Ecotrain QOTW "Bearing in mind the health and state of our western culture and society today, do you think we have too much freedom?

My first @ecotrain Question of the Week

I believe that we are not evolved enough, not educated enough, to deal with the excesses and freedoms of Western society. We are not ready, and not well equipped to cope with them, causing a whole mess of crap like addiction, gluttony and greed. We are not creating balanced people. Generally speaking, people are not taught values that are conducive to good health and mental state.

People are trying to fill holes in their soul, which they don’t even realise they have. We try to fill these holes with material goods, with drugs, with food, with money. But, how can you fix something that you don’t know is broken? We end up wandering around blind, groping around in the dark. I know that I was for a significant period of my life.

I didn’t even realise I was so unhappy, before I came across meditation and Yoga. My mind was like a treadmill that I had never got off of. It just went round and round. When I started to have gaps in between the thoughts and the noise, it was incredible: what space! I didn’t think such space was even possible.

We are not taught to look at our thoughts or our attitudes, as possible causes of the shitty way we feel. We look outside ourselves again, and blame a whole host of other things for our unhappiness. We blame our jobs, our spouses, our bodies for our unhappiness before we ever take a good look inside.

Mindfulness and meditation from an early age, in schools, I think could help tremendously. We could shift the focus in schools from taking and passing exams, to preparing young minds for the future, for adult life and that in entails, and nurturing their passions.

People should always be free to fuck up their own lives (as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else), part of having freedom is being able to do that in your own spectacular fashion. We can only provide, along side that freedom, some education on how to live in this modern world.

Visit https://www.offgridyoga.com for more information about out off-grid Yoga retreat.