The Miracle of Observation 

In late 2019, I started my wellness journey with the goal to find myself and if I could, help others that were as lost as I was. In 2020, after tasting some of the results of the changes I had made in my life, I started working on my first book, the Self and Meditation that was inspired by conversations I had with people that loved and cared for my well-being and I theirs. Among those were countless conversations with my family about wellness and the importance of meditation supplemented by spiritual practice. I am a Christian and it was interesting challenging mindsets that had coalesced over time forming biases about my self and the nature of God. Fast forward to 2022, as we close the year, I am thankful for so many things, top of the list being my wellness journey and the path to finding self. I thought I’d share some useful habits for whoever needs to hear this;

If you’ve read this far, and I have your attention, take a moment to close your eyes and breathe in through the nose deeply and out your mouth slowly as you recite in your mind- I breathe in peace and calmness, I exhale any stress and negativity- do this 3 times before you read on;

If you’ve followed the exercise in 1 above, you should be feeling lighter; that is how powerful your breath is. On pages 13-14 of, The Self & Meditation, I write that by simply paying attention, observing every coming in and going out, you exercise control. In observing your breath, you still the mind and find rest in the moment. Those few seconds of rest can grow to minutes, hours and eventually days, months and even years of reprieve from mind chatter. Habits are coalesced repeated actions that operate from your subconscious; although you’ve been breathing since you took your first breath, intentional repeated breathing is a habit you’ll be thankful you picked up when things get tough (which they do);

Supplement meditation with mindfulness. On page 46 of The Self & Meditation, I quote Takuan Soho, author of the Unfettered Mind who writes that to achieve stillness, one must investigate thoroughly, both coming and going.Dear friend, when you Recognise, Accept, Investigate, Non-identify (RAIN) every emotion and feeling arising inside of you, the result is the receipt of wisdom without a teacher. Psalm 46:10 says, Be still, and know that I am God. Mindfulness and meditation are tools God has given to you to help you suffer less.

Be kind to yourself, love yourself. If you blame yourself for things that have already happened, or if you have a negative view of your self, you nurture negative emotions in your interactions with others, you will transfer your hurt to those around you, including those you love. When you live and love with equanimity, you make friends
with difficult emotions and in offering them compassion, you will heal yourself. Kindness with self also requires planting positive seeds in yourself. These are seeds of love, contentment, kindness, joy, peace, tolerance, empathy and patience. When you search your actions and thoughts today and the last few days, are these virtues reflected in relation to yourself and others ? If they’re not, that is because you’re not intentional about planting these seeds in you. What comes out of you (fruits) is a reflection of the seeds you plant.

Practice right thinking. Right thinking requires you to see the correlation between your thoughts and the perceptions they form. Your brain is constantly rearranging world views and your actions will result from your brain processing information and comparing it to previous similar knowledge. This linking of information helps you to understand what is happening but also forms perceptions that are often deceptive. Perceptions are based on memory which is susceptible to forgetfulness or misinterpretation. So right thinking
asks you to confront and question your perceptions, am I sure that this happened ? am I sure i am reacting the right way?

Read your Bible and pray everyday. Meditation supplemented by spiritual practice will ground you and give you a firmness that can weather any storm. One of my teachers, Meister Eckhart says, that it is certain that when you take some holy person, some great person whom you revere, some saint whom you know to be perfectly non attached and meditate on that heart, it will calm the mind. For me, this is Jesus Christ & the Buddha. Whenever I’m feeling some typa’way (sic) and I read scripture or a lesson from the Bible or from a Buddhist teacher, I am reminded of Christ’s love, the universality of God who created the universe and I don’t feel alone; this comforts me and gives me hope. No one religion has a monopoly over God and it is important that you see religion as a philosophy with faith as its substance. The Buddha often taught his students, “my teaching is like pointing my finger at the moon. Do not mistake my finger for the moon.” Recently, I enjoyed reading Acts 17:16-31 ESV, https://bible.com/bible/59/act.17.16-31.ESV where Paul reminds stoic philosophers that the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man. When you practice mindfulness grounded by religion and seek insight and guidance from scripture, you discover self love and find God. Love and God are one. You will also be more tolerant of other religions/faiths and you start to lead with love rather than fear. Love will not flourish in the midst of fear. To love God as God loves you is to love without discrimination. I hasten to caution, nibbling at many religions without grounding yourself will only confuse you more if you don’t have grounding/foundation. I found that a solid foundation in Christianity allowed me to read from other faiths without losing my way down a rabbit hole of religious practices and habits. Cultivate a heart that seeks God and His love. When you step beyond intellect and reasoning, you’ve made the step to God.

Clean gut = clean health. Eat well, love well and exercise. Dr. Alejandro Junger in his book, Clean Gut explains that the body has two brains, the one in the head and the gut. The one in the head fires neurons as electricity whenever you have a thought, the one in the gut fires electrical impulses when you’re feeling or when you’re emotional or have intuition. The brain is our intellectual centre, the gut is our spiritual and emotional GPS (acronym for global positioning system). I noticed long ago that how I felt had a correlation with my stomach. Before I was intentional about what I put into my stomach, I was sick all the time, I was bloated and unhappy, I couldn’t sleep well, I was a mess, dependent on treatments but without a cure. Is this you ? Have you noticed that. when you have indigestion, you also sleep badly ? We are what we eat. Hippocrates said, ‘Death lurks in the intestines’ and this sadly will be true for most of us. Thankfully, your gut can heal, you can heal. There’s a lot of information out there on gut health if you are motivated to heal yourself. If others can, why not you?

Put in the work. If you’re tired of where you are, if you yearn for better, you have to put in the work. On page 45 of The Self & Meditation, I quote Dr Nicole LePera who in her book, How to Do the Work; Recognise your patterns, Heal from the Past and Create Yourself, talks about the mind body connection and how you can either use your mind or body to get you well. She calls these, top-bottom and bottom-top processes. If you’re mind centric like I am, use your mind to lead your body, convince yourself of the importance of healthy living and your body will have a reason to follow. If you’re body centric and exercise and physical exertion come easy to you, work with that. Use your body to declutter and heal your mind.

In 2019 when I started my wellness journey, I was overweight- close to 95 kgs, I cared more for my work than I did for my self (my body, my mind, my spirit), I ate poorly and felt bloated most of the time, I was sickly, depressed but didn’t know it. I lived and thrived in delusion, the facade of keeping up appearances. I did not have the will to move beyond my suffering even when I was presented with information that could have helped me live better. How could I see beyond my suffering when that life was all I had known ? When that life was all those closest to me knew, we were birds of a feather flocking together, rolling stones gathering moss filled unhealthy habits. I accepted what I understood to be the human condition. It took me almost losing my life to discover that I was the steward of my choices. Get better or die, start to live or just exist. I made the choice to try and get better. Buddhist philosophy showed me that ultimately happiness came down to choosing between the discomfort of being aware of my mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them- (adapted from quote by Yongey Mingyur Riponche). I started this journey because I asked myself how much worse could meditation, intentional living/eating and all these tools presented to me make the human condition worse ? What about you ? Will trying what I’ve proposed here make your life worse ?

It has been a few years since I started what I call the work. Honestly, it has been and in many areas still is hard work to practice healthy habits. Thankfully, I have tasted the results (give me that dopamine hit any day over anxiety) and I know that the work leads to growth and so I take it day by day as I cultivate healthy habits such as daily meditation, daily exercise, mindfulness, intentional smiling and laughing, hiking and walking (including barefoot which reduces body inflammation), loving, intentional friendship, playing, praying, breathing and generally practicing habits and activities that leave me with sustainable joy rather than a shot of happiness. If I may ask of you as I ask of myself everyday, lead with love by planting positive seeds in yourself and in those you love, embrace equanimity when you’re too caught up in lif(e)ying and fail to lead with love and plant positive seeds-that is the work. Learn with beginner’s mind, read and entertain yourself with films and material that help you to know self and exercise control over craving- for it is known that craving is the root of suffering, question your reality and see your perceptions for what they are, perceptions (constantly ask yourself, am I sure of my perceptions ?). Love yourself-take care of yourself by watching what you feed your body and mind, care for yourself and resultantly like many before you, wait to enjoy the freedom and feeling of health in body, mind and spirit. See time as a friend, time heals all, comforts all, reveals all. It is well with my soul as it will be with yours. By the way, don’t be fooled into thinking that these life changes will mean you live and walk on clouds, no ! We are still in this our Uganda! We are suffering ! The work is mostly about attitude. It was the stoic philosopher Epictetus who said, “sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and yet happy, in disgrace and happy”.

So, I end with a little motivation-because of the work, as I write this, I’m within my BMI range (I’ve lost over 18 Kgs, weight loss itself not being the focus but rather the health & wellbeing that comes with it) and my work is to continue to cultivate these habits
that have changed me for the better. These changes did not happen overnight. They took time, in my case-years and I’m aware they can also be eroded easier than I picked them up. Neuroplasticity helped me form new habits but it can also easily lead me to fall back into familiar unhealthy patterns. Being aware of this has led me to be intentional about finding and nurturing relationships with others like me, people like the community at Payal’s yoga studio, Karuna & the retreats she organizes, people like my hiking community and my friends and family to whom I constantly sing to about mindfulness meditation, learning to embrace difficult emotions and intentional living, I chose to be the piper in their story just like I’m choosing to be in yours. I wrote the self and meditation for you, dear one. Should you choose to embark on this journey, It will do you good to find people who make it easier for you to stick to the positive habits you’ll pick up. Do the people close to you nurture your positive habits ? Do they encourage you to live better and most importantly, to live or do they nurture your delusions ? As they say, the journey of 1000 miles begins with 1 step, take your first step towards healing and liberating yourself. So, I speak to you who has read . It is possible to get better, it is possible to suffer less, happiness is not something you should pursue but rather something you just need a change of perspective to experience, you don’t find happiness, you become happy. Peace is always with you, peace is in every step you take, if you choose to walk in it. In one of my most impactful movies, The Matrix, Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is presented with a choice by Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) when he offers him two pills. Neo can take the blue pill and return to the matrix, a dream world that Neo has known all his life as reality, but which is in fact a shared hallucination controlled by robots, a prison for the mind. Or he can take the red pill and wake up, seeing the world for what it truly is. I present you with the same choice and end with what Morpheus says to Neo,

“I can only show you the door, you’re the one that has to walk through it”.

-End-

You can purchase a copy on Mahiri https://mahiribooks.com/products/the-self-meditation-by-omuteizi-kwasi?_pos=1&_sid=cd2fe67b5&_ss=r , Aristoc Bookstores, Karuna Yoga Studio, Entebbe Airport Duty Free, Kardamom & Koffee and also at the Sankara Public Library. I’d love to discuss the book with you; if you think you’d enjoy a book reading/discussion, let me know through my socials. Omuteizi Kwasi is a pseudonym by Kenneth Muhangi.