Hi Everyone 👋 We tend to file faith under religion. Something you have or you don't, and if you don't, that's the end of the conversation. But look at your day. You got in a car or on a bus this morning trusting a stranger to drive sensibly. You took a pill because someone told you it works and you never checked the chemistry. You said you'd meet someone at 7 and believed they'd turn up. None of that is proof. All of it is trust. So the honest question isn't whether you have faith. It's what you've put it in. Some people put it in God, or in the Buddha's teaching, or in something they can't name but can feel. Some put it in nature, that the seasons will keep turning, that a walk will sort their head out. Some put it in loving kindness, the idea that being decent to people is worth it even when it comes back at you badly. And yes, some people put it in the flat earth society, or in a politician, or in the belief that everyone is out to get them. Faith doesn't care whether it's sensible. It's what you act on before you have proof. That's the part worth sitting with. Faith isn't the opposite of doubt. It's what you do while the doubt is still there. In Buddhism there's a word, saddhā. It gets translated as faith, but it's closer to confidence, the kind of trust that grows from testing something yourself. The Buddha was fairly blunt about this. In the Kalama Sutta, he tells people not to accept things just because they're tradition, or because a teacher said so, or because it's in a book, or because it sounds right. Try it. See what happens. Then decide. Which means Buddhist faith isn't belief in the teeth of the evidence. It's what's left after you've checked. You practice kindness for a while and notice your life gets less tangled. That noticing is where the faith comes from, not the other way round. Here's what I'd ask you to look at today. When life gets hard- not mildly annoying, properly hard- what do you fall back on? What do you actually trust to hold you? Because whatever that is, that's your faith, whether you'd call it that or not. And it's worth knowing, because a faith you've never examined will let you down quietly, and you won't even notice it happened.

Hi Everyone 👋 Wired and Tired You're exhausted all day. Then eleven o'clock comes, and you're wide awake, buzzing, mind going, and you think, right, I'll use this; I'll get something done. Two in the morning, still going. The next day you're a ghost. There's a stage of tiredness past ordinary tiredness where you stop being able to rest. That's the one to watch for. Not the tired where you sleep. The tired where you can't. Dry mouth in the night. Waking with your heart going. A little sweat at the back of the neck. Hands and feet that are hot but you feel cold. Emotions right on the surface and no warning. Crying in the car, then fine in the meeting, then crying again. Feeling everything and nothing within the same hour. Traditional Chinese Medicine calls this Yin deficiency, and it's specific about it. Yin is the cooling, moistening, resting half of you. The water in the radiator. Burn the candle at both ends long enough and Yin goes first, while the Yang, the fire, keeps blazing with nothing under it. Heart and Kidney, they'd say. The fire doesn't get cooled, and the Shen, the spirit that lives in the Heart, can't settle because there's no quiet for it to sit in. Zhuangzi, who was a major Daoist philosopher in the 4th century, told a story about a man who was frightened of his own shadow and hated his own footprints. So he ran. He ran as fast as he could to get away from them, and of course the faster he ran the more footprints he left, and the shadow kept up with him without any effort at all. He ran until his strength gave out and he died. Zhuangzi's comment is dry, he didn't know that if he'd simply gone and sat in the shade, both the shadow and the footprints would have disappeared. You cannot outrun exhaustion. It's attached to you. It comes with you. So, today, rest before you need it. Ten minutes at three in the afternoon, sitting down, doing nothing, no phone. Not earned. Not after the list. Before. You're not rewarding yourself; you're putting water back in the radiator.

Hi Everyone 👋 The Food It's nine at night. You've been going since six am. There's nothing in, and the shop is a walk, and the thing you're going to eat instead takes four minutes and comes in a box. Or it's the meal deal, eaten at the desk, at the screen, standing up, in eight minutes, and you couldn't tell me afterwards what it was. I want to be careful here because there's a lot of nonsense talked about food by people who've never had to choose between dinner and the bus. Cheap food that fits a bad day isn't a moral failing. It's arithmetic. But there's a cost, and the cost isn't the one the magazines go on about. Watch for it. Bloating that comes on after eating and lasts. Brain fog at two in the afternoon. Heavy limbs. Loose stools, or the opposite. Sugar cravings at night, hard ones. No appetite in the morning at all. A coated tongue when you wake up. Feeling worse after eating, which is the one that should make you stop and think, because eating is supposed to help. Traditional Chinese Medicine is very plain about this. The Spleen and Stomach, they say, are the cooking pot. They want warm, they want cooked, they want regular, they want you sitting down. They don't want cold, raw, or a sandwich eaten at speed while reading emails. Eating while distracted is not eating. The Spleen can't do its job while your attention is somewhere else. That's why you can eat a full meal at the desk and feel hungry an hour later. There's a small line in the Analects. Confucius, in ordinary life, "did not speak at meals." That's it. That's the whole observation. Eating was eating. He wasn't conducting three conversations and a strategy session at the same time. So today..... One warm cooked meal, sitting down, no screen. Not a regime. One meal. If money's tight, which I know is for so many these days, tinned tomatoes, frozen veg, an egg, a stock cube, rice or noodles. That's a warm meal for about a pound, and it takes eight minutes. And chew it, which sounds patronising until you notice you don't.

Hi Everyone 👋 Here we are on day 2 of how traditional chinese medicine connects to our daily life. The Money There's a particular kind of tiredness that comes from checking your balance. You know it before the app has loaded. You hold your breath slightly at the till. You've got a rough figure in your head and a much worse figure underneath it that you don't look at. I grew up with no money. Not "we had to budget" no money. Not much food in the cupboard, no heating in the house, hot water boiled on the stove top, no way of asking anyone for help because everyone around us was in the same state. So I know what it does to the body. It sits low down, in the gut and the lower back, and it hums. Watch for the signs..... checking the balance several times a day, as though the number might have changed out of sympathy. Shame at the checkout. Hiding it from people. Lower back ache. Cold hands and feet. A grip in the belly that never quite releases. Being generous when you can't afford to be, because you can't bear to be seen as the one who can't. The old medicine puts fear in the Kidneys. And the Kidneys are the deep reserves, the savings account of the body, the thing you were born with and slowly spend. Chronic fear goes straight there. That's why long-term money stress makes you feel old. Aching back, weak knees, tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. The Spleen worries, the Kidneys fear, and between them they use up everything you've got. The Greeks had a story about the Danaides. Fifty sisters, punished in the underworld by being set to fill a jar with holes in it. They pour water in. It runs out. They fetch more. Forever. That's the feeling. It isn't only that there's not enough. It's that the effort of trying to make there be enough never stops. So here's the thing, and it's small, and it won't pay your rent. Fear multiplies in the dark. One true number, written down, once. Not to fix it. Just so it's a number and not a monster. Then leave it alone for the day.

Hi Everyone, please help me welcome @Zia Jehan to our wonderful community 🥳