Finding yourself during the lockdown

So, it’s started. I am starting to see the cracks. For many people, the novelty of working or being at home during the lockdown seemed quite attractive at first and luckily for the first week or so the weather was fantastic but now people are starting to struggle. This is only to be expected but it also illustrates just how easy our lives are on an everyday level. Yes, you may be in debt and have to pay your bills but that’s mostly because you have got the things that you wanted. I can say this without any concern for sounding arrogant as I do understand that many people may live on the poverty line in the UK but the fact remains I have lived in South East Asia in real poverty i.e. I had to live on 1 meal per day and I luckily I did have accommodation but it cost £25 per month and it was cooler in the scorching heat outside than it was inside my tiny room. I was on my own and as an ex-Royal Marine hardships were part and parcel of life. Plus I always believed they were only temporary and I would find a way out because I was willing to do what was necessary to get there.  

People often wonder why I push myself on a daily basis and do things that I never really liked such as sitting outside in the cold for 30 minutes during the winter months, or such as taking an ice swim in the Thames, or even simply going for a run that I very much dislike on an almost daily basis. And the reason is to build mental resilience, to build up a mental strength so that if a time ever came that I would need it my mind would be prepared. Now bear in mind I am not doing anything outrageous like David Goggins, Cameron Hanes and the likes but in my own way, I keep testing myself on almost a daily basis. 

Well, it looks like that time is upon us. Who would have ever thought we would be where we are now in the middle of a Global Pandemic and with nearly every Western nation in lockdown? 

If I’m being honest I had a mini panic during the first week of the lockdown from my perceived fear of not being able to get any new clients. This feeling of fear subsided and I managed to control it by simply focusing in on all of the lessons I have learnt over life. 

So what did I do that may be of use to you? 

As some of you may know my life has been, well not so ordinary to say the least and during one of my unusual episodes I had the great fortune to meet and be trained by my very own Buddhist monk. Now I have recalled this story before whereby I was learning how to meditate by walking back and forth in a clearing in a forest. On this occasion, the weather was beautiful, not too hot as I was shaded by the trees and there was a nice cool breeze blowing gently through. For the first time in my life I really seemed to be getting to grips with this meditation malarky, as being a full-blown Alpha male who thought I would be able to easily grasp meditation techniques I struggled and not for a short while aI struggled on and off for years. But here I was actually getting somewhere which is in itself a paradox as my teachings were that there was no ‘good’ meditation session and there was no ‘bad’ meditation session there was only practice. 

What do I mean by the fact that I was actually getting somewhere with my training? Well for years I misunderstood that to meditate correctly you needed to sit in a lotus position back straight and you could only focus on one single point and if you lost this point you had to refocus again and again. Obviously now this is ridiculous as it would be impossible to focus on one point constantly for any amount of time without years and years of practice, but at the time I didn’t know any better. 

But here I was completely and utterly transfixed by my breathing, I was aware of my surroundings and my walking but they seem to fall away from me and all I could do was focus on my breathing, I was what experts would call the flow state. But then came the crash… Suddenly out of the tranquillity a farmer had packed up work for the day and decided he would ramp up his new sound system to full blast and play some of his favourite tunes. This was like a firecracker in my ear and immediately smashed my ‘zen’ moment. 

I was furious, how could this imbecile ruin my special moment? I did, however, realise that 1. the farmer didn’t know who I was or what I was doing and 2. Who was I anyway, what special right did I have over that farmer that he should turn off his music to satisfy my whims? 

This is a very big issue with our modern-day society and a topic for another day. 

I soon realised that in fact, the situation was out of my control as we are all facing on a daily basis. And so with all of my experiences in life, I was going to win and beat this situation. The first thing I did was accept it and tried to enjoy the music, this however did not help me in reaching my task of meditation and in fact, made the experience seem even longer than it needed. I then tried my best to completely ignore the sound by trying to block it from my mind, yes good luck. If you have ever been laying in your bed at night and you have unfortunately got noisy neighbours and you try to block ou their sounds, it only seems to make you more focused on the sound, right? 

Yes so none of these approaches worked for me, so the next thing was to ask myself what would my monk do? And what has he taught me? He taught me that no matter what just simply focus on your breathing, in and out. So this is what I did. I still was angry inside as I couldn’t control my current situation but I had a task to do, so let’s see. After some time what I can only imaging was about 30 minutes or so, I began to realise something and that was I was so focused on my breathing that although I could still hear the music, it simply didn’t bother me, I had no feeling towards it, I was completely indifferent to it. This was a wonderful breakthrough for me as I had not realised up until that point wat it was to meditate. It is not to obtain all of these flowery feelings of content and feelings of clarity although that can be a side effect sometimes. 

For many years I struggled with the fact that in the Buddhist teachings it is understood to release yourself from all feelings and emotions which lead to desire, which in turn leads to suffering. How was I as a western young man going to achieve any of my ambitions or dreams in life if I had to get rid of my desire? Does that mean I could only be a monk to be content? 

And then whilst I have been locked up in my room during this current situation and having plenty of time on my hands I picked up an old book of mine ‘The collection of teachings of Ajahn Chah’ which is a famous Buddhist teacher monk that has taught thousands of younger monks throughout South East Asia not just in Thailand. 

And in this book the teachings went over the same teachings about controlling your thoughts and emotions to control your desire which leads to suffering. But this time something else dawned on me, it didn’t actually teach this I first understood it, it simply said emotions are tools, desire is a tool, and it is understanding this and learning how to be in control of your emotions and your desires to use them effectively as tools. This is something that is greatly missed or at the very least misunderstood here in the West. 

Many of us think that stifling our emotions makes us cold and stiff and it can lead to emotional stress because we bottle it up inside. I hear this all the time especially from highly respected people in the military who have been in very tough situations and therefore warrant a degree of admiration and respect. But this is completely wrong! 

It is the initial weakness and lack of discipline in controlling our emotions that allow many to bottle up their feelings. If you do not control your emotions they will CONTROL YOU. It is that simple. There is absolutely no way of hiding from yourself. When you have managed to understand that you need to control your emotions from the very beginning and then when they arise you understand what emotion it is and what you are feeling the way you are you then can make a controlled decision or at the very least understand the flow and ebb of that particular emotion in yourself. It is not having this understanding or control that problems arise. It is not taught that you need to bare all of yourself to other people and burden them with your problems to hide from your problems, it is taught however that you become more self-aware and you try to understand yourself and the reasons why you do or the reasons why you feel the way you do at any particular moment in time. 

I love science and firmly believe in its ethos and search for truth and the monk training me explained to me once that if I could live for a thousand years and aia could research anything ai wanted in all of science at the end of that thousand years I would only be left with even more questions and yet in the entire time I still would not know nor understand myself. We all have heard the saying “know thyself”. And yet how many of us ever do?

So what have I done during this unprecedented period? For many of you, it is too late, you have not taken any time to look into yourself and test yourself on a daily basis, but now you have been forced into this fantastic opportunity and it is an opportunity. You can make the most from this time or you can let it pass you by. 

What can you learn personally from this situation?

What have you learnt so far from this situation?

Look inside yourself and ask yourself questions about yourself, what is it you do that is amazing for those around you? What will people say about you? How can you do better for your family and yourself? 

What steps do you need to take to start yourself on this journey? 

What are you going to do in the future when this is all over? If your answer is to go straight back to normal life, then you have seriously missed a very important lesson and opportunity for you and your family. 

It all starts by becoming more self-aware. Every now and then when you are at home try it. You don’t have to sit down and become a monk and meditate for hours, you don’t have to meditate at all, in fact, just simply ask yourself some simple questions. 

How am I feeling today? Why am I feeling like this? What can I do today at this moment that is within my control to make myself feel better?

That’s it. It’s that simple. There are no special formulas. There are no special rituals and practices that take you to the top of a mountain. No just simply take a few seconds out in your (not so busy day) and ask yourself these questions with the aim of understanding yourself better. You do not need to have all or any of the answers just start to learn to get to know yourself better. Try it every day for 1 week and see how you feel at the end of that week. It’s even better if you have an argument with your partner and you ask yourself these questions. Be careful never to turn the answer around and blame it on your partner, ask yourself honestly what did you do that could have led to the disagreement in the first place.

Sit down with your partner and explain what you are doing, why you are doing it and aks them if they would like to join you. There should never be any blame placed on anyone during this practice. 

Ok, so that’s it from me. Give these ideas a go for a couple of days at least and see how things go. what’s the very worst that can happen, you could be stuck indoors in a complete lockdown and there could be a worldwide pandemic? Sorry already done that, I might even make the t-shirts.