The Three Principles

‘Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength’.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In the last year of living in Britain I was invited as a guest speaker for an enterprising and newly formed Three Principles organisation on the south coast. As we walked towards the talk venue after a shared meal at a local Indian restaurant, I was asked an intriguing yet often asked question: “Do you really never prepare for a talk, at all?” I laughed and replied that no, I hadn’t ever prepared anything for any talk I had given on the Three Principles, adding that it would be impossible to do so. Because how can one prepare for the unknown?

‘Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it’.

Mark Twain

About two or three weeks after meeting Dr Roger Mills and learning of the Three Principles I was in the school library with a group of students writing English assignments. I had been working at this school for about a year and seemed to be a relatively popular teacher (not many children actually like school, I know I didn’t). Now, I had become: “The best teacher in the whole world”, on hearing this I told the pupils that they didn’t know all the other teachers in the world so how could they distinguish. Their answer was simple: “We don’t need to know them, we know you”.

“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” 

Henry Van Dyke

It was a clear and sunny day at Heathrow Airport in early December 2001; security was manic and the queues were long and slow moving. They were even stopping people just before boarding and making them empty the contents of their luggage out onto a table. I witnessed a lot of distressed and agitated people, some wishing to simply get on and settled, some merely doing their work as best they could in the circumstances of new security procedures. 

‘Nothing is work, unless you’d rather be doing something else’.

George Halas

Many years ago I remember reading Jean Liedloff’s thought provoking book The Continuum Concept and being struck by the story she told of a Venezuelan tribe that had no word for ‘work’. The tribe simply saw the tasks they needed to perform each day as something to be carried out with joy, this really gripped my imagination. They would laugh and joke, even when things clearly weren’t going their way.

When we are in the middle of a crisis we do the best we can to get through it, but when it comes back as a thought created memory, it can begin to feel like a recurring nightmare from which there seems to be no escape. But what if there was an escape from the past and its traumas?

One morning many years ago on my way to work in a nearby town, I was running up a rising slip road towards the railway station in my home-town, when I suddenly felt tears running down my face before I even realised what was happening; less than a moment before I had smelt a woman’s perfume, without even noticing the person wearing it! It was a perfume my mother had worn when I was a child and she had committed suicide when I was just 8 years old. Without a chance of preventing this thought created feeling arising in my mind I felt the emotion of a loss that I could not prevent, revisit me from out of the past.