“Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.”
James Allen
How often do you feel guilty for choosing a course of action – from forgetting to take a bag shopping with you, to wasting printer paper, to using your car when you could have walked? What is the point of that feeling of guilt?
I would suggest that guilt can be a clue that something needs tweaking. Guilt is often a sign that we’re misunderstanding a cause and effect and that we’re heaping unnecessary blame onto ourselves.
Supposing I were to feel guilty about forgetting to put an apple in my son’s packed lunch. Here’s what my internal Guilty Ecologist would be telling me:
“Oh no, now he’ll probably grab his favourite chocolate bar from the newsagent’s on the way home. That’s not good for the planet (think of the embodied energy in that compared to my locally grown, organic apple!). It’s not good for humanity (it’s not even Fair Trade Chocolate!) or his health (chocolate bar = hydrogenated fat + white sugar mostly isn’t it? – yuk. What will that do to his insides?!). And all of that is my fault!!” All this time, my son, oblivious to my anguish, is carrying on with his day as normal. So, my thoughts about what I did and my projection of what the consequences might be are what’s triggering my guilt, not what actually happened!
As guilty ecologists, we can inflict plenty of torture on ourselves by failing to forgive our mistakes, our ignorance and our misunderstandings on our individual journeys to a more resilient future.
How could I have avoided torturing myself with my guilt in the example above?
Perhaps I could have done that by:
1. Being aware of the guilt.
2. Just watching my thoughts doing their monkeying around, rather than reacting to them.
3. Recognising my wish to live simply and sustainably and to nurture my son. Being grateful that I care.
4. Reminding myself of where my responsibilities lie – my son’s quite capable of making his own decisions about what to eat in place of the missing apple – or not. That’s his call. He might even learn something from doing that!
5. Take action to remind myself of the apple next time.
6. Forgive myself!
Written down that might sound like a lot of “stuff” for one small incident. In reality, this processing to relieve guilt can happen in a few seconds, with a bit of practice!
If, like me, you find yourself being The Guilty Ecologist from time to time, here are some ideas for preventing such self-torture:
We can be sorry for what we did. Then we can recognise that the person who acted in the way we regret is not the same person that we are now. We are changing, evolving and developing all the time and can choose to act differently given a similar set of circumstances in the present or the future. We can have some understanding for the stresses we were feeling at the time that contributed to our actions.
We can reflect on our intention at the time of the incident. Sometimes we can cause harm to someone else or to the environment inadvertently. By asking ourselves what we had intended to happen, we can perhaps reduce the negative impact of our actions. For example, if I forget to take a bag shopping with me, I can choose to spend a little more money and buy a durable bag from the shop that I can re-use next time.
At the same time, if we’re in a situation where we’ve made a mistake and we can’t do anything to remedy it, then we can choose to accept the situation and to learn from it, rather than to undermine the rest of our efforts with guilt.
We can check whose responsibility the decision in question was. Perhaps the reason I didn’t have time to walk to my appointment was because I delayed my departure in order to help a colleague who had become unwell. Not all undesirable events that happen to us are our fault. Our responsibility is how we choose to deal with them.
Forgiveness is an art and an important part of learning how to live in healthy relationship with others and with ourselves. Part of this is reminding ourselves that all normal human beings make mistakes. If we are to be capable of forgiving others, then we will need to learn to forgive ourselves too.
At a time when we’re feeling courageous, we can confess our mistake to someone else and ask for their opinions on it. Perhaps our reasons for feeling guilty are not fair on us and someone else’s feedback will highlight this for us.
A great way to soothe any emotion that we perceive as negative is to find ways to give to others. It’s remarkable how this simple act can change our outlook on a situation in just a few minutes. How does that work? Energetically, it reverses the energy flow. Guilt is self-directed negative energy – we don’t like ourselves. Giving is other-directed positive energy – just the opposite!
There are many negative emotions that can arise on our quest to live and work more sustainably. We can imagine these as being like weed seeds in our minds. If we feed them they will grow. All we need to do to ensure that they remain dormant is deprive them of nourishment i.e. stop dwelling on them, and instead focus on growing the seeds that are good for us.
Picking coffee beans
We are in the middle of Fairtrade Fortnight here in the UK and I find myself feeling somewhat irritated with that phrase. Why do we need reminding to buy fair trade? Why don’t we just choose fairly traded goods all the time? How come there are such things as non-fairly traded products?
There’s a practice in Buddhism known as “deep looking” where we’re encouraged to contemplate an object, say something manmade, or something from nature and to reflect on how it is connected with other things. The intimate connection between things, people, animals, everything, is known as “interbeing.” So, when we read this blog, look at his computer screen more deeply, we might be able to see the oil that was used to produce the plastics, the vegetation that was crushed for millions of years to produce the oil, the metals and semiconductors that were extracted and processed to make the electronics, the power station, wind farm or solar cells that are producing the electricity that power it and all the human beings involved in those complex production and distribution processes.
Think of all the events, people and other living things throughout the world who have been involved in ensuring that we are able to sit here now and read this blog!
If we were to use “deep looking” when we are shopping for food and clothes, for example, perhaps we would never pick up an item that was not fairly traded, because we would immediately be aware of the exploitation we were colluding with. Perhaps we would even begin to see the unfair trade that is happening, not only in third world countries but here in the UK too, where millions scrape an existence on something less than a living wage.
“But I can’t afford to buy only fair trade!” is what I hear some reply to this.
And when we look very deeply, can we really afford not to?
“…on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.”
From The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The New Economics Foundation published a report last week about the possibility of reduced working hours leading to a more sustainable future.
As far as I’m aware, the term work/life balance derives from the old, unsustainable, industrial growth model where life and work are viewed as separate and in conflict (work being regarded as something akin to slavery, which it still is effectively for many living in poverty or in debt-funded affluence).
In a life sustaining social model, there are less clear boundaries between life and work. If we were leading this kind of sustainable lifestyle, we would be so true to our purpose in life, our offering to the world, that work that earned a living would be close in nature to how we spent the rest of our time. What we might call a hobby now might be seen as a vocation as well as a way to spend some leisure time, enjoy the company of friends and experience joy. Thus, there would be little need for work/life balance. There would be only life!
There is still something else here about balance, though. The way I see it, the need is for balancing roles rather than balancing work with life. This is an idea that is promoted by Stephen Covey in his time management book, First Things First. He suggests that we contemplate our lives in terms of the various roles we play in it, regardless of whether they earn us money. Then, we aim to balance the time spent in each of those roles as a way of ensuring we nurture our physical, mental and spiritual selves. Examples of roles might be: computer programmer, parent, friend, conservation volunteer, son/daughter, brother/sister, tennis player and so on.
To achieve this, we can start by reducing the time we spend in paid employment that does not feed our soul. Whilst this will probably reduce our income in the short term, what it increases is the time available to reassess our roles in life and what we truly value. This will doubtless throw up other challenges. But unsustainable cycles and patterns of working have to be broken somewhere.
I was prompted to write this blog and my Love Letter to the Future by a campaign that Greenpeace ran during the Copenhagen summit. However, it seems just as pertinent on Valentine’s Day, as a reflection on our love for others, for the earth and for other life forms. It also reminds me of the 7th Generation exercise that we do in The Work That Reconnects. We have a 1-2-1 conversation between 2 people, one from the present day and one living 7 generations in the future. The present day person explains to the person from the future what life is like now. They describe the challenges that they are experiencing and their hopes and fears for the future. In response, the person from the future describes what life is like for them and how their forefathers survived the 21st century. It can be a very moving and enlightening experience.
Here’s my Letter to the Future:
Dear friend,
I am writing to you from the year 2010. We are facing challenging times. There are changes in our climate that threaten to obliterate millions of people and much of our wildlife. We have depleted the earth’s natural resources to a point where we are unable to sustain our current way of living. We have become dependent on money and yet live with chaos in our economic systems. So far we have few solutions and little guidance from our government leaders. Some people cannot even see or acknowledge what our future appears to hold if we take no action.
Some of us are taking action in our jobs and in our communities and personal lives to raise awareness of the need to live and work more sustainably. We value community, cooperation and quality of life. We aim to live in harmony with nature rather than exploit it. We recognise the need to honour the natural capital that surrounds us rather than remain in slavery to the financial capital that we have created. We know it should be possible to effect this transition to a life-sustaining future using our personal skills, our intelligence and the technological advances we have made.
If you’re reading this letter, then maybe that means the transition was successful. I hope this letter finds you in good health, happiness and living harmoniously.
Love from Sally.
What would you include in your Letter to the Future?
Apparently January 25th was officially the most depressing day of 2010. Called “Blue Monday” the Monday on the last week of January each year is the day when we’re most likely to feel down and lack-lustre. This is often attributed to the combination of debt from Christmas, cold and wet weather, suffering from colds and flu and the lack of a public holiday on the horizon. So, we can breathe a huge sigh of relief that it’s over a done with for this year at least!
However, with Spring still not quite with us yet, what can we do when we succumb to the Winter Blues? The usual distractions of overeating, drinking alcohol or vegging out in front of the TV that many of us are tempted by can lead to addition physical and emotional difficulties. What simple, sustainable alternatives are there?
First of all, we need to have a deeper understanding of why the Winter season has a tendency to get us down. In addition to the cultural, materialistic reasons mentioned above, there are natural, energetic reasons why this happens. The energetic nature of Winter (in the UK) is to be cold and damp. The physical effect of this on our bodies is to make us feel like exercising less, expending less energy and eating more. Emotionally the effects are to make us feel like making fewer changes, taking fewer risks and staying grounded.
One of the wonderful benefits of living more simply and sustainably is that our self-awareness becomes supercharged and our sensitivity to our surroundings, and in particular what the natural world is up to, becomes greatly enhanced. As this awareness matures, we are more likely to notice how, when our environment changes with the seasons, it affects how we feel. Then we can start to make some rather different decisions about how to respond to that in a simple, sustainable way.
This might not eliminate “Blue Monday” altogether, but it may well lead to us having a much more comfortable and productive day.
So, how do we change our approach?
Acceptance
Rather than resisting the qualities of Winter that we don’t like, we can choose to accept the cold and the wetness. What can we find about Winter that we enjoy and look forward to? By accepting what is, we can start to relax and reduce the stress that we are imposing on ourselves. We might even begin to enjoy it!
Alignment
This is a kind of “if you can’t beat it, join it” principle. It’s all about engaging with Winter, but in a way that nourishes our minds and bodies. For example, we can make a point of enjoying some light, moderate exercise each day (not as much as we might during the other seasons). If we cultivate a winter habit of wrapping up warm and walking for a short time around midday, when there is most sunlight, then this also boosts our mood and encourages vitamin D production. This in turn can increase our feelings of energy and wellbeing. Eating warming, lightly cooked, balanced foods, as Alana suggests, at our major meal times not only warms us from the inside, but helps to endure that we get adequate nourishment to boost our immunity to colds and flu. This is a time to use our company cafeteria rather than take a cold, packed lunch to work or to take time out to cook our main meal at lunchtime if we’re working from home. Another healthy way to engage with winter is to take steps to improve our sleep patterns. Rather than fighting winter by attempting to get by on the same amount of sleep we need in the summer, we can accept that our needs vary with the seasons and give ourselves permission to sleep a little more. If you have difficulties falling asleep at night, you could try this delicious, stress-relieving bedtime drink (see the Hot Milk Drink recipe).
Action
My third remedy is a favourite of mine for alleviating the blues, feelings of fear and apathy and general malaise – action. What type of action is prescribed in this case, though?
First, let’s look for some of our favourite sources of positivity. Who out of your friends and acquaintances make you laugh, radiate an aura of wellbeing and positivity? They’re the people to make sure you spend time with on Blue Monday.
Perhaps you have other sources of humour and positivity that you like to turn to when needed.
When socialising, be mindful not to use it as just another distraction, but rather as a means for meaningful connection with others .
Conclusion.
When faced with Winter Blues, we can choose to succumb to our usual materialistic, unsustainable distractions, or we can choose some simple, sustainable options for nourishing our bodies and minds. In this way we can transform Winter Blues into Positive News.
This site seeks to explore the heart and soul of downshifting to a more sustainable, ethical and holistic way of living and working, in keeping with the needs of the planet, humanity as a whole and ourselves as individuals. (read more)
