Posted by Click here to get a free newsletter Zen and a Way of sustainable prosperity: Balance, financial success, and sustainability with the secrets of the Japanese Omi-merchants.
As I said before, one of the reasons I created ZENWSP is to empower sustainable-minded people to get into influential position in society.
Since we had an election, I have been thinking about how we can apply ZENWSP to politics.
One thing I notice in us is that we can not always remain positive when we encounter negative outcomes, which often happen in politics. If we look at our election result, parties that support constitutional reform have gotten two-thirds of the seats, and it is depressing. We are filled with disappointment and start complaining about many things. We blame the Democratic Party and Maehara for creating such a mess; we blame people who were stupid enough to vote for the L.D.P. after all the things Abe has done. The worst of all, we start feeling that there is no point in putting energy into politics, we can never change things through politics, I just want to get on with my life, changing the world through my sustainable lifestyle, it is the most effective way after all. But we know that’s not true. Political decisions can affect our lives tremendously; we have all witnessed it through the accident at Fukushima nuclear power station.
We need to calm down. Take a deep breath, and look at the situation again. Yes, it is devastating, but it was like that before the election. They had the two-thirds of the seats. Nothing got worse than before. On the contrary, the parties against the constitutional reform have gained more seats, and the joint struggle of the opposition parties and citizens have gotten stronger since the Democratic Part was replaced by the Constitutional Democratic Party. Not only that, we the citizens have a lot to do with creating this result. There is a conspiracy theory that the military-industrial complex pulled the string to use Koike and Maehara to destroy the liberal wing from Japanese politics and create two major conservative parties. If it is true, they failed in their attempt, and we managed to stop it.
We didn’t win the election, but the wind started blowing in favor of our side, and we will be able to turn the situation around if we pull ourselves together and focus our mind on what we can do to make it happen.
ZENWSP stresses the importance of positive thinking and how to control your mind to think constructively.
Examples of the questions to ask are the following:
How can we turn it around?
What can we do to change the situation?
What is the list of things we can do to win the next election?
What can we specifically do in some of the things on the list?
Each time when you are overwhelmed by negative thoughts, you can ask yourself these questions, or you can ask one another these questions in your group.
I’ll be speaking at Pechakucha night Kyoto on November 4th.
https://www.facebook.com/events/171365180106136
https://www.pechakucha.org/cities/kyoto
I am giving a 2-day workshop in Japanese on December 2nd and 3rd.
http://zenquest.net/index.php?zenwspworkshop
Omi-merchant's way of Sustainable Prosperity 