we do it with Respect, Empathy, Awareness, Love.
Develop Respect and Empathy for ourselves, all other ordinary human beings, and all of sentient life.
Cultivate Awareness and self-awareness as the means for living consciously, which enables us to embrace true learning.
Love yourself and life. Once we learn to love ourselves it’s then an automatic leap to loving other human beings, nature, and the whole caboodle of everything. This kind of Love is not to do with the object of our attention, it’s an undefinable flow of energy that comes to us when we unblock our minds and unlock our hearts.
Of course, it may take time and practice to live the REAL way, considering the efforts of school systems to stop us living this way, but transformation begins with understanding what we need to do. Without awareness of something we cannot make a choice to do it.
DEAL yourself a metaphorical great hand of cards to live a great life…!
This is my acronym for the four quadrants of life that we can focus on and make changes to, with the objective of living with health, harmony and happiness, that is, living holistically.
DEAL stands for Diet, Exercise, Attitude and Lifestyle.
What this does is bring awareness to the changes you both want to make, and—less enjoyably so—need to make.
I have found that every aspect of human life fits into one of these four quadrants! All are equally important, and, in the manner of holistic understanding, living and health, all are intertwined. Bring benefits to one of the quadrants and the other three will benefit too.
Also, many people fail to transform and make lasting change in their life because they try too much too quickly. Hence why I made these Letters a year-long Challenge!
So, there you have it, living the REAL DEAL. This is actually the title of one of my chapters in my book. We will spend the next few Letters exploring each of these aspects of the REAL DEAL.
And we will start with what for me is the most important change to make at the start of any journey of transformation. Diet.
Once we get past our tongue’s demands, we can make tremendous progress. Rewards come very quickly, as you will recall happened to me in reading my three part tale of my introduction to natural healing.
So, next week’s Letter will be on diet and nutrition, and this leads us nicely to your task for the week.
Weekly Task for Letter #5
Next week we take a proper look at diet and nutrition.
Of all the things I’ve researched, nothing comes close to the amount of conflicting information as to what is a good, healthy diet, and I mean from apparently credible sources.
I can read two people who I respect for their integrity and their intelligence, yet they may well have opposing views on aspects of what makes for a good diet.
It’s why I always say that while we can get useful pointers from other people, and that certain core principles apply to all of us, at the end of the day we must learn to discern for ourselves what our best diet is, and this illustrates why wellness itself, and healing, is a proactive, personal journey.
So the best starting point is to first ask ourselves what we actually do consume.
Become fully conscious of our whole diet, and from this basis we can make choices and decisions to clean our act up, and make sure we treat our body like a temple rather than a trash can.
Your weekly task is twofold, and linked:
to remind yourself of the last Letter’s Weekly Task, which was to implement one or two changes in your diet, and to record how you feel during the week in your journal: did you do it? did you notice any beneficial reactions in your body and mind?
to list in your notebook all the different foods and drinks you typically consume; this means your regular foods and drinks, but you can also note down those which you eat or drink from time to time.
Once you feel your list is complete, read through all the foods and drinks, and give any you feel are health-promoting a ‘tick’, and any you feel will deplete your health a ‘cross’.
Go by your own existing understandings and gut feel for what is good or bad for you. This is YOUR diet we are looking at, and as you just heard me repeat, and I will do so again and again, wellness is a personal journey. Doctors don’t heal, our body does that. Doctors only treat symptoms.
Add up your ticks and crosses, and decide if you have more of a temple or trashcan attitude towards your body!!
Then next week I shall share my personal guide to diet and nutrition, and it’s not one you will have read anywhere else!
Word of the Week
Last week our word was resilience, and this week we will have a word linked to resilience, helping us become more resilient.
Our word is determination.
While resilience refers to our capacity to handle setbacks in life, how to handle things that are happening or have already happened, determination is more of an attitude, a mindset, with which to approach what we may feel are difficult challenges to come, or that we are setting out to tackle by choice.
All transformation needs plenty of determination, as this is definitively part of the mindset of making change.
We need determination to reach our goal so that we can keep ourselves motivated to continue with our new journey, our actions and habit changes and so on.
Determination enables us to handle any hurdles that come our way, and to ensure we don’t give up before the real fruits come to us.
Sentence of the Week
Let’s have a sentence that reveals the rewards we will experience for putting determination into our life!
“All the best things in life come to those who do the hard yards.”
I’m not sure if that’s one of mine or if I read it somewhere in the past. But I’ve seen it to be true in my own life countless times. Put the effort in, and the universe brings us concomitant rewards.
When we make the effort, do the work, rewards come. If it seems they are not, double down, keep the determination and stay resilient, and they will come when they are due!
Seeking quick fixes, magic potions, gurus, experts has been done down the ages because we don’t want to do what we think is the hard work.
However, again, I’ve noticed myself that what I previously thought was hard work was only because I wasn’t skilled in it and/or lacked enough determination.
Practice changes all that.
Health Tip of the Week
Let’s make it a food one.
Chew your food thoroughly.
Digestion begins in the mouth, and the more you do there the less work your body will have to do to complete the process. Also, saliva releases important enzymes to help with the break-down of the food.
Furthermore, we have something called a ‘satiety gene’, which is our body naturally telling us (our mind) when we’ve eaten enough for its purposes, not for what our tongue or unconscious habits may decide for us.
If we shovel the food down like there’s no tomorrow, we don’t get that message in time, so we overeat, and that’s not part of healthy approach to life.
Before I ended up living in Thailand, I recall back in England being a very fast eater, and have to assume I didn’t chew my food properly. Nowadays on trips back to England or in Australia I am always the last to finish my meal. Because I live in a tourist town, I get to see many people from all over the world, and I’m not kidding, most people eat way too quickly! Seems like the food barely gets to touch the sides.
Become conscious of your eating, and train yourself to chew the food properly. I’ve read it before: drink your foods and eat your drinks… that is, make sure you chew properly and get that saliva mixed into your drinks before you swallow.
Finally
I’d like to say a quick word on the tasks I've been setting you, both for the reading of each Letter, and the Weekly Tasks.
In my classrooms, task-based learning is how the students learn best (yes, absolutely everybody!), and of course, after all the tasks they do, usually by collaborating in pairs or small groups, we have a reflection period and the students also want to hear my input.
Much of my teaching work is getting students to think about things first, before I add my understandings. We all of us know SO MUCH MORE THAN WE THINK WE DO! Good teaching will bring that out of students.
It’s not quite possible to do this as comprehensively in this format we have with our Letters, and unless you are doing them with a friend (get one to sign up and work together each week!). I feel I am setting it up the best I can within the limitations of us not being live together.
So to a big extent, while my Letters will help you stay accountable to yourself, there are many things you will have to take responsibility for, and to make sure you do.
For example:
have you been doing all the Weekly Tasks, or promising yourself you will start them in the next Letter?
have you been doing the Pre-Reading and Post-Reading Tasks?
have you found yourself wanting more feedback from me in the following Letter relating to the previous Weekly Task, and/or the reading tasks?
have you been reading each Letter twice, as recommended in Letter #1?! A quick skim and scan the first time to get an idea of what’s in this week’s Letter, then a proper read the second time and also doing the tasks on this second reading
have you been keeping a journal?
To reiterate, you are most welcome to email me with any specific feedback you’d like, or questions you have, or clarifications you’d like to make.
Putting things off to the ‘next time’ is our ego response to anything which seems like hard work to the ego, or anything that it perceives will take it out of its comfort zone.
I’m sure you’re doing a great job, but if you have been putting some things off…
… now is the time to stop doing so, and be super determined (hah!) to do all the tasks.
As I always told every group of my Master’s students: the more work you put in, the more rewards will come your way.
Finally Finally!
A favour to ask: please copy this link for the back catalogue of all the Letters and share it with, say, 3-5 friends you think will be up for Challenge 2024. The more the merrier.
And may I ask you to do that now, before it slips your mind?! Here’s the link:
https://www.aspiritualrevolution.com/letters
Many thanks, all the best, and have a tip top week, why don’t you!
Philip
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