"If you want to garden, you have to bend down and touch the soil. Gardening is a practice. Not an idea."- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: There is a difference between understanding something intellectually and the practice of doing it.
"It has become a habit to reach for the phone or computer and immerse ourselves in another world. We do it to survive. But we want to do more than just survive. We want to live."- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living
Insight: We tend to optimise for the wrong things - busyness, nonstop information, and relevance.
Insight: Unrelenting distraction in the digital world is leaving people unfulfilled.
"We must distinguish happiness from excitement... Many people think of excitement as happiness. They are thinking of something, or expecting something that they consider to be happiness, and for them, that is already happiness. But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace."- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Being fully in the moment time can feel like it is slowing down, and your world expands.
Insight: Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that we are all like a wave in water - we can tend to get caught up in the rise and fall with the tide, but we can forget what we actually are - water.
Insight: We are often focused on movement of the wave - optimisation, productivity, efficiency - and if we forget where we come from, the water, we face loneliness and suffering. Without water a wave is nothing.
Insight:Social connections and community are important to our physical and mental health.
"Habit energy is stronger than we are... it is pushing us all the time."- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Developing new habits or stopping old ones is difficult.
Insight: We move with routine or social inertia that shapes much of our everyday activities.
Insight: Fighting against "habit energy" can be exhausting.
Principle: Use habit energy to shift toward positive actions - remove obstacles that get in your way.
Principle: Reflect on common behaviours, then set up conditions conducive to the behaviours that you want.