Last night I attended the Troubleshooting Enlightenment Workshop by Jamie Smart from Salad Ltd and I have to say I am still buzzing from the experience!
The workshop took place in one of the many meeting rooms at the Grand Connaught Rooms, a fabulously luxurious building in the Holborn area of London. I always get a bit of a buzz when I visit central London so I was already feeling pretty good although not as good as I could have been (lots on my mind!)
The workshop started and I soon relaxed as Jamie started his talk. What I love about Jamie is that he has so much knowledge and passion about the subjects he talks about but also uses his irreverent style and humour to get the message across. This is important to me as it really helps me get into a good state of learning and enjoyment which I think is very important- we all know how important it is to enjoy the learning process for the information to really sink in!
So what was the workshop all about? Well, the theory is fairly simple and has been spoken about for hundreds of years by Buddhists as well as many other Eastern religions, but Jamie’s way of presenting the information somehow hit home much more than any Buddhist text I have read.
What Jamie is saying is that everything around us- all that we see, feel, taste, hear and smell is a representation constructed by us and it is up to us how we interpret these representations. We can therefore choose how we feel about anything at any time. For example, if someone cuts you up in traffic, you can choose to be furious at the guy in the white van or you can choose to just let it go or even find it funny. You may feel like you should be beeping your horn, shouting out of the window or giving the guy the finger, but does that really feel good? The guy in the van doesn’t care about your ranting. He isn’t going to pull over, apologise and say “Sorry. After you old chap!”. And meanwhile, who has all that anger? Yup-you do!
Because we all have a choice about how we feel at any time and specifically now, we could just choose to feel happy despite what is going on in the outside world. Now, this may be easier said than done, but when you just allow yourself to go inside, and give it a go, you soon realize that it does feel good to just be in the here and now and feel happy inside. And the more you do it, the more automatic it becomes!
Jamie went into this in much more detail than I have, but if this sounds like something you would like to try, why not check out the next free workshop in November by following this link for a short video from Jamie and more info:
Be happy!