Mindfulness - take care of yourself, take care of your home

Sure there will be a lot of noise over the air waves from now until the people of each nation realize that power is the ability to govern for the greater good.

In Thich Nhat Hanh's book The Art of Power he lays out five spiritual powers — this power from within is a discipline to release ourselves from oppressive  systems since the beginning of history.

They are:

1. The Power of Faith
2. The Power of Diligence
3. The Power of Mindfulness
4. The Power of Concentration
5. The Power of Insight

I have Faith that I am capable of living with integrity and have a right to be here. I don't have to be right all the time, or good all the time - I have the capacity to think about and learn from my mistakes and to observe the integrity of others.

Hanh says there are four aspects of Diligence:- (1) don't give negative emotions a chance to manifest in your mind; (2) calm and replace negative seeds (anger, hate, fear, despair) in your conscious mind with positive ones; (3) always invite good seeds to manifest (love, forgiveness, joy, peace, happiness); (4) try to keep a good mental formation such as compassion, joy, peace, by nurturing it.

"Mindfulness is the energy of being aware of what is happening in the present moment. When we have the energy of mindfulness in us, we are fully present, we are fully alive, and we live deeply every moment of our daily life."

The power of Concentration can lead to a breakthrough, to see deeply into the object of your focus. If we are suffering some ill-health, say a back ache, we can concentrate on that pain and perhaps link it to an emotional event that we have brushed aside.

The power of Insight "is a sword that cuts painlessly through all kinds of suffering, including fear, despair, anger, and discrimination." Hanh goes on to say that an insight is more than a notion and his key teaching is the insight of impermanence.