Finding Peace In ChaosNo matter where you live, the world has become a very loud place. Whether it is the drawl of city life, with vehicles drowning out all other noise until it is impossible to hear the voice in your own head; or the white noise from constant contradictive opinions about current affairs spoken more at you than to you in everyday conversations. Add the pressures of work, studies, and social life on top; or even the basics of life; getting enough sleep, eating well, and being all round ‘healthy’; life is a lot. And as a young adult trying to find his way in the world, struggling emotionally as much as everyone else, I think it is time to start actively prioritising mental health and spiritual health.I believe we need to stop seeing spirituality as joining a religion or a cult; and more about your own moral compass to help you navigate the world and making conscious, everyday decisions.
Of course, we have all heard lots about mindfulness as a new trend. But practising it does not mean having to sit for hours trying to meditate to a voice-over app. Many people experience mindfulness in their hobbies and do not notice because it either has not been pointed out to them, or because it has been called a different name. Spirituality or mindfulness did not come very easy to me at first but to cut a long story short, it was Muay Thai that opened the door to feeling connected to something bigger than myself. Throughout the years of training various martial arts, I never resonated with anything so well than with Thai boxing and I believe it was due to the spiritual side of the sport that I so desperately needed in everyday life. I fell in love with the sport instantly, throwing myself into the hours upon hours of training, fight shows in market halls and nightclubs and pretty much any other place the promoters could put a ring in. And as I began to fight regularly on local and national shows, I truly learnt peace. During the chaos of a round, with the crowd shouting and screaming, for me or against me, there was a quiet inside myself. Before I understood what this was, the only way to describe it to my family was ‘being in the zone’. Now I have experienced this feeling in other aspects of my life, I understand that it is ‘being present’. To be completely in the moment as they happen. Of course, in the fight I had to be, there were consequences if I was not present. It took several years to experience ‘being present’ in another situation, and in that time Thai boxing had become an integral part of my life and identity. It helped shape who I wanted to be by exposing me to different role models and life ethos from a different culture. Of course, in the fight I had to be, there were consequences if I was It took several years to experience ‘being present’ in another situation, and in that time Thai boxing had become an integral part of my life and identity. It helped shape who I wanted to be by exposing me to different role models and life ethos from a different culture. I was lucky enough to be able to move to Sydney in 2018 and had to put Thai boxing on the back burner for a few years. However, this opened a new door to surfing. Another sport where I could only control my actions, how I responded to the situation. In this instance, the situation happened to be the ocean, and waves, and whatever they decided they wanted to do on that day. Some days they were wild, heavy, and thick waves trying to swallow me whole just to spit me back towards the beach, daring me to try and catch another; other days they were gentle and rolling, allowing me to try different things and feel like I’m cruising with the most beautiful style in existence. The biggest thing I learnt was to be there, in the moment, as it happened. Be present. I noticed the similarity between Muay Thai and surfing pretty early on. They both have their individual cultures, influenced by different things, but to me they both teach a moral compass. They both teach (indirectly and directly, depending on aspect of the sport) compassion for people, and for the planet. And they both demand mindfulness. Regardless of whether you want to be the best in the world or just a casual surfer, or if you fight for the love of it, if you aren’t there when its happening to respond and act/react, you’ll never be good. Or even worse, you’ll never understand why you fail. Mindfulness and spirituality doesn’t need to be a cult or religion. It can be about resonating with your reasons why you act the way you do in life. How you impact the world and people around you. Everyone thinks they’re a good person, but do you make conscious decisions to follow your moral compass, and not act based on expectations? It’s about being in the moment, in the zone, being present in as much of life as you can. My advice for a starting point is your favourite hobby. The aspect where you cannot coast, the aspect where you need concentrate to keep improving, or as it was in my case, to stay above water. Start there, recognise that feeling and try to find it in other areas of life. You don’t need hours of meditating every day. You just need to find your starting point, as every book ever written on mindfulness says, it’s your own journey, you need to find your own starting point. Sometimes peace can be found buried in chaos.
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Photos used under Creative Commons from France1978, JarleR, Raed Mansour, Ruben Holthuijsen, L a r a -