Hi everyone 👋 A big thank you to everyone who reached out to me in the last couple of days re my health 🙏❤️. I was back in hospital again yesterday for the second day of treatment this week. The treatment was painful, + they took a biopsy from my chest and gave me stitches. Thanks to the care and the anaesthetic, it was manageable, and a big thank you to a dear local friend who took me for a beer afterwards to help calm my mind before going home. Another day, another reason to be thankful and grateful ❤️ With Love ❤️ Always Mark

happy Birthday @Christopher Whitehead-Baines , one of our community members and host of his own amazing communities on Skool 🥳 Happy Birthday, my friend, I hope you have a wonderful day of celebration 🙏

What's been hardest this week? Sleep / Energy / Focus / Mood Vote and I'll ask you about it.

Gaslighting That never happened You're imagining things Why are you so sensitive If these sound familiar you might be experiencing gaslighting . You remember the conversation you know what you saw you know what they said but they deny it. They calmly and confidently look at you with eyes that say are you OK? You start questioning yourself. Did I really hear that? Maybe I just misunderstood. That's exactly what they want. Gaslighting isn't just lying. It's getting you to wonder whether you can even recognize lies anymore. The gaslighters goal is to make you feel dependent on them for your sense of reality.

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.