Following is a brief description (and video) of the most important advice I ever got.
It continues to improve the quality of my life in countless way.
It’s stopped me (mostly) from ruminating on negative thoughts. It’s helped me learn how to reduce my own suffering when things don’t go my way. And, most importantly, it’s teaching me how to be happy regardless of what happens in my life.
This is a profound shift.
From 21 to 27 years old I ran a advertising agency that I founded in 2012. Although financially successful, I spent most of that time unhappy.
Why?
Because I was riddled with desire.
Desire for success. Desire for wealth. Desire for happiness that I believed was attainable through success and wealth.
But it never came.
In fact, things got worse.
In 2017, I stood on the platform waiting to return to Manchester while considering jumping in front of the next passing train.
Around this time I first heard Naval Ravikant say “desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want”.
I didn’t understand what it meant then.
I do now.
We don’t feel happiness when we get what we want. We feel happiness when the desire ceases.
99.9% of people misunderstand this.
We live in a world that will not allow this truth to become widely known.
All of consumer capitalism is built on the idea that happiness can be bought. As the former founder of an advertising agency, I intimately know how true that is.
But it’s the desire for those things that creates the suffering that veils our happiness.
The answer is to remove desire.
Which is extremely difficult. But there is a way…
Letting go
I first read The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer in 2021.
Within a few pages I read the line “you are not the voice of the mind, you are the one who hears it”.
BOOOOOM!!!!!
The power of one sentence.
It changed me.
But Michael Singer wasn’t finished with me.
I quickly bought and devoured all of his books. Then took his course, Living From a Place of Surrender.
In the course, Singer teaches us how to let go of our attachment to the voice in our head.
For example:
When someone we know ignores us, the voice in our head starts yapping “how dare they do that” and before we know it we’re lost in a cycle of negative thoughts and lose half the day.
But it needn’t be this way.
We can, with practice, learn to let that voice speak but not allow ourselves to be affected by it.
Remember the quote above “you are not the voice of the mind”.
That voice is independent of YOU.
When the voice chirps up, we quickly recognise that it has, and we relax. We relax our chest, arms, bum, legs and let the voice do it’s thing.
Don’t try to stop the voice. Just let it be. Let it say what it has to say.
If the voice is particularly aggressive, we can start repeating the mantra “I can handle this” silently in our head.
After a while, the voice goes away. And you’ve just avoided an afternoon of rumination.
This is the practice of Letting Go.
Which is why “Let It Go” is my phrase of 2024.
Here’s a video explaining more:
Really helpful, thank you.
thank you. I needed this today