ReThinking Mental Wellbeing
Real, relatable conversations about mental wellbeing from someone who is walking the same journey as you, just sitting on a different side of the microphone.Just like you, I’m on this journey of self-discovery and healing. We answer the questions that you have asked. To explore mental wellbeing in an honest and authentic way without all the jargon getting in the way.Mental wellbeing is deeply personal, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to finding peace, fulfillment, and self-acceptance. That’s why this podcast is all about rethinking the way we approach mental health. It’s not about fixing ourselves or striving for some unattainable version of perfection. It’s about creating space to understand ourselves better, to embrace our unique challenges, and to redefine what wellbeing looks like on our own terms.So join me in our discussions where we can sit with each other and learn how to live out the best version of our authentic life.
ReThinking Mental Wellbeing
Guiding Principles for a Meaningful Life
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We explore how developing a framework of principles can provide stability and guidance in a constantly changing world, helping us live our most authentic life and improve our mental wellbeing.<br><br>• The difference between rules and principles - rules are rigid and fear-based while principles are flexible and value-aligned<br>• Speaking with kindness rather than niceness - kindness honors our truth while respecting others<br>• Understanding mana as a source of personal and collective strength that gives our words power and influence<br>• Living life simply by reducing unnecessary possessions and commitments<br>• Prioritizing experiences and relationships that align with our authentic selves<br>• Cultivating mindfulness and gratitude to appreciate what we have without grasping<br>• Identifying your personal ratio between effort and rest to maintain wellbeing<br><br>If you have any questions you would like us to discuss on future episodes, please email me at rethinkingmentalwellbeing@gmail.com.<br><br>
Hello and welcome to another episode of Rethinking Mental Wellbeing. This is our community podcast where we can talk about everything related to depression and anxiety. So my name is Andre and I want to thank you for being with me over the next half an hour as we share this space of lived experience where we can talk about how to live the best version of our authentic life. So if you're ready, then I'm ready. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome back to Rethinking Mental Wellbeing. If you're here for the first time, then welcome to the space, and if you've been here before, then welcome back to the space. Wouldn't it be helpful in life if we had a framework, a scaffolding of principles, of truth that we can lean into and construct our days onto? Wouldn't it be really helpful, when things get tough, when things get overwhelming, that we can fall back onto these truths, that we have to remind us how we need to live our life with principles that are both helpful and healthy for us, principles that are not just important to us but meaningful to us. And in our world of constant change, in a world that is forever moving, sometimes it is really nice that we can rely on the stability of our principles in life, that we can rely on a framework that is reliable. Through our fundamental truths and our beliefs, our principles in life serve as this foundation so we can create a life more meaningful and more fulfilling. Principles influence life and influence the way that we interact both with ourself and the world around us. When we develop our life around principles, it will look a lot different than a life with rules.
Speaker 1:When we live a life with rules, they are often bound to our experiences. Rules are a strict, non-negotiable statement that, for many of us, have been born out of a fear belief or out of a protection belief. When we develop rules in life, we don't allow for the ebb and flow of the world that we live in, we don't allow for the differences of the people that we meet and we don't allow for the experiences outside of these rules that we have. For many years, one of my rules was that the world is unsafe. This dominating rule was fueled by the dominating belief that if I wasn't always in protection mode, then I would be unsafe. The problem was that my definition of being unsafe was born out of trauma and was created by my need to feel as safe as possible. So my rule that the world was unsafe, anchored itself by my experiences of suffering and trauma, as my isolation and my separation of the world around me kept me hypervigilant and my separation of the world around me kept me hypervigilant and my safe place of isolation turned out to be not very safe after all, because I was still on high alert, still hypervigilant and still feeling unsafe in a place that was meant to be safe.
Speaker 1:So you can kind of start to see how our rules in life sometimes can become our anchors that secure us into our own suffering, bringing back to life the very experiences that we've had and the ones that we are trying to heal from. But principles in life are a lot more flexible and a lot more broader. They tend to follow our values as we are guided internally rather than by the external demands that we are trying to impose on the outside world to protect our wounds that we still have inside. In this episode we're going to explore a few principles that may be helpful for you to provide in our world some more stability, to provide in our world a reliable structure that we can pin our experiences onto and lead us into the direction that adds quality to our life. So for the rest of this episode, I'm going to share with you some of the truths that I have incorporated in my life, and you can cherry pick and use whatever you want to use as ideas and principles in your own life, and some of what we talk about in today's episode may also prompt you with some of your own principles in life. So, before we start, I'm just going to ask you to go grab a pen and paper and write down some of the ones that are important to you and some of the ones that resonate with you, as we are not just going to talk about the principle, but we're going to expand on it, and if you walk away today with just one principle that you can use, then our job is done, because one is a great start.
Speaker 1:The great philosophers of the past, philosophers like Aristotle, socrates, friedrich Nietzsche, plato, epicurus and many others are still talked about in today's world, passing on their wisdom to our future generations, because their teachings, their quotes and their philosophy is still relevant in today's world. One of the most recognizable principles in life was formed into a poem in 1927, and this poem is entitled the Deserata. The title Deserata is literally translated from Latin into English, meaning things that are desired. This poem has a main theme of finding peace amongst life's challenges, encouraging the need to be kind and compassionate, and at times even tolerant, as we seek to understand and appreciate the world around us. The Deserata is still popular today and, considering it was written in 1927, it's a statement of the relevance that this particular piece of writing still has in the world that we live in today.
Speaker 1:So, as we go through the rest of this episode, we're going to give you some principles again that have been helpful in my world, and I'm not asking you to take them on as your own. I am asking you to find the ones that are relevant to you. In other words, if it fits your soul and it fits your life, when it feels true for you, it becomes instantly relatable, as that principle connects to your authenticity, to your values and to your truth that you have within you. So the first principle we're going to talk about is speak with kindness more. This is where the difference between kindness and niceness needs to be explained.
Speaker 1:Too often we are taught that niceness and politeness are character traits that are seen as positive, even endearing. But being nice has a price, as we consistently put other people's needs before our own, and that price is at the expense of our own needs, and the cost is the emotional exhaustion and the chronic stress overload. For most people, being nice is a learned behavior. It is a behavior that we've adapted because at some level we've had to learn that we had to suppress a part of us in order to feel safer, to feel significant, to feel belonging from the people around us. And as we practice being nice, we also practice self-abandonment, as we pursue things like acceptance and validation and approval at the unaffordable price of our own truth. Being nice is often the behaviour we action for the approval that we seek from the people around us, which, in turn, is tied to the interpretation of not only our sense of worth but our sense of identity. Being nice also gets wrapped up and entangled, and often mistaken, for our values. When we learn to be kind, though, the behavior and action may look the same, but the birthplace is completely different.
Speaker 1:Showing kindness sometimes doesn't look very nice to other people, and the reason is because your authenticity, your needs and your truth have been honored and respected by you. The responsibility is no longer in the hands of other people to get your needs met, because kindness honors your values by the boundaries that you put in place. It is set by your compassion and is lived out by your kindness. Kindness is about learning your limits, learning your capacity, learning your pace and learning your flow of what is acceptable and not acceptable. As you action those things to the world around you, gently and without having a need to feel you have to prove or convince yourself to other people about your character and your identity and who you are. Kindness is restraint, kindness is self-compassion, and kindness is prioritizing yourself, not putting yourself above other people, but realizing that the energy that you've put into getting other people to approve of you needs to be the same energy that you put into your own self-compassion.
Speaker 1:Speaking with kindness doesn't mean sugarcoating everything, especially if it's pretending everything's okay when it's not. Some of the kindest words we can ever speak is when we say things like this isn't working or this hurt me, or I feel really uncomfortable with this, or simply just saying no. It's the understanding that real kindness means saying these things without the intention of making anyone else feel smaller or inferior or disrespected, because it's about the way you speak your truth, and when you wrap what you say around your kindness, around care and around respect, it changes the way things are said, but not necessarily the way it's received, because, of course, we can't control how other people will receive it, and there will be times, no matter how much you honour yourself, no matter how compassionate you are, however you speak your truth that it will be misinterpreted by the gateway of other people's beliefs and other people's energy, because we only receive things that are said to us from our own perception. It is seen through our own lens of understanding and from the distance that we are from our own truth and from the emotions and the energies that we are surrounded with. Being kind means we say what we say because it's lined up with our authentic nature and our truth, but the attitude and the atmosphere that we say it in means that we respect ourself and we also respect other people and care enough to say it in a way that doesn't shame other people. Kindness doesn't mean you never get angry, though. It doesn't mean that you're always smiling, always agreeing or always staying silent. Kindness is about learning to protect our peace without punishing others, and it's learning to genuinely apologize when we need to. The ability to own our actions and our responsibility is a part of what kindness is. So speak with kindness more in your home, in the world around you, to yourself. Let your compassion and let your respect be what your words are carried on. Be kind to others, learning to say things like no, not now or not this way, because kindness isn't about getting people to like you more. It highlights who you're becoming, and this next principle is closely linked with kindness. Let your words be spoken with mana.
Speaker 1:Some of you may have heard of a man named Taim Itu, so he did a TED talk in Auckland about 10 years ago. His TED talk that you can look up on YouTube was entitled Mana the power of knowing who you are. So I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here, but I'm going to use his words to describe to you what mana is. You might have heard it before. This word is mana. Everyone has some form of mana. Mana comes from knowing who you are, where you come from and your connections to your land. Mana grounds you. Mana makes you solid. Mana connects you to your past, your present and your future. We don't always have to agree. Mana is tested, even challenged, but with respect and an understanding of one another, we are all equal. We are all the same, on the same level, and I really like this next piece of writing about the meaning of mana, which reads like this Mana is a source of both personal and collective strength, pride and identity.
Speaker 1:If it's mishandled, it becomes the bearer of shame, ridicule and embarrassment. As mana allows us to walk tall, then it also casts a long shadow called humility. So your mana is a combination of your character, your passion and the words you use that have an influence to the world around you and to the world within you. Your words have power. We often mistake power as using force or volume and what energy that they are wrapped in, because the words we use are often felt before they're heard. So think about words as what creates the spark that ignites the energy laying within you is what creates the spark that ignites the energy laying within you, because often the words we use is reflected from the energy that lies within us.
Speaker 1:We listen to two things when people are talking to us. We listen to what they say. We also listen to the way it's being said. So the question is what is the energy that you have within you? What energy are you igniting and bringing to life by the words that you use, through the energy that's attached to them?
Speaker 1:Speaking your words with mana is about speaking with authority, with power, with influence, with spiritual power, with charisma, power and influence and control isn't about domination. It's about knowing yourself. It's about knowing yourself and it's about knowing your authentic nature, knowing your ancestral influence, where you come from, honoring the land around you and respecting the mana as a spiritual force, in peace, in yourself, in places and even in objects. Words have the power to build people up or to bring people down. They can encourage you, they can uplift you, motivate and inspire you. Speak your words with truth, with conviction, but wrap them around your humility and your compassion. This, of course, isn't an excuse to put up with people with bad behavior, but this is a reason why we shouldn't have to up with people with bad behavior, but this is a reason why we shouldn't have to.
Speaker 1:The next principle of life that may be helpful is live life simply, and this idea of living simply is not a new one. It's not a modern idea, but it has gained some popularity over the last few years Thanks to the rise of technology and social media and modern life. We have moved away from the pace of our preferred design and we find ourselves catapulted into a world that is too busy, too demanding. There are more and more people in the world today that are learning to listen to what their design is telling them to do to live simply. This doesn't mean going without, as society will get you to think, but it's about being content with what you have, through the practice of gratitude, without the hunger of needing more. There's typically three types of headings that you can use as a framework on how to simplify life. This isn't the gold standard, but it gives you a good place to start, and this is in no particular order, reducing possessions and commitments. We are often taught to buy more and to have more, because what we have is never enough, and so we live our life influenced by the proverbial carrot that dangles just in front of us as we accumulate our happiness in the stuff that we have around us.
Speaker 1:We have very strong emotional attachments to objects or things around us, and one of the reasons why is because this is actually rooted in evolutionary history, because sometimes our objects and things that surround us serve as a reminder of our connections, of our comfort, of our security and even of our identity, and this often leads to the experience of positive emotions, and so we don't attach ourselves to things, we attach ourselves to the memory and to the experience and to the emotions that those things bring and, in particular, if we feel lonely or if we feel stressed or even disconnected to the world around us and we become so emotionally invested in things that we often see things as substitute for important people that are or have been in our life, things like photos or memorabilia that have a strong attachment to a loved one that may no longer be with us. And sometimes we attach ourselves to things so deeply that if things become damaged or lost, then we feel damaged or lost, and sometimes letting go of things also means to us letting go of the person that is attached by the emotion that we hold to the thing that we have. So I want to make quite clear that I'm not suggesting that we simplify life by getting rid of everything that means something to us. So of course, that's not what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:If it helps when you declutter your home, if the idea of throwing something out is really stressful, then maybe look at donating or selling things or giving them away to other people that may need them. And of course, we can always look at reducing our consumption and reducing the things that we buy, because we all know that buying things makes us feel better, and we've even given a title that most of us have given ourselves permission to keep doing this under the name retail therapy. Be more mindful about what we purchase, for what reason, for what purpose. This can help reduce down some unnecessary things that end up cluttering your home. So, of course, this should not be done immediately or straight away or all at once. You take your time, at your pace, at your speed, because this is about the focus and priority of reclaiming and learning to simplify life, not to re-traumatize or complicate or add more stress to life, and this is more about learning to make space both mentally and emotionally. Our home should honor meaningful memories of the past, not as a place that reflects fear or feelings of unsafety or feelings of anxiety as our emotional claw marks gouge themselves into the things around us, desperately trying to hold on to our sense of comfort and security through the emotions that we attach to the things around us.
Speaker 1:And so, to add to the second part of this, reducing our commitments is talking about removing the things in our world and our life and in our day that don't really serve us as well as we think they do. They don't really help us live a life that is healthy and helpful, but rather helps us by keeping us distracted, even keeping us entertained, but at the expense of avoiding of minimizing the deeper part of us that may need to heal. In fact, there's two questions that we can ask ourselves in relation to anything that we do in life, any situation, any circumstance, any environment or any activity that we can use these questions to navigate, to find a direction that is more useful, that adds quality to our life. The first question is this situation, event or circumstance healthy and helpful for me, or is this situation unhealthy and unhelpful for me? And the second question is this situation, event, circumstance, draining or refueling? These two questions become useful as guidelines to identify the things that we are doing that don't necessarily have a healthy and helpful payoff. This requires a deep form of honesty and an awareness within ourselves that ensures that we're not creating a story or a narrative that's sole purpose is to make us feel better about doing the things we know is not that helpful.
Speaker 1:The second part of living simply is learning to prioritize our experiences and relationships. There's a beautiful quote that says I will show you your priorities in life by what you repeat, by what you reinforce and by what you practice. A big part of living simply is prioritizing the right relationships for us, the right connections for us that fit you and your truth. So when we learn to recalibrate our experiences and reprioritize those experiences around our authenticity and our truth, then that becomes a lot more healthier for us. This may look like focusing on people that give you joy and fulfillment and a sense of connection. This may look like spending time in nature. This may look like focusing on hobbies and interests. And the third part of living simply is learning to cultivate what we call mindfulness and gratitude. This is where we learn not to live life in the past or the future, but to enjoy the moment that we're in, where we can learn to live intentionally, appreciating what we have around us, holding what we have gently, not trying to grasp onto or cling on to anything out of a fear of losing it, but to enjoy what we have for the time that we have it. And we can only do this through appreciation and gratitude.
Speaker 1:Something my teacher taught me many years ago is that there is nothing in this world that we own or that we can claim possession on as our own, because everything we have everything we had or everything we're going to have is either rented out to us or on loan to us. An example would be that house or that car that you have. Yes, we pay money for it, but that doesn't mean that when we are no longer needing it, it stops existing because it'll go to someone else who will also pay money for it. And the same goes for things that we have in our possession, that we have for a time, for a season, whether that season is for a minute or our entire life. They don't stop existing when we no longer need them. They will go to other people who are also going to use them on loan. And gratitude is born out of a sense of loss.
Speaker 1:So an example I often use in my workshops is say, for instance, you've lost your phone, or your phone got broken and you can't find it, or it's in the repair shop to get fixed, and a month goes by by the time you get it back. You're going to feel grateful for it as if you've just bought it all over again. So it's essentially going to be what it feels like to get a new phone again the same situation as if your car needs to go in and get repaired and you go without a car for a month Inconvenient and frustrating Absolutely. But when you get it back it's going to feel like buying the car again for the first time. But you don't have to physically go without something or lose something in order to feel gratitude. You can just imagine what it would be like without this person, without this thing, which then brings up within you the feeling of gratitude, but you're not grasping onto it for fear of loss, which is what often people will do in relationships. You're enjoying the moment you're in and you're being grateful for what you have, without the hunger of needing any more.
Speaker 1:And the last factor of living a slow life is learning to live within our own means and learning to live at our own pace. This also means learning to live within our own means and learning to live at our own pace. This also means learning to live within our financial means. This is critical for living, simply because one of our strongest stress points is financial stress or living beyond our means. So learning to live simply means spending less than we earn, investing in our experiences not necessarily things and as much as possible avoiding accumulating things beyond our financial means.
Speaker 1:And living a slow-paced life doesn't mean living in slow motion. It means saying no to commitments that don't align with your values, as a way to protect our time and our energy. And understanding your pace is knowing the ratio between anything that feels like effort and this can be interpreted as stress, whether it's good or bad stress and quiet and rest, or even peace. This ratio between effort and rest will look different for me, as it will for you. So we've talked about this before, but as an introvert, I'm quite happy living 60% of my time in solitude, in nature, doing things on my own, at my own pace, and the rest of the time around things that require effort. So this could be learning something, this could be the workshops that I run, but I know my ratio, and living simply means understanding what your ratio is.
Speaker 1:So there are some ideas about how to live simply, but the priority is learning to simplify, to slow down, to declutter mental, physical and emotional stuff, so we can make more time for the things that are truly important to us. We can make more time for the things that are truly important to us. So that's all I've got for this episode. Thank you for joining me today and I hope that you've got something useful from this discussion, and if you have any questions you would like us to discuss on future episodes, then please email me at rethinkingmentalwellbeing at gmailcom. I'd love to hear from you. So until then, go well, go in peace, have a great week and we'll see you next time. Bye.