State of Mind

"If one is true to one's self and follows its teachings, who need be without a teacher?" - Chuang Tzu

How do you respond to chaos? - Dall·e AI

Your internal state is just as important as the external inputs into your body.  You can eat all the healthy food you want but if your internal state is chaos, you will not be healthy.  Conversely, you can do all of the meditation, yoga, etc. you want but if you're only putting junk food into your body, you will also not be healthy.  The type of food that is eaten is important to the health of your body.  Taking care of your mind and spirit is equally important.  They go hand in hand with each other, yin and yang.

The world we live in is chaos, it always has been and always will be.  You cannot control the chaos that happens in the world.  All you can do is control how you react to it.  The chaos is necessary.  Light cannot exist without the dark, that contrast is needed.  Our world is full of contrast, always has been and always will be.  Trying to control that external chaos is a recipe for misery.  Noticing how that chaos affects you and alchemizing it into something good and something beautiful is something you can control.

When you find yourself surrounded by chaos, sit with yourself in meditation, practice yoga, dive deep into Qigong, practice breathing exercises (such as 4-7-8 breathing or box breathing), or cold plunges and sit with that uncomfortableness.  Accept the chaos for what it is and channel it into something positive.  You are the only thing that you have full agency over.

When you notice your internal state being off, accept it and sit with it.  What is the universe trying to teach you?  Don't run away from that teaching and learn how to calm the storm within yourself.  Storms will inevitably rise within you but you choose whether to feed the storms and let them grow or to squash them before they do harm and alchemize that energy into something positive.  Every challenge is an opportunity for growth.

It all starts and ends within you.  In every animals life there is a moment where their heart is not beating and then suddenly the next moment, their heart is beating.  Conversely, in every animals life there is a moment where their heart is beating and then the next it is not.  These are facts of life.  None of us choose when our hearts start beating or when they will stop beating, that is not our choice to make.  What happens in-between those two moments, is up to us.  We have full agency over what we make of our lives and what we learn.  We are here to learn.

The present is all we have.  Depression is where you're dwelling on the past.  Anxiety is where you're worrying about the future.  If you have severe depression and severe anxiety at the same time, you are completely and utterly lost, not sure how you got there in life and not sure where you'll go in the future and in that moment you can only see yourself as surrounded by absolute darkness and piercing silence.  The only place to go is within yourself and find out who you really are.

You are not your job, you are not your car, you are not your house, you are not the clothes you wear, you are not your hairstyle, etc.  Those only describe you at that exact moment in time but they do not say anything about who you really are.  Who are you really?  Once you dive deep inside yourself then you find out who you really are.

Once you discover that, you start becoming a light within the darkness and one day you'll find yourself shining so bright that the darkness no longer exists and no one can extinguish your flame, no matter how hard others may try.  The only reason you know you are shining so bright is because you've experienced the deepest of darkness that exists within the universe that can never be forgotten.  You know that contrast between the darkest of darks and the brightest of lights.

It's a beautiful thing.  Light can only appear out of the darkness, you cannot know nor appreciate the light without the dark so embrace it as a fact of life and have hope and faith that the light will come.

Right now is the only moment we have.  Live now.

Instead of letting chaos tear you apart, take it as an opportunity to dive deep into yourself and focus on yourself.  You can only heal others once you have healed yourself.  Fill your own cup first, then let it overflow out onto others.  Turn yourself from a pest infested swamp into a crystal clear natural spring that has an endless supply of fresh water that continuously bubbles up to the surface and clears out any debris that may fall in.

To truly be healthy, your internal state is just as important as the vegetables you eat.  Just like vegetables, don't just eat one type of vegetable, eat all of the vegetables, all of the colors of the rainbow.  Don't just meditate or just practice yoga or just practice breathing or just practice qigong or just cold plunge.  Do all of them as they all have different benefits.  Diversity is the spice of life and is the key to our world and the universe as a whole.

These are practices that need to be done both when times are good and when times are tough.  Practice needs to be done everyday, regardless of the circumstances.  You can make time for it if you want to, even if it's only two minutes.  Two minutes is better than zero minutes.  You are developing roots and plasticity.  The roots need to be deep and you need to be both as flexible and as strong as possible.

When a hurricane hits, trees with shallow roots get uprooted and tossed about.  Trees that are not able to bend get snapped.  The trees that have deep roots and are able to bend, no matter the strength of the storm, those are the trees that survive then go on to thrive.   Riding out the storm may not be fun but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Let chaos unite instead of divide.  We are all much stronger together.

It's a beautiful day to be alive!