GAYNOR O’FLYNN’S WRITING ON BEINGHUMAN®
HONEST
Everyone has one basic responsibility, to themselves and to others…to be honest.
Everyone has one basic responsibility, to themselves and to others…to be honest.
Being honest simply means being ourselves. Trees, plants, flowers, animals and our bodies seem to have no problem with this. Our minds however often try to fight the natural order and harmony of creation and in the words of Bob Marley.
"If ya come to do somet'ing, ya do it. But if ya come to do somet'ing an ya don't do it, ya fighting against God".
Being dishonest, trying to be something we are not is hard and exhausting. Being honest, being ourselves is actually quite simple but not always easy! Many of us need to undo years of programming and habits that have trained us out of it.
Being honest involves listening to our feelings, sensing our body and a little like in a child’s game moving towards the warmer ones and away from the colder ones.
When we practice listening to all our feelings, comfortable and uncomfortable, trusting our senses, we start to follow our path, to be who we were created to be and do what we are created to do. We learn, evolve, change and flow through life with more ease, joy and grace. We contribute to the order, beauty and harmony of the whole.
When we are honest with ourselves and with others, we get out of our own way and give our innate life force the time and space to create love both for ourselves and for everything and everyone else.
Honesty moves us beyond our could haves, should haves and would haves to what we truly desire, not what we think we desire and what we truly desire is often quite simple. By being honest with ourselves, we are honest with others, honest with life.
Honesty moves humanity from chaos to flow, war to peace, fear to love.
Life is simpler when we are honest.
#culture #media #mindfulness
THINGS
Human Beings love things.
We human beings love things and are confident that those things are the way we think they are.
Be it our desks, computers, pens, paper, rooms, houses, streets, towns, cities… or ourselves…
We love to navigate our way in our work, our relationships, our lives and our world based on our confidence in our things and your things.
Our mind loves to builds stories about these things but our mind is not actually a thing.
If we try to find our mind, we can’t see our mind, smell our mind, touch our mind, hear our mind or taste our mind…
When we start to understand our mind is not a graspable thing, we see our identity is not a thing either, we are not fixed things.
We then see everything is a lot less fixed than we believe, manifesting out of a flowing, evolving energy and changing from moment to moment, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year.
When we look back at our lives, we see in just this one life we have been many things at different times, in different places, with different people.
Like characters in our own immerse play, we act our roles as our lives unfold.
#vr #energy #theatre
FEAR
Fear is a great teacher.
Fear is an essential to keep us alive.
Fear can be intelligent, clever and play a useful role in our creative work, play and lives but there are different types of fear, different ways to be afraid.
We can have pointless fear of our thoughts and emotions or necessary fear of facts. Yet often when we experience fear, certain habits tend to kick in, regardless. We quickly cover our fear with our ideas, assumptions or beliefs. We tend to want to blame something or someone for our fear. Or to deny or ignore our fear, physically or mentally.
We develop ways to avoid fear but work, drink, drugs, food, drama… only makes fear stronger and makes it harder to see what is actually going on.
But what if instead of turning away from our fear, we turned towards our fear? What if we developed a curiosity about our fear? What if we took some time to get to know our fear, stayed open to our fear, had a chat with our fear or simply hung out with our fear?
What if we were kind and loving enough to give our fear the space and time to reveal itself? This can seem daunting but if we simply, gently face our fear with patience and courage, if we resist the temptation to fight or flight, to be a hero or a coward and simply stay open, untouched and observe, our fear passes like clouds, storms, rainbows, planes pass through the sky.
Simply there and then gone.
Fear is a great teacher.
NAKED
Sleep will save humanity!
We are all born naked, but can we live naked?
Can we take off all our masks, our pretences, our roles and our disguises so we experience our nakedness? The nakedness of the moment, of experience, of life?
But there is an innate contradiction in life. The act of being human, growing up, becoming an adult, society’s norms and expectations… tends to move us away from the natural, naked potential we all have.
To become human, we tend to become a specific human, in a specific family, school, culture, language with a set of political, economic and religious norms.
Then as a grown-up human we do a specific job, in a specific business with a specific role. We have specific relationships, we specific sorts of people, who we find in specific places at specific times in our lives.
We become very attached to our identity and often have a wardrobe of identities that we wear for different occasions.
But by becoming aware of our own innate nakedness, we can see beyond our disguises, our limited definitions of ourself, we can see the vastness of possibility, the vastness of our potential.
We can see we are all always able to grow, evolve, change and that is at the heart of being human.
We can see we are all naked…
#culture #society #mindfulness
EGO
Sleep will save humanity!
The tech industry loves the ego.
The concept of the ego drives a multi trillion dollar global industry.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Amazon, Netflix, Apple et al… love to help us build brand me. My account, my handle, my likes, my dislikes, my image, my business, my beliefs and of course my money-making data.
Though we need a healthy ego to operate in the world, to be unique, to be aware to know who we are and what we were put here to do. We also need to be aware of the limitations of our ego, to be aware of what it is for and what it is not for and to be aware when it gets sick.
And tech has exposed our ego to a global pandemic, a threat to our mental health and sanity that is unprecedented in the history of our species.
A sick ego loves to feel superior, elite, exclusive and is greedy. A sick ego is never content, happy or peaceful and the tech industry dominated by 98% male, elitist, educated founders knows and exploits this to win the global battle of hearts and minds and make those trillions.
The tech industry knows that keeping us wanting, unhappy, divided and discontent keeps us online, keeps us working in the data factory and keeps the trillions of dollars coming.
The industry’s AI is built with superiority, bias, prejudice and greed at it’s core, creating artificial, stupid, machine taught, out of control money making robots that feed our ego an unhealthy tech diet. It is hard for even the healthiest ego to resist the constant, persistent manipulation of our subconscious but not impossible…
Remember today as we all use the tools technology brings us and don’t get me wrong, those tools can be used with great intent, to stay in awareness, to stay alert and to spend at least half your time off a screen…challenging right.
Sleep will save humanity!
#brand #technology #data
PEACE
We need to make friends with our mind
Peace on earth comes through each and every one of us developing peace of mind. `
We need to get to know our mind, to talk to our mind, to be kind to our mind, to be patient with our mind, to laugh and have fun with our mind, `our mind needs to be our BFF.
As in any good friendship we need to take the time to listen and understand even when our mind is feeling mad, sad or bad.
We need to resist the temptation to fix or judge our mind, to learn to simply be there when our mind needs us, no matter how busy we are.
We need to learn what our mind needs, to see beyond our mind’s hopes and fears, to learn how to talk to our mind, learn how to hang out with our mind, learn how to simply be with our mind even when our mind is bored or boring.
We need to see through our mind’s behaviour, to love our minds no matter what our minds do, to relax and get to know our mind’s true, pure, brilliant nature.
If every day we put some time into the relationship, we are patient with our mind, we love and care for our mind, we can have a friend for life.
And it is only when we have a true, deep, strong, loving friendship with our mind, that we can connect with a deep, natural sense of peace not matter what is going on in the world... even war.
#Peace
STORY
Stories have power.
We are all great storytellers.
We constantly tell stories about our lives, our beliefs, our ideas, our convictions, our wins, our losses, our likes, our dislikes but often we don’t recognise what truly, great storytellers we are.
We have all put in our 10,000 hours creating stories about ourself and others based on where we were born, our upbringing, education, family, friends, experiences, travels, politics, religion, culture, language… We think we are someone, somewhere, concerned about something and we know you are someone else, somewhere else concerned about something else.
But though we are master storytellers but we are also reliably unreliable. Our moods constantly change: we are happy, sad, angry, bored, lethargic, tired, excited, joyous, crazy, wise…
So, our stories change too.
We do many rewrites, sometimes working in writers’ rooms but mostly alone. We constantly draft, edit and refine our stories and look for the people, places, preferences, products and passions that support our own unique, evolving narrative. But the real magic happens when, in the legendary words of Julian Cope, ‘You realize, it’s just a story’.
When we realize it’s just a story, life, we can relax, feel and experience the play of sound and light. We can change who we think we are, what we think we do, think, feel or believe any time, any place, anywhere.
We can change our story.
As the master storytellers we are, we can use our skills not only to change our own story but also the stories we tell others. We can create actual books, plays, films, podcasts, videos, art, courses, lectures, manuals, workshops… social media posts…
We can use our storytelling skills to help ourselves and others, tell a new story.
Stories have power.
#Story #Power #Storytellers
SPACE
What you don’t do is often as important as what you do.
Across the creative disciplines be it drawing, painting, singing, playing, writing, lighting, dancing, designing, making… What you don’t do is as important as what you do.
Space, be it physical, sensual, temporal or digital is an extremely important yet often overlooked phenomena, a part of all our creative work, a part of all our lives.
Space is big, really big and endless yet with practice space can be discovered, remembered, developed and integrated in our creative work, out art, our products, our services, our lives.
Relax and for a moment imagine opening up to the vastness of space, the potential, the energy, the possibilities of an endless, finite, ever expanding universe.
Feels good, doesn’t it…
The practice is simple, free, always available and so, so powerful!
OPEN
It is so important to stay open in life.
I think it is so important to stay open in life.
Open to new ideas, new people, new places, new habits, new ways of being, doing and feeling.
When I am open, I flow, I feel relaxed, peaceful, grounded… I am less rigid, fixed, I feel limitless, carefree and accept more in my life without labelling it good or bad. Basically, I am a lot happier.
In my creative practice, staying open helps me have better, wilder, braver ideas. I am more patient with myself and others. I have so much more energy.
By staying open I do not restrict myself to a narrow definition of ‘me’ or ‘mine’: my work, my business, my practice, my creativity, my life . I can write, sing, direct, dance, move across creative, performative and technical disciplines. I am not confined by my own idea of myself. I am free, open to the potential in me, the potential in the entire universe, … and the universe is BIG
The practice of staying open, and for me it takes daily practice, is powerful and liberates me.
CREATE
We are all creative.
There is little in life that does not need creativity.
There are probably as many ways to enter our creative flow as there are humans…. Nature, play, movement, music, journals, laughter ….
But sometimes in our culture the definition of creativity seems to me limited, rigid, or constrained to certain ‘creative’ activities, when really creativity has more to do with a state of being than a state of doing.
Creativity is innate in all human beings. It is impossible to be alive and not be creative. Creativity is natural, kind, compassionate, joyful and so, so powerful. When our creativity flows, we sense it in our bodies, our minds, our energy, our life.
Creativity is natural. all we need to do is let go of our hopes and fears, relax and get out of our own way.