Archive for the ‘Humour’ Category

By Seamus Anthony

If there is something you are truly shit scared of doing then I reckon that the best gift you can possibly give yourself is to step up to the plate and do it. But how do you get yourself off the couch and into the fire? Here’s a couple of personal examples of how I managed to confront my worst fears and come out reasonably unscathed.

Flying into the Face of Fear

Ok – so “feel the fear and do it anyway” has become one of many clichés in the Personal Development world, but nevertheless, like most clichés it contains a powerful truth. I have repeatedly found that if something is worth doing then it is probably going to be a bit scary. Why? Because it means stepping outside of your comfort zone and risking failure.

I can think of several occasions where this has been true for me: getting on an airplane to fly from Australia to Europe for example. Despite all the comforting statistics, my Taoist/Zen philosophies and my deep breathing techniques, I still hate flying and the longer the flight the more jittery I get. Nevertheless, it meant a hell of a lot to me to see Ireland, the country of my immediate ancestry and France, my wife’s country of birth, so I got on the damn plane and strapped myself in. The failure I was scared of was fairly remote (crashing) but like most fear, rational thinking had nothing to do with it. I was shitting bricks for months in advance and had repetitive nightmares (about falling out of a disintegrating airplane hull and down through the air to wind up bobbing about in a burning sea waiting to drown) in the weeks leading up to and during the trip away.

Well, suffice to say, the plane didn’t crash, although it did seem likely at one point. We were flying over the Himalayas and the old bird relentlessly shook and bumped like a bronco for three hours while lightning strikes outside briefly illuminated grim stewardesses faces, their South-East Asian complexions looking decidedly pale and disconcerted. Meanwhile my wife, who isn’t scared of flying – just of apparently imminent and genuine catastrophes – was sobbing uncontrollably into my lap about how she didn’t want to die this way.

That bit wasn’t so cool, but apart from that I enjoyed the trip immensely. If I hadn’t gone the pain of the real failure would have slowly have eaten away at me. Some opportunities you just have to take, not to do so would just lead to future dissatisfaction and remorse – and this would have been the real failure.

How To Puke and Shit at the Same Time

The airplane journey from Hell was a couple of years ago now, but just yesterday I confronted another fear and transmuted it into achievement: I stood up in front of a large crowd and delivered 5 minutes of my own original stand-up comedy material.

The reason I decided to do so was twofold. Firstly, I am a solo singer/songwriter and after many years of hit-and-miss banter between songs, ranging from brilliantly executed comedic genius to embarrassing, lame nervous mumbling, I have long desired to get my act together to the point where the bits between the songs are as reliably entertaining as the songs themselves. Secondly, I just love stand-up comedy so, so much and I have been writing my own material for a couple of years and secretly coveting this particular flavour of the limelight – after all, I know I am a funny guy, I just get too many laughs out of people to doubt this. So why not?

I’ll tell you why not … because cracking your mates up with spontaneous one-liners and standing up on stage delivering quality (funny) stand-up comedy are two very different things. I didn’t even need to have done any stand-up to know this is true – it’s just a well known fact. And making a mug of myself in front of rows of un-amused faces just scared the willies out of me.

So for years I avoided acting on it, but as part of my renewed commitment to my live music show this year, I decided it was time to bite the bullet. So I signed up (in a fit of bravado) online for the annual Raw comedy competition here in Melbourne, Australia. (Home of the International Melbourne Comedy Festival, Melbourne is an awesome place for live stand-up comedy.)

As the event drew closer I began to wonder if I should just call up and drop out. But no, I didn’t. Not because I am particularly brave but because the true extent of the fear I was going to have to face just wasn’t kicking in yet. Unlike long plane flights, I don’t get that nervous in advance of stage performing, mainly because I have been getting up and singing in public since I was eighteen (so that’s nearly half my life). But, I do get quite nervous the night before and all during the day of the event and I knew I would be super-nervous before this because of that fact that when it comes to stand-up comedy, quite obviously, I had no idea what I was doing. I was (and still am) a complete comedy noob.

Watching other people do something doesn’t prepare you for doing something. Reading “how to” books about doing something doesn’t prepare you for doing something. The only thing that prepares you is having a go and getting some experience under your belt.

Two weeks out from the event I realised that if I didn’t start preparing soon then I was a dead duck. But the trouble was I wasn’t sure where to rehearse. I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it at home on front of my wife and child, and I wasn’t about to shell out to hire a rehearsal room so I found a novel solution. I have been in the unenviable position lately of having to drive into the city between two and four times a week (for work). This drive takes me about an hour in the traffic, and everyday I see people apparently talking to themselves in other cars. I presume they are talking to people on speaker-phone into their cell phones. So, I figured, if I were to be practicing my stand-up routine aloud in the car to myself as I fly down the highway at 100 kilometers an hour, other drivers would probably assume I was just another tosser using his mobile phone on the go. Perfect!

After nearly two weeks, I had a routine that I hoped was good memorized, but I hadn’t yet bothered to time it. Often I would actually stop for a few seconds while I was running through it in order to concentrate on driving (it wouldn’t be very funny if I crashed while cracking funnies to myself now would it … or would it?). So I decided the time had come to go out to my bungalow office and put up with the fact that my wife and my neighbours could probably hear me and run through the routine with a stopwatch.

It came to 12 minutes! Whoops – the competition only gives each contestant 5 minutes each – and unlike the music business where people just tend to do little more than complain privately about stage-hogs who go over their allotted timeframe, in the comedy world you get a very blunt “fuck you” in the form of a red light in your face, followed shortly by loud music and a dead microphone should you fail to take the first hint!

So I went through the material and chopped it ruthlessly back to five minutes. Trouble was I had been over and over this stuff so much without any audience feedback that I had little idea if I was cutting out the funny stuff or not. I would just have to wait and see on that one.

The big day arrived, and although my wife (a classic ‘shrinking violet’) was apparently catatonic with fear, I felt ok. A little highly strung perhaps, but apart from a few truly non-Zen moments, I was cool … or so I thought.

It was an afternoon gig, and as I drove into town to face the music (although strangely not literally for once) I ran over my material one more time for good luck. Suddenly I was struck with a terror powerful enough to stop a nation. As far as I could tell, there was absolutely nothing funny about the useless drivel I had been rambling on about to myself over the past two weeks, and it would be best for everyone if I just turned the car around and went home and got really drunk by myself in the dirty gap under the house.

But no, fool that I am, I continued on. I walked into the venue and, as it was a first round heat of a competition, there were about twenty other wanna-be’s there for a briefing. I felt relieved that nothing the organisers had to say was disconcertingly new to me. Do your five minutes and get off basically. Not a problem. Then the doors opened and as I sat there waiting for my friend to rock up and hold my hand, it was just me and a bunch of gloomy, sweaty-palmed hopefuls sitting around, trying to avoid eye contact and sipping on beers a little too fast. It was very similar to the atmosphere in a plane shortly before take-off. Actually (minus actual screaming, I suppose) this was more like the atmosphere in a plane, shortly after take off, in which the captain has announced that he’s a lunatic terrorist and intends to fly the plane really fast into something really hard.

I truly didn’t care about winning the competition, I just wanted to do the gig, remember my lines, and hopefully get a few laughs, nevertheless the nerves began to play major havoc, especially when actual people began pouring through the doors in disturbingly large numbers. I had imagined a tiny crowd of about twenty other funny guys and their girlfriends, but obviously others in the line-up were not so shy of inviting their entire Facebook friends list along to the gig! Fuck!

Crunch Time…

(…”crunch” being the sound my balls make when they voluntarily compress together in an attempt to form a new black hole to suck me into in order to save me from hideous embarrassment and a life of bitter regret…)

Once I had watched about two contestants be really, really good (funny) and two others really, truly woeful, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to puke or shit or both at the same time.

Then my moment came, they called my name out over the pumping music, the applause still continuing from the act before and I was walking up the stairs to hit the stage.

How it went isn’t important, or maybe I am just saying that because it didn’t go fantastically well. Not that I can remember it very clearly. I don’t know about other performers, but my time on stage is usually all a vague blur to me as soon as it is over and the more nervous I am the more this is true.

I certainly wasn’t the funniest there on the day, not by a long shot, but I did get a few laughs here and there. That’ll do me for starters.

I didn’t forget my lines, but I went so fast due to extreme nervousness that I ended up reinstating some of the material I had axed. Really what I should have done (and I knew it at the time but just couldn’t seem to find the brakes) was slow down and give the jokes some air.

I discovered just how fucking horrible it is when you crack a joke and nobody laughs … and I felt the sweet, sweet relief when people did. I spontaneously dropped in a couple of ad-libbed moments, and to my surprise they got the biggest laughs. I don’t think this was because the jokes were better, but because they didn’t come out sounding scripted, which, to my detriment, the pre-prepared stuff did (but that’s the key to stand up, apparently, appearing spontaneous when delivering tightly scripted material).

Oh, and I didn’t get through to the next heat, but I really didn’t care about this. Why? Because I know for a fact that many of Australia’s most successful comedians didn’t make it through their heat in this long-running competition, and they made it anyway. How? Well, I don’t know but I can hazard a guess: persistence and hard-work. Or maybe they knew who to sleep with, I dunno…

I went home that night happy that I had faced my fear and rode it through. And I went home determined to do it again, and again, until I get better at it and can relax up there in the (incredibly bright) glare of the spotlight and just ramble away like I do when I am cracking up my mates.

So how do I suggest you face your fears and do it anyway? Well, just make the initial commitment and then get ready for the ride. Buy your plane ticket, book your spot on stage, or lock yourself in for whatever it is you want to do. Then, when the time comes, – - just do it.

…and you don’t even need a new pair of Nikes.

Photo by Fluzo

By Seamus Anthony

I like to meditate; I can do it for hours. It was a very liberating experience discovering meditation. Not because I became suddenly enlightened or anything unrealistic like that but simply because it gave me an excellent excuse to do what I already loved to do so well – NOTHING.

Because that’s what meditation is basically, it’s sitting around doing nothing.

Sweet. How hard is that?

Not very.

Not when you’ve had as much practice at it that I have. You see I come from a long line of very, very lazy dudes. When faced with the choice of doing something constructive or simply sitting down with a nice hot cup of tea, the people in my family always choose the couch and cuppa option.

But meditation gives you a great way to do much the same but come off as looking a lot more constructive than you really are.

It’s a bit like how governments reclassify unemployed people (by putting them into training programs) so that they can say the unemployment rate has gone down.

In the past, when my girlfriend walked in on me sitting on a milk crate staring at the plumbing attached to the outside of the back-wall of the house and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, I used to have no choice but to mumble “uhhh, nothing …sorry” and then rush off to do the dishes or whatever to make amends.

Nowadays I puff my chest up, act all insulted, “DO YOU MIND? I am MEDITATING and you are disturbing me! GO AWAY!”

So I reckon being a Zen master teaching meditation would have to a pretty cool job. I would be perfectly qualified for that job. And what a job! Power over people and a complete lack of any task whatsoever. I should start my own “consultancy” and charge fifty bucks a head per hour…

I can imagine it now… (insert Happy Days-style ‘daydream sequence’ wobbly-lines fade-out here)

“How to Sit on a Cushion and Do Nothing” By His Supreme Holiness Zen Yogi Master Seamus Shrinduparindada LazynaraTao

The Master walked in, said “Right you lot – just sit there and shut up!” and promptly did the same.

After ten minutes one of the students put up his hand to ask a question – “I just wanted to enquire as to my posture-”

“Posture?” squawked the Master “POSTURE? What the hell has posture got to do with anything?” He stood up, revealing a back that has been trained as a child to fit perfectly to the contours of any couch. He was a human banana; a walking text-book example of full-scale scoliosis.

“Look at me – I am a MASTER! Do you see me worrying about my posture?” Sitting down again, the Master scowled at the class wearing an expression of open contempt.

“Stop thinking about anything, including your posture – and just sit there and shut up.”

A hand shot up.

“But sir, I read that you should sit up and …”

“Shut UP! How do expect anyone to learn how to meditate if you keep TALKING?”

Ten minutes pass. Most of the students, beginners all, can’t stop wriggling and shuffling on their cushions.

“STOP SQUIRMING!”

Another ten minutes ticks past. One young lady has dropped off to sleep and is snoring ever so slightly. The Master silently rises and walks to where this young lady is having her lotus-nap. He pokes her gently with his foot and whispers:

“Excuse me love.” No response.

“Hel-loooo.” Still nothing.

“OI! MATEY! WAKE UP! YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING NOTHING – NOT SLEEPING!”

That did the trick.

After the group had practiced sitting still and doing nothing for about as long as it took for two people to quietly leave the room (one of them sobbing) and another one to run out screaming about “the voices, the voices”, the Master glances at his Rolex and realizes that his hour of hard work is nearly up.

“Stop meditating and listen up” he barks, “It’s question time.”

(And this is the truly awesome thing about being a self-professed Zen master – you don’t have to know anything because it is in your job description to ridicule any question you are ever asked as being irrelevant and to speak in completely impenetrable riddles.)

Your Meditation Questions Answered

Student: So if I find that I can’t stop thinking while I am meditating what should I do?

Master: Last week I had a really tasty tuna sandwich.

Student: While I was meditating I had a really grand vision of a woman riding a white horse. She brought me a message of peace and prosperity and asked me to share it with the whole world. Was this vision a valid meditation experience?

Master: When we are done here I would appreciate it if you’d stack your cushions in the cupboard up the back.

Student: My back and bum gets all stiff and sore when I meditate.

Master: That’s because your posture’s all wrong – DON’T YOU PEOPLE LISTEN TO A WORD I SAY?

Student: I think I have reached enlightenment!

Master: Oh yeah – sure you have – one meditation class and now you’re the master already?

It’s not as easy as that you know. It’s not like you can just apply yourself and expect it all to fall into place!

It takes many years of training – you must learn to do absolutely nothing ALL OF THE TIME.

Your problem is that you are too motivated. Check your attitude kid or forget about it. I started doing nothing when I was a small boy – you’re forty! You’ve spent your life building up a business empire by always doing things! Being constructive. You’re a mess! Don’t make me laugh!

Student: Now that I have begun my journey into Universal Consciousness, what should I do next.

Master: You should give me that fifty bucks you owe me and get the hell out of here!

By Seamus Anthony

Here is a slightly exaggerated list of the reasons why my music career kind of stalled …

1) Either by fluke or an initial burst of hard work, achieve a minor level of proficiency and/or success and then decide you have made it already, that the world owes you continued growth, success and adulation, and that you don’t need to try anymore.

2) Foster and fertilise your ego until it becomes so inflated that you can’t see around it anymore.

3) Believe your own hype.

4) Get stuck into drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes until you are both psychologically and physiologically addicted to both. Allow the unchecked consumption of these vices to eat up all of your cash, and destroy your health and your grip on reality. Eat badly and allow your fitness levels to plunge, and your body image to go to pot.

5) Don’t listen to other musicians and learn from them. Don’t listen to many different kinds of music. Don’t constantly read and research, ask questions, pay attention to what the Pros do, or invest any time whatsoever into learning new skills. And NEVER practice. Fail completely to plan your career in advance, and be very careful to utterly neglect to utilize any strategy or common sense whatsoever as you go about your business. MOST IMPORTANTLY – ALWAYS REFUSE POINT BLANK TO GET INVOLVED IN ANYTHING THAT EVEN VAGUELY RESEMBLES HARD WORK.

6) Believe every two bit, self-deluded, no-hoper Manager/Agent/Record Company Owner/Publisher and all of the lies and empty promises they feed you. Be eager to hand control of your career over to them, and happily let them go about destroying any chance you have of getting anywhere worthwhile.

7) Be impatient, irritable, irresponsible, unreliable, dishonest and lazy.

8 ) Pay no heed to the way you treat others. Forget who your real friends are, and disown your family. Harbour bitter, long-standing grudges against other people, and never, ever, try and see things from another person’s perspective. Always be rude and disrespectful.

9) Rampantly cheat on your lover, and then lie through your teeth to them about it. Use your perceived  status to use up and hurt both your lover and those you cheat on your lover with.

10) Pay no attention to your financials; just let someone deal with that because you are an Artist and it is beneath you to have to think about money. Then, expect to always have all of your material needs met, at no cost to yourself, even when you have done nothing to earn this. Get angry, throw public tantrums and lay blame every which way but on yourself when you don’t get what you want immediately.

11) Make it clear to your fellow musicians that you alone are the star of the show. Get rid of any great musicians who have the balls to upstage you, or stand up to you and threaten your out-of-control, massively insecure ego. Resolutely keep using any crap musicians that you like to have around because they can somehow manage to swallow your bullshit (and smile while they chew), even if it’s obvious that they have absolutely no talent.

12) Blindly believe that your music is perfect in every way, and that anyone who provides you with any constructive criticism is a moronic philistine with bad taste and no idea about anything. Let the praises of the easily impressionable bloat your feelings of self-worth until you are in danger of bursting.

13) When things aren’t going your way, give into self-defeatism and depression, crawl into your hole, and self-medicate the pain away.

14) As the years slip past without any real progress being made, begin to foster massive feelings of cancerous resentment against the world and everyone in it. Let bitterness be your guide as you feel the disease of  long-term disappointment  stagnate in your veins and your heart grow black with despair.

15) Learn to counter your feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing by negatively  criticizing others. Try to keep your gasping ego alive through feeble attempts to make yourself look better at other people’s expense.

16) When you have children, project your limiting beliefs onto them from an early age so that they may follow in your footsteps and likewise become masters of Zen and The Art Of NOT Becoming A Rock Star.

17) Die at an early age a broken, substance abusing, unhappy soul without a friend in the world and a family who hates your guts – because you were always nasty to them and don’t have any money to leave them when you go.

By Séamus Anthony

Ever wondered how some people manage to get up before the sun to meditate and exercise? Well, let me categorically confirm that I’m no expert, but recent* experiments have shown that three elements are integral: persistence, patience and good humour. Without these you might as well stick with the sleep in!

The Frozen Buddha

With strains of classical music the clock radio burst to life. What was my first thought? – “I must be insane”.

I have this year resolved not to wimp out during the frosty months but to rise despite the cold – which frankly, I despise – and do my meditation, chi gung, and exercise routine at dawn.

First thing.

In the face of my every screaming instinct.

Shivering, I stumbled out of the bedroom at 5:11am (to avoid beginning my day with an earful of bad news, I never set the alarm to go off on the hour). I then proceeded to have rather a funny time of it. Apparently, this was my day to have my persistence, patience and good humour well and truly tested.

I sat on my chair in the study and began my chi gung sitting meditation, but the little blanket I had over my lap just wasn’t cutting it. I was in serious danger of turning into some kind of Buddha shaped ice-sculpture. I collected my chi, stayed calm, and moved to sit in the living room where there is an old gas wall-heater. I turned the heater on and it cranked up with its usual cacophony of pops, clicks, and groans, all magnificently loud in the stillness.

My pets decided this was their cue to come and hang out.

The cat, Mimi, I can handle; besides, getting rid of her is only possible by putting her outside, which would mean getting up again. However, the dog, Dude, was too large for the space between my knees and the heater – and anyway, he smells. Thankfully, we have an established rapport. One grunt and he was back on his bed. The thing is, he’s gigantic and his bed is a very noisy beanbag.

As Dude turned around about 20 times, I practised my patience and ‘letting go’ until he finally lay down and went back to sleep. Part of his ‘going back to sleep ritual’ is making slurping noises with his mouth – God knows why – so I had the pleasure of listening to that for a few minutes. Meanwhile, far from contemplating the divine, I began to make plans for that meditation and hard-to-catch-DVD-dialogue-disturbing beanbag … plans involving a large truck, one with robot arms on the side.

Just as I am thinking this – the very same garbage truck pulls up outside my house and starts its robot-arm-whirring, wheelie-bin crashing racket.

Oh, the synchronicity if it all.

“I am patience, persistence, and good humour. I am patience, persistence, and good humour”, I silently repeat, not very good-humouredly.

Meanwhile I have warmed up nicely. The cat, surprisingly, decides to leave me alone for once.

Then, I start falling asleep.

Not actually asleep, just drowsy due to the heater, which means my thoughts are heading off into la-la-land. I turn the heater down, which sets it off popping and creaking again. I start counting my breaths to keep my focus up, but keep wandering off into noddy-land again and again. An old hand at this, I relax and patiently bring myself back to my breath awareness, often having to guess which number breath I was at.

Eventually – hallelujah! I reach that sweet point of meditation where my mind opens wide and the connection with Tao has been made (Tao is God, universal consciousness, spirit – there are countless names). Bliss and clarity are achieved; total contentment. Internal chattering calms and a direct sensation of transcendent love flood my senses. It feels fantastic. This energy relaxes and heals on three levels: physical, mental, and spiritual.

Sound good? The cool thing is that this experience is available to anyone who seeks it out, and it’s free.

After enjoying this for ten minutes I get up to do my standing chi gung. I have been aware for a while that Mimi has been padding around the house in a hurry. I am just beginning my stretches when she comes and starts doing the leg-rubbing thing. I don’t mind this. I am in fact very used to it. I have a theory that purring cats emit good chi. So I usually just let her do her thing until she gets bored and wanders away.

This morning, however, she keeps trotting around the house, then coming back, running off, and then returning until I realise what’s happening. The house is closed up on account of the cold and she wants to pee! I hear her scratching the carpet in the spare room, and I know that if I don’t open a door and let her out then she is very soon going to do it inside.

I breathe in, collect my chi, see the humour of it and let her out. That makes two mornings she has disturbed my stretching routine. Yesterday was more dramatic. I was outside (it wasn’t as cold) and was getting the usual leg rubbing from her as I bent and stretched. No problem. Then all of a sudden I felt four sets of claws digging into my back – she’d had gotten some kind of a fright or tried to swipe at an insect or something and had decided to use my back as a climbing wall!

Well, that threw me. Chi flying off in all directions, I lost my cool, turned and barked at her in a very dog-like manner. She fled, stopped a few feet away and promptly resumed looking totally unruffled, casually stretching and giving her paw a bit of a lick. I had to smile. Cats are the indisputable Zen masters of suburbia. I collected my chi and resumed my practice.

As for the rest of this morning, I went for a jog despite the Antarctic weather, did my other exercises, and never quite lost my rag with it all. Now I sit here smug in the knowledge that I have – on this day at least – proved to myself that I can be the person I want to be: persistent, patient and good humoured.

As for tomorrow? Ask me that at 5:11am!

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*I have to admit that this article is actually a couple of years old and originally appeared in Australia’s LivingNow magazine – I gave up on all that early morning shit ages ago. It’s for the birds…

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By Seamus Anthony

I have always been a very Lazy Dude, and in fact I come from a long line of them. But the way I see it, laziness is in fact a Godly virtue. Here’s a few reasons why:

1) Lazy People Are Good For the Environment:

Lazy Dudes consume less. It makes sense: if you are too lazy to earn the big bucks, and too lazy to enjoy the (dreadful chore that is) shopping, then you just get by without a lot of stuff and this makes you an eco-warrior.

Put it this way, we need to stop using so much energy if we’re gonna save the planet right? Well, who do you think just opted to kick back and not drive anywhere for a few days? Not Anthony Robbins, that’s for sure.

2) Lazy People Are Safer:

Driving fast takes a lot of effort. It’s way easier to cruise just below the speed limit. Try not to drop the roach though, that can cause complications.

3) Lazy People Cause Less Noise Pollution:

If you’re lazy like me you get all self-righteous and grumpy on weekends when all those damn un-lazy psychos are out with their whipper-snippers and lawn-mowers making a bloody great racket. Why can’t they just do what me and all the other Lazy Dudes are doing – nothing much. Sure, the lawn might be out of control but A) who cares? and B) at least you can snuggle into bed at night knowing you weren’t responsible for any shift-workers going to work all sleep deprived due to edge trimmers and leaf blowers and then losing an arm in an industrial accident.

Motivated husbands of the world – hang your heads in shame.

4) Lazy People Promote World Peace:

You ever hear of a perennially Lazy Dude joining the Army? U-Uh.

Case in point: John and Yoko doing their whole bed-in routine. If everyone was as lazy as those cats were, there would never be another war ever because running around doing push ups and making your bed at 5am is hard work man!

5) Lazy People Provide Others With Awesome Career Opportunities:

I regularly see complete weeners with fantastic high paying careers.

You think the weener whose job I want would have their sweet gig if I was actually motivated enough to try and take it off him? No way!

I may be a Lazy Dude, but I am as cool as … you know … something refrigerated – okay?

If I were to walk in to their office with so much as an ounce of artificial motivation, that weener’s home for an early lunch (hopefully not to find his wife shagging some other ice cool Lazy Dude).

6) Lazy People Are Extremely Generous:

This is a bit like the employment thing.

Just say I had one of those hard rock candy things on a stick – the kind you get at the fair.

Now, I was probably planning to just sit on the steps all day and suck on it until my tongue was in shreds and my teeth that little bit closer to falling out, but then you come along and take it off me. I’m too lazy to do anything about that, which is the same as being generous for all practical purposes, if not intents.

7) Lazy People Make the Best Music:

Fact: I have never known a decent musician who was NOT a completely lazy, self-centered twat (myself included).

We make shocking flatmates but hey – can we strum a sweet ballad .

By the way, all those uber-motivated types you see bouncing up and down in video clips are not decent musicians. They are weird little ego-maniacs who need to read this post something fierce.

8 ) Lazy People Are Naturally Enlightened Masters:

Other people pay good money to learn how to meditate, then spend a week going bananas in some freezing cold temple while their minds do high speed laps inside their buzzing skulls.

Lazy Dudes spend so much time just happily staring into space, their minds a complete void of any content whatsoever, that they generally cross the enlightenment event-horizon in their mid-to-late twenties.

This is of course, where the old expression “Sipping frosty home-brew, reach enlightenment, still sipping frosty home-brew” originated from.

9) Lazy People Make the Best Gurus:

Spiritually enlightened they may be, but the fact remains that the average Lazy Dude will always be too habitually slack to ask you to stop coming around to their house just to sit cross legged at the foot of their couch all day (although they may grunt at you to get your head out of the way of the x-box).

Also, Lazy Dude Masters are incorruptible; they will never get it together to charge anyone for the above privilege.

(However it is a universal unspoken rule that you leave a small contribution on the fridge for any brewskies or *cough* other “peripherals” you may consume during your contemplative retreat.)

10) Lazy People Don’t Expect Anything Much Of Others:

This is the greatest thing about the wee Slack Folk. Unlike all the other demanding so-and-so’s that just never seem to get out of your face with their “urgent” this and their “important” that, us Lazy Dudes want but one thing from you: for you to call and order the pizza.

That’s right – us Lazy Dudes are a pretty easy bunch to please. We’re mostly happy just to quietly group up into little cliques of two or three and you know – bowl, drive around and enjoy the occasional acid flashback.

So the next time you feel like peeing on some Lazy Dude’s rug, think long and hard about whether it’s worth it. Because individually and as a whole, we Lazy Dudes are of such great benefit to the world that we pack a pretty awesome karmic punch.

And besides, you know, this aggression will not stand … man …

By Steven Mills

There is nothing better then finding that you have carved out a spare hour in the day to sit and meditate.

The daily worries of the world have started to float away, and the big thoughts that fill your normal waking mind have started to quieten down. A slow, easy feeling of peace works its way over your body as you focus on the simpleness of in breath and out breath. You begin to focus on nothing, to pull your observing mind out of the “stream of consciousness” and begin to notice your thoughts as something separate.

Then you start to hear them.

“Oh yes doing well, yes quieten down the thoughts” says one.

“You really should be doing that blog post and not meditating” says the next.

“Sounds like a truck outside, wait.. wait… no it’s a bloody leaf blower!” complains a third voice.

It’s the small voices of the mind, the thoughts that during waking life dictate your actions and way of thinking, but now in meditation serve to distract you from your aim of letting go and giving the mind a rest.

In the still silence of meditation each of these small voices begins to sound very loud. And while you would think on a Zenish blog such as this I would be all against the annoying babble of the ego, I have come to have a small sense of respect for this misunderstood aspect of my psyche.

The way that I see it, each of those voices is a mini revolution in your head. It is your mind, or more accurately your ego rebelling against the idea of being quiet. The ego will do anything to get you to stop focusing on something else, but instead go back to how you spend a lot the other hours of your waking life, focusing on it. It puts on characters, it puts on plays. It will start to talk to you like yoda.

It will send you off on strange mental journeys to remember what you had for lunch on the 3rd of April in 2004. It will try to convince you that are 232 better things that you could be doing with your time right at this very minute. It will try to send you to sleep; it will try to make you uncomfortable. Some call it monkey mind, but more often then not it acts more like King Kong then a friendly chimp.

So you can see that while you start to quieten down these voices, the ego part of you starts rebelling against the observer.

An internal war escalates, with both sides digging in and upping the ante from minute to minute. The harder you directly fight the inner voices and forces of the ego, the harder it will fight back.  If you continue to fight it will end up in full on war, with all of your attention being used to quell the voices and associated images, and none left to focus on the object of your mediation. And you thought this stuff was all peace and love?

Well, instead of fighting this inner rebel, the thing to do is to accept him. Let go of the idea chasing all of the voices down and let them speak. As they do though, imagine that the volume on each is turning down, and that the voice is slowly floating away.

Allow them to say what they have to say, but don’t buy into the story that they are telling you.

By Steve Mills

Remember a few years ago when that song came out, I’m sure you know the one. It had a super catchy chorus, more hooks than a fishing shop and embedded itself so deep in your skull that you found yourself humming it while “on the job”. Sure it was annoying as hell, but everyone was going nuts over it. For weeks it was all you could hear on the radio. It was so popular that it sparked new novelty dance crazes, giving wedding DJ’s an excuse to throw out their tired old copies of the “Grease Megamix” and the “Bus Stop”, and play something new for drunk old people to dance to.

Then one day, something happened. A new song came along, and it had a really catchy chorus, hooks aplenty and was heard pumping out of radio’s from New York to Upper Cumbucta West. Two weeks later no one wants to hear the Macarena, and everyone wants to hear Beyonce. Time moves on, things change.

Just like popular songs, movies and books, everything that we can see in our world is in a transitory, impermanent state. People and places, empires and cities all come from nothing, grow and flourish for a time, and then inevitably at some stage return to nothing. It’s the nature of reality. The Buddha said that “Decay is inherent in all component things,” and his followers accepted that existing in the world meant being in a state of flux, a continuous becoming.

Just like these one hit wonders, most of the stuff that happens in our day to day lives is transitory and impermanent. Events so strange, unpredictable BUT also over so quickly that if you weren’t living through them you would laugh. Events, like being stuck in a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or missing out on concert tickets arise into the NOW, flourish for a short time and then vanish, never to be seen again. Detachment to thoughts and negative emotions of past events becomes easier when we gain a perspective of just how small a role in the events of the Universe we take.

But just like the top 40, where the current hit songs are change positions dramatically from week to week, it is this constant flux, this interplay between Ying and Yang, manifestation and destruction that makes life interesting. Change is what makes life worth living. It can be exciting, frightening, exhausting, or bring relief. It can deliver sadness or happiness, resistance or attachment.

If everyday of your life did not have this underlying impermanence, the world would be a very boring place. To me there is no more motivating or perspective changing idea then “No moment ever again, or ever before in the history of the Universe will ever be this moment.” The nature of your impermanence means that the fact that your are alive and conscious in the here and now, thinking these thoughts, breathing this air, seeing these exact things is remarkable. Of all of infinite time and infinite space you are here right now.

And once this microsecond has passed, The Universe as it exists right now will never exist again.

By Seamus Anthony Ennis

Well, maybe they do. Truthfully, I wouldn’t know, but I can’t help but reckon that those who walk around claiming to “perfectly enlightened” are probably at least partially faking it – if not out and out bullshitting us all – and so therefore they must have some pretty human moments. Try and picture it with me …

The seminar is over and the Guru has slipped into some casual attire and is down in the hotel lobby having a scotch, listening to the depressingly blue jazz band and trying to catch the eye of a pretty business woman. Unfortunately she turns her nose up at him so he downs his drink and retires to his room; yet another one. They all look the same.

He checks his email. Nothing interesting; just work and irritating questions from a few of the more obsessive disciples. “Why can’t they just switch on their brains and sort out their own problems?” he mutters, “Ah well – it’s a living.”

He flops on the bed and flicks on the TV. Sport. More sport. Bad movies. Oooh! Porn! Oh, unless you pay for it the screen goes blank after thirty seconds…

“Bah,” thinks the Guru. “Might as well turn in, gotta be up early for tomorrow’s flight to Seattle”.

Ok so I made that scenario up – and truthfully it’s most probably a reflection of what I would be like if I got myself a traveling guru gig – but you know…

The Set Up

When I hear people rave on about being perfectly enlightened I can’t help but feel a little cynical. Why do they feel the need to set themselves up to be so flawless?

Well the reason is simple: By setting themselves up as being Enlightened (or Rich, or Fit, or Productive, or Whatever) what they in fact are saying is “I am more Enlightened than you“. (Or rich or whatever.)

This then triggers in you a longing to be like you perceive them to be. Surely then you too can be rid of all that nasty fear, angst, depression, regret and the rest of the bad feelings that come with the package that is “being human”. Proclaiming perfection creates a tension in you, and that tension makes you buy their stuff.

Not that there is necessarily a problem there. If their stuff makes you feel better, even for a little while, then it is probably a good thing. And if all you do is make an effort to learn something and improve yourself a little – then great. But read back over the last line of the preceding paragraph.

See anything wrong with this picture?

Gurus Create Tension!?!

That’s just crazy! Isn’t it their job to relieve you of tension?

Nope.

It should be, but in reality their job description is just the opposite.

The Perfectly Enlightened guru makes you feel un-enlightened. The Perfectly Fit guru makes you feel like a fat slob. The Totally Rich guru makes you feel like a worthless loser. They have to – otherwise you wouldn’t buy their book.

Which might be fine with the Fit guy or the Rich guy (as long as you have, at least to some extent, the wisdom to rise above the Ego and its desire for what it perceives you lack). Chances are they ARE super-fit or super-rich (doesn’t mean they aren’t jerks though).

But the “Perfectly Enlightened” guy? That’s a whole ‘nother story.

Ain’t no such thing, Dude. Ain’t no such thing.

Further Reading:

Zen is Boring

You are already enlightened.

By Seamus Anthony Ennis

Arm Rests. Adjustable ones. The key to happiness is being able to notice that things like this exist. Allow me to elaborate…

When things get wacky (difficult, painful), the hardest thing to do is to see the woods for the trees. Let me begin with an example – the common occurrence of a friend’s advice to a lovesick mate:

“It will be okay; either you’ll break up with your boy/girlfriend or you’ll work your problems through and stay together. Either way you’ll be fine and it will all be for the best.”

An answer to which our lovesick puppy will categorically fail to relate to until later, when he will see that it was absolute truth all along. Until then the problem will seem tragic, unbearable, and probably life-threatening.

Meanwhile it’s comically easy for the friend of our love-sick puppy to see the solution to the problem. Puppy just needs to be himself, do his best, and wait. That’s it. End of story.

But onward, holistic soldiers, to the arm-rest thing, and the promised ‘key to happiness’ I know you are breathlessly waiting for …

Oh, the Pain! The Pain!

Both at work and here in my home office I have been struggling for a while trying to get comfortable in front of my computers. I have tried sitting up straight for hours on end, relaxing back like a slob, stretching every few minutes, sitting on cushions, adjusting the monitor height, adjusting the chair height (at work anyway, my home chair is stuffed). I tried acupuncture, massage, and yoga. Nothing helped. I have been constantly uncomfortable, always suffering pain. In fact, I experience more back, shoulder and arm pain now working at a desk than I did all my long years working in…

…the Hostility Industry

Sorry, *coughs*, I meant ‘hospitality’, of course.

I used to come home from ten hour bar tending/dish washing/table waiting shifts rubbing my shoulders and groaning that I wanted a desk job because I assumed that all the bending and lifting, and thumping and flexing, and go, go, go was causing stress and strain and was directly responsible for my gargantuan shoulder pain.

Hello! It was just the opposite! One month after I stopped pounding the cafe boards I started experiencing a whole new world of distress and pain. Needless to say, movement is extremely important to our overall well-being and we should never forget this, my information dazzled, overly cerebral friends.

Anyway, yesterday, I suddenly had a blinding flash of inspiration. The reason for my pain was not my posture per se but the fact that the stupid arm-rests were forcing my elbows and shoulders skywards – an unnatural position and obviously the cause of my agony. Being a talkative chap in a talkative office I exclaimed ‘Eureka!’ and announced my discovery and my newfound life-mission to solve the problem. “I will make my fortune being the guy who solved the Great Arm-Rest Debacle!” I cockily predicted.

“Dude, too late”, said Karen, the sharp-as-a-tack young lady to my left. “The arm-rests are adjustable.”

And so they were.

Like, Duh.

One click of a button and the problem was solved, my shoulders dropped and I noticed an immediate increase in postural comfort. Then this morning I sat down here at home and discovered that the same applies for my salvaged-from-the-side-of-the-road home office chair. As mentioned, the seat height doesn’t adjust up and down properly, but the arms adjust as freely and carelessly as a wind-sock in an indecisive breeze.

Cripes! Wake up brain! Such an easy answer to a couple of year’s worth of pain and frustration. But how do we train ourselves to see the easy answers that stare us in the face? To see the clever idea that will easily make good? To separate the wheat from the chafe? To best deal with pain and stress?

Well, it’s easier said than done, but I believe it’s best to take Love Sick Puppy’s friend’s advice and just be ourselves, do our best, and wait.

Ask questions; meditate; allow things to work themselves out.

Even when we are ‘losing it’, we do well to recognise this fact and just go with it. It would probably be more damaging to hold it all in and act like a stoic. Energy needs to flow, so if it’s time to freak out, then freak out already. The sooner you release your negativity, the sooner you’ll be smiling again.

And, not least, persist. If after all the cushions, and stretching and fifty-dollar-an-hour treatments I’d given in to the pain and never put my mind to the problem again, then I never would have had the pleasure of, if belatedly, discovering the tactical solution to the Great Arm-rest Debacle.

P.S. By the way, the fact that we are all already enlightened is a bit like the fact that I had adjustable arm rests: the solution was already there – I just didn’t know it yet. Same goes for your inherent enlightenment: it’s there already, it’s just a matter of getting touch with what that feels like.

By Seamus Anthony Ennis

It’s just my opinion, and I have no idea what I am talking about, but you – yes, you – have absolutely no clue what the hell is going on.

Yes, you heard me, and that goes for your guru, coach, expert or teacher also.

You see, sometimes when I am at barbecues, beer comfortably resting on my belly, paper plate piled high on my knee, the subject comes up that I write personal development articles and, for better or worse, I cringe. Why? Because the first thing that happens, at least in my mind, is that people look at me and think “Well, what the hell does he know that I don’t? He’s no guru; look at that blob of mayonnaise on his beard! And isn’t that the guy who drank a couple too many at Jo’s party last fortnight and made a fool of himself? Personal development writer indeed – hmmph!”

And the truth is they are right. I don’t know diddly. But neither do ‘they’ and neither, my friend, do you.

You might have chosen to believe certain things, and these beliefs are most likely an integral part of your sense of personal identity. In fact they are probably very useful in keeping you from just collapsing under the weight of a total existential breakdown, but nevertheless…

You. Don’t. Know. Anything. About. Anything.

Believing something is not the same as knowing something. One is a choice, the other is a certainty, and in this life there are no certainties.

Everything you think you know is all just your own unique perspective and is completely unprovable as ultimate truth.

I once saw that great, mad, rambling comic Billy Connolly expound his view on this. Minus a few expletives, he said:

“We are part of something enormous that’s too big for us too understand. … We’ve been looking through the wrong end of the telescope for God … See those wee things that live in ponds … they don’t have a clue that we exist, because we’re too big for them … Well, there’s something too huge for us. We’re the leg of a chair. We’re a cup of tea. We’re something dead simple.”

In other words we just see this little circle of possibility that just doesn’t give us a particularly insightful view of the big picture whatsoever. We are too big for the little water bugs to comprehend, and that, my little insect friends, is our lot too. If you’ve ever seen that email that goes around comparing the relative size of the planets to each other and then to the sun, and then our sun to the other even bigger suns out there until planet Earth is so little it can’t even be seen on the computer screen anymore, then you’ll know what Billy means. We are so, so tiny in the grand scheme of things that we are conceited to think that we will ever understand our Universe …

… and herein lies our freedom.

(”Everybody! Follow me!” screams Connolly, doing a Nazi salute and marching off, “We’ll come back for your valuables later!”)

But seriously, given that you will soon be dead, and given that you can’t be expected to understand God or the big picture, there is simply no good reason why you shouldn’t dream ‘big’ (which will always be comparatively small) and, to reclaim a corporately-hijacked cliché, just do it.

I Don’t Know What I’m Talking About

I don’t know what I’m talking about of course, but in my opinion our mission is to help to raise the vibration of the universe just a little bit. To make a positive contribution. Now, this contribution, even if you became the single most important human being in the history of the world, will by default always be tiny in the grand scheme of things, but in the earthly context of this and subsequent generations, you can help to make our world a better place, and this can bring you (and others) happiness.

Far be it for me to bark orders, but there’s no point trying to understand the Universe, because that is a waste of time, and there’s no point wasting our lives chasing security, because there simply is no security. Soon, very soon, you will be dead and whatever happens after that is anybody’s guess. So be free. Do what you want. Dream a dream and have a go. Sure you’ll need to consider practicalities, and you’ll need to decide whether or not you really do actually want the pressure and risk that comes with being a working astronaut or high-wire trapeze artist, but don’t let others put you off by telling you what-is-what, because those people, be they priest, parent, spouse, whoever, have absolutely no clue – and neither do you.

If you ponder it long enough, I hope you will see the ultimate freedom that lies in this fact: No matter how hard you peer up above you, you will never really know what the heck is actually going in outside of your little muddy puddle, so you are free do what you feel.

My only sub-clause is this: The one apparently apparent fact in this life is that doing good is infinitely more satisfying for any sane person than doing evil. So please don’t use this article as an excuse to do something horrible. After all, it’s not like I have the foggiest idea what I am on about.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and find a napkin to wipe the mayonnaise – and forty seven thousand, three hundred and eighty nine tiny doomed critters – off my beard. Good day to you.

This article was first published in print in Living Now Publishing’s DaretoDream magazine (March 2008, Australia)