I Find Peace Like This
What comes up for you when you think about your artistic side? Creativity, imagination, spontaneity, innovation and originality sound like appropriate synonyms. Self-discipline, on the other hand, is more associated with control, rigidity, routine. If you were to choose, what would you go for?
The Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard has been acclaimed to be the happiest man on earth. Do you know by whom? Well, some cognitive scientists of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience in Wisconsin made this affirmation after showing that Matthieu Ricard, a highly experimented meditator, has extraordinarily high levels of upbeat activity and almost invisible levels of negative emotions.
If you are a human being who has had a fair share of life experience, chances are you’ve already been through a rich range of emotions. From joy and utter happiness to sadness and frustration, we have access to feeling this wide palette of emotions.
How much quality time do you usually spend with yourself? Have you ever found yourself postponing any personal activity, just because you had something urgent come up, but still find the strength to always be there for yourself?
Minds practicing creativity have changed the way we live and experience the world. Without them, it would not be possible to sit down in a warm place reading these words that a person from another part of the world wrote. For creativity, there is no limit. If we want to live in a better world, we can do it!
Some people get to keep their playful attitude towards life throughout the years. Can you recall your childhood days? Everything was an opportunity to play and enjoy the moment, right? Many of us still have that candid and spontaneous drive for playfulness. And meditation made it even clearer why playful is a way of being.
If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. Vincent Van Gogh
Some years ago I read 13,99€ by Frédéric Beigbeder, a French publicist who wrote this novel as a biography, which took him to get fired after its publication. Octave Parango, the main character and alter ego of the writer, is a successful creative executive in the advertising industry, one of man “who decide what the public will want tomorrow”.
Years ago, when I was in a yoga class, we were asked ‘How much attention do you pay to your hands and feet?’ The instructor went on to remind us that our hands and feet worked for us day after day. But did we ever thank them? Did we ever express our gratitude?
