Keep Evolving

I have to tell you about this book I just finished. It's called How to Hold a Cockroach, and I know, the title alone almost made me put it back down. Who wants to hold a cockroach? But that's exactly the point. I picked it up during what I can only describe as a season of "existential clutter"—when life looked fine on paper but felt heavy and tight for no clear reason . And this little book? It cracked something open.

It's technically a story about a boy who gets confronted by a cockroach at dinner. But it's not really about bugs. It's about everything we've been taught to fear, recoil from, or judge as bad rejection, failure, anxiety, even our own messy selves. The illustrations are beautiful, and the whole thing reads like a children's book for adults, the kind you finish in an hour but chew on for weeks .

Here are the five lessons that have been rattling around in my head since I turned the last page.

1. The Cockroach Principle: What you resist really does persist.
The book opens with this simple idea: our suffering doesn't come from life's inevitable "cockroaches"—the hard stuff, the fears, the discomforts. It comes from how frantically we try to avoid them . The boy screams at the cockroach to go away, but it just sits there. And then he has this tiny moment of curiosity: Wait, why do I actually hate this thing? Who taught me that? The lesson hit me hard: when you stop flailing and actually look at the thing you're afraid of, hold it gently, even it loses its power to haunt you. It might still be ugly. But it stops running the show.

2. You've been wearing someone else's glasses your whole life.
This one stung a little. The boy realizes his disgust for the cockroach isn't really his—it was handed down by his family, his culture, everyone around him . He'd never actually examined it for himself. And it made me think: how many of my fears, my judgments about myself, my "I can'ts" are actually just hand-me-downs? How much of my anxiety is someone else's old script I'm still reading from? The book gently suggests we try on our own eyes for once.

3. You can hold two opposite things at once.
One chapter introduces this idea of "The AND Practice." You can be terrified and brave. You can be heartbroken and grateful. You can be a complete mess and worthy of love . We're so trained to resolve tension, to pick a side, to fix the "bad" feeling. But the book argues that freedom comes from learning to hold contradictions without exploding. I tried it during a rough week: "I'm overwhelmed AND I'm handling it. I'm scared AND I'm showing up anyway." It didn't fix anything, but it gave me room to breathe. And breathing is where change starts.

4. The ugly emotions are actually your teachers.
In a world that screams "good vibes only," this book makes a case for befriending the feelings we usually shove under the rug, envy, shame, regret. One section gives these "emotional cockroaches" little portraits and captions, like "Hi, I'm Regret! I help you not make the same mistake twice, if you let me" . It reframes them not as enemies, but as weird, uncomfortable messengers. When I stopped trying to kill my anxiety and started asking what it was trying to tell me, it became less of a monster and more of a very annoying, but occasionally wise, houseguest.

5. Freedom isn't about changing your life. It's about changing how you hold it.
This is the big one. The book's core message is that ultimate freedom isn't the absence of problems, constraints, or cockroaches. It's the ability to choose your relationship to them . A prisoner can be freer in their mind than a billionaire trapped by greed. The boy learns that he can't control whether cockroaches show up, but he can control whether he screams, runs, or pauses long enough to see one with curiosity. There's even a little ritual at the end where you "hold" your cockroach, name it, feel its texture, thank it for what it taught you . It sounds a little woo-woo, but I did it with my fear of not being enough, and I'll be damned if it didn't loosen its grip on me.

It's the kind of book that finds you at exactly the right moment. If you've been feeling trapped by invisible chains, or if you're just curious why you react so strongly to the "cockroaches" in your own life, read it. It's a love letter to anyone who's forgotten they're already free .

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4sfXWEF

Here's a story about Happiness:

A teacher once gave a balloon to every student, who had to inflate it, write their name on it, and throw it in the hallway. The teacher then mixed all the balloons. The students were then given 5 minutes to find their own balloon. Despite a hectic search, no one found their balloon.

At that point, the teacher told the students to take the first balloon that they found and hand it to the person whose name was written on it. Within 5 minutes, everyone had their own balloon.

The teacher said to the students: "These balloons are like happiness. We will never find it if everyone is looking for their own. But if we care about other people's happiness, we'll find ours too."

Here's a little prayer of Thanksgiving from Leunig...

https://youtu.be/tXIc69kpnMs?si=ph8mFxsSo4kA6_TY

Spoons- A Poem About Spoon Theory by Rowan McCabe Spoon Theory is a term first coined by Christine Miserandino. It helps to explain why those with long term conditions can find daily tasks more challenging t...

The Lion and the Child

Source: [https://jackkornfield.com/the-buddhas-lions-roar-discovering-your-inner-royalty/?

“The lion’s roar in our own spiritual life arises when we rest in the truth of who we are — no longer bound by fear or pretence, but speaking and living from the centre.” – Jack Kornfield

In the journey of awakening, there comes a time when practice moves beyond quiet perseverance and enters a realm of bravery and dignity. Rumi spoke of three stages of the spiritual path — the camel, the lion, and the freshness of the child. The camel teaches us devotion, the willingness to bear what is difficult. But then comes the lion — a presence of truth and fearlessness, what the Buddha himself called the lion’s roar.

When challenged by skeptics, the Buddha would stand in the centre of his being and declare: “I have mastered all the great ascetic practices, and beyond them I have found the way to freedom. You too can be free. Sit, face yourself with mindful awareness, and you will awaken.” His voice sounded the full authority of someone who had met life directly and discovered the unshakable ground of the heart.

A lion’s roar is not an ordinary sound. If you’ve ever heard one, even in a zoo, you know it reverberates through the whole body. The lion opens wide, roars from its core, and the whole place falls silent. Birds stop calling. Monkeys grow still. It is a sound that commands attention. In the same way, the lion’s roar in our own spiritual life arises when we rest in the truth of who we are — no longer bound by fear or pretence, but speaking and living from the centre.

“To live with the lion’s roar is to stand in your full dignity, to honour the beauty in yourself and others, and to meet the world’s joys and sorrows with courage.” – Jack Kornfield

The Buddha described this dignity beautifully: “I consider the positions of kings and rulers as dust motes in a sunbeam. I see treasures of gold as broken tiles. I look upon the myriad worlds as small seeds, the rise and fall of beliefs as traces left by the seasons.” This is the perspective that comes when we see from our timeless Buddha nature — the inner royalty that is our birthright.

Poet William Stafford once wrote of a wanderer who, no matter how dark or cold the world becomes, can still answer the question *Who are you?* with “Maybe I’m a king. Maybe I’m a queen.” We all carry this possibility. Children understand it intuitively — that secret hope that one day a knock will come at the door, and we will be called back to our palace and our true inheritance.

To live with the lion’s roar is to live with full wisdom now — to stand in your innate dignity, to honour the beauty in yourself and others, and to meet the world’s joys and sorrows with courage. This is not arrogance, but a profound remembering: that beneath the stories and struggles, there is an unshakable nobility of heart.

Metta,
Jack

A Gentle Reminder...