THE CREATIVE BUDDHIST NEWSLETTER

Dear Subscriber First Name,

How would it be to apply the rule of quality over quantity to every area of your life? 

I didn’t make any new year’s resolutions, just getting through January in Stockholm takes all my resolve. Nor did I have a ‘guiding word of the year’. It’s a thing, apparently. But while I was in the gym, an idea came to me. How would it be to live a life of quality over quantity? 

I’d not had breakfast, and I was thinking about what I might have for lunch. I’ve been fasting most days for a couple of years, just eating lunch and dinner. What I’ve noticed is, the more I enjoy my food, the easier it is to go without food. I think it is the secret of renunciation for hedonists! 

I grew up in a foodie family. My mum would say, “Some people eat to live, but we live to eat!” Food is such a source of pleasure, growing it, preparing it and sharing it. 

So you might think, if you love food so much, why just two meals a day? Why not three, plus snacks? Well, a couple of years ago, I saw a pic of me on my wife’s phone. It was Christmas, and I looked like a little barrel. I should have kept the photo, but of course I made her delete it! Being a foodie, I didn’t want to diet or watch what I ate. It would take the pleasure out of eating. So I tried fasting. It’s really worked for me. I’m back in the jeans I bought 20 years ago. 

I’ve noticed recently that if I go to the trouble of making food I really enjoy, then the times when I’m not eating are much easier. Some of it is to do with nutrition. If I eat more fats and proteins, I’m more physically satisfied. But it’s also to do with a sensory satisfaction. The more I enjoy, the more it satisfies. 

Fasting has become a way of combining my epicurean nature with my equal and opposite desire to practice simplicity and renunciation! 

Fasting feels like a secret that no one had told me. How to lose weight easily, while eating the food you love and saving yourself time and money. 

We live in a world of excess. We are undernourished and overfed. But not just with food. What about media? How much do we take in and how satisfying is it? In my work, could I work fewer hours but work with more of a relaxed and focused attention? 

What would it mean to apply the rule of quality over quantity in your life?

February’s Dharma Bundle 

Dharma Vibes:
finding the Dharma in modern culture

Let’s bring a little life and light to February by dwelling on the art and culture we truly love and seeing if we can find the Dharma there. Here’s what you’ll find in February’s bundle;

• Article: Finding Dharma in modern culture

• Video or audio: What does it mean for the Dharma to be everywhere?

• Video: Dharma vibes: Dharma in art, photography, film and TV

• Spotify playlist: Dharma vibes

• Creative Assignment: “I don't know much about art, but I know what I like” - honouring your own affinities with art

• Video: Zoom workshop recording.

Live Workshop
Finding Dharma in the art and culture we truly love.

📅 Saturday, 8th February
⏰ 4:00–5:30 PM (GMT)

The Dharma Bundle is a ‘bundle’ of dharma resources, thoughtfully made and beautifully packaged. Short, illustrated Dharma videos and audio talks. Audio meditations and reflections. Creative assignments. Zoom meetups. Find out more here.

On my radar this week

Book - The Work of Art:
The Work of Art by Adam Moss has been on my wishlist for a while and a dear friend just bought it for me. It’s one of those too heavy to hold up in bed books. In each chapter, we meet an artist who shares with us their work process for a single piece of art, including notes and sketches. It’s subtitled ‘How something comes from nothing’ and you realise how rare it is to get such a detailed look behind the curtain at how art gets made.

Movie - The Last Waltz:
I rarely feel like the youngest person in the room these days! So I loved being in a cinema full of baby boomers watching ‘The Band’s’ last ever concert. The Last Waltz is made in 1978 by Martin Scorsese, and you don’t just feel you are at the concert, but that you are on the stage. Playing alongside them are Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan and lots more. The concert is inter-cut with funny little interview snippets. Watching it, you really are taken back to another era, so much hairier than this one! I had a smile on my face throughout.

TV - Olive Kitteridge:
One of you dear newsletter readers recommended this and I can’t remember who, but thank you. Olive Kitteridge is a drama full of people who are difficult to like. The brief series is rather depressing and quite brilliant. Frances McDormand plays Olive, and she is such a complex character, right the way through you just don’t know how you feel about her. Bill Murray turns up late and brings some warmth. It’s worth your time.

Podcast / Book - Change your diet, change your mind:
I came across Dr Georgia Ede on the Diary of a CEO podcast and bought her book Change your diet, change your mind. Her specialism is metabolic psychiatry, which, like nutritional psychiatry, is a whole new field. It’s looking at how what we eat affects our mental and emotional states. The brain, after all, is a part of the body! It makes you wonder how much of the mental health crisis we seem to be in is down to changes in our food culture.

Instagram - Louise Mulvey of Kava counselling
I adore Louise’s micro counselling sessions on Instagram! They are so sensible and yet often make me laugh. She looks like she’s about to burst out laughing herself most of the time. Like this one on how when there’s a gap in our communication with someone, we can fill that gap with all kinds of disaster scenarios. That’s me. I do that. I bet you’ll recognise yourself in everything she talks about. Connect on Instagram and get yourself the strictest, kindest, funniest agony aunt out there!

Diary extracts:

Sound is invisible

“Cinema is sound and picture both—50/50 really,” David Lynch once said. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t think this way.”

Lynch once described sound as "invisible" in movies, and of course sound is invisible. But what he meant is that while its impact on us is enormous, it often goes unnoticed.

I rarely watch horror or scary movies, but I do watch Gogglebox (the show where people watch TV), and sometimes, they're watching something terrifying. When I’m alone and it hits the scary part, I just turn the volume off—and suddenly, it’s not scary anymore. It’s amazing how much of that fear is tied to the music and sound. 70% of it, maybe. It’s probably similar with drama, suspense, sadness, and even love. As Lynch says, it’s a 50/50 balance between what we see and what we hear.

But what about real life? I think sound can be invisible there, too. When you first learn to meditate, you’re often instructed to close your eyes and just listen to whatever’s happening around you. Listening, in itself, can be a form of meditation. Our sense of sight is so dominant that sound often fades into the background. But once we pay attention, we realise we’re surrounded by an entire soundscape—whether we're on the bus, waiting at the doctor’s office, or just sitting quietly.

Listening is a very different experience from looking. When we look, we’re typically looking at something. It seems like we are directing our attention, controlling the moment. But listening feels different. We are listening for something. Listening is like waiting, more open—it’s about receiving. Listening requires us to be receptive, it’s even a metaphor for receptivity. We might say, I need to really listen to myself. It doesn’t mean I need to listen to myself literally, to my stomach gurgling. It means I need to be receptive to what I’m feeling. 

So, when you need to tune into your own receptivity, use listening as a micro meditation. Let the sounds around you draw you into the present moment, and just listen.

A quote I’m thinking about:

"Certain things are just so beautiful to me, and I don’t know why. Certain things make so much sense, and it’s hard to explain."

- David Lynch