Just right after we said “Happy New Year” to our loved ones, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances, our country experienced an unprecedented riot. As a result, many of us felt shocked, feeling the sadness, anger, and question of the big “Why?” On that awful day, I had to take two sleeping pills to get myself to sleep.

At first, I was distraught and angry, but soon I realized I have more work to do. I need to spread the word of creating peace, love, harmony, and moral consciousness practice.

I am not here trying to control anyone, neither trying to convince anyone. But I feel obligated to do the right thing and hopefully raise awareness of how to restore our inner peace. If we are confused about the right thing (everyone thinks they are doing the right thing), first is to ask ourselves of our moral conscience: is this a good moral action?

The second consideration is to ask ourselves: does this help anything or to make things better? Is this a healthy way to do it? Do I affect people positively or negatively? What are the consequences of my action?

Imagine, what would happen if we all choose to do the right thing? We can create a peaceful, harmonious, and healthy world.

How to Create a Peaceful, Harmonious, and Healthy World? Here are my suggestions for you to try:

1. First, let’s re-set our mind, thinking bigger, more than just about ourselves, or outside of ourselves. We need to think about our world, our environment, the future of our children, our friends, our neighbors, our family, the unity of our community, and our Country.

What happens if we all think of others or care for others? Here is the first practice, do something for other person/people without thinking “what I get out of it”.

2. Words do matter. We all talk and listen daily, but we often hear more negative things than positive things. Even on some news channels, 9 out of 10 news items may be negative, and one is positive at the end of the news.

This does not make our Country look good, nor does not truly represent our Country. Because we do have many good things happening daily, many good people, many kindnesses around us, many sacrifices, many touching stories, many dedicated scientists, doctors, nurses, and first-line workers.

We want to see more good news: new roads, better infrastructure, better management, unity in our government or common ground in different parties, and harmony in our society and communities.

Say things more positively, rather than negatively. How about reminding each other instead of criticizing/cursing each other.

We can encourage each other instead of belittling each other; we need to use more words of healing, loving, changing, nurturing, helping, encouraging, inspiring, growing, improving,….

But we have too often used words like “Fighting,” “Killing,” “Hate,” “Punishment,” “Stupid,” which do not make us feel good; instead, they make us feel stiff, stressful, and angry.

Fighting for this, fighting for that, don’t you think it’s too stressful with those words? The consequence of these negative words may cause Rage, Revenge, Violence, which can never get life back to normal.

We are not living in the 18th century when we had to fight for our lives; this is the 21st century; we don’t need to fight; we need to talk, discuss, find solutions, love, harmony, and peace.

Words do matter, and how we say them does matter.

Words can cause fear and violence. but can also make others happy. We feel awful when someone makes negative comments to us, but we also need to remind ourselves to avoid using negative words to others.

We often criticize others. but are unable to accept criticism ourselves. If we don’t like a negative comment, we should not make a negative comment to others. That is fair, right. If we feel our government is not doing a good job, don’t criticize them by saying bad things on the media, but we can tell them directly what you feel.

There are many different ways to get your opinion out to our leaders. We will also need to understand that no one can please everyone because everyone has different needs.

We have to believe in our leaders, support our leaders, and cooperate with our leaders. We have leaders, and we have laws. But, violence never worked in the 20th century.

Can you say a nice thing to someone once a day? This will be our next practice: say something nice to other person/people once or twice a day.

3. Simplify our life. We are too complicated and overstimulated by all kinds of media, some fake and some real; some educational and others are useless or meaningless.

Think for a moment, how much time we have in our life? If we are 50 and plan to live to 90, we have 40 years left. If we are 65 plan to live to 95, we have 30 years left. The older we get, the shorter the day/ time we feel. Don’t you think we should focus on things meaningful and cherish these 30 years?

What if we use these 30 years to learn something, do something we enjoy doing, make something that can be memorized by the next generation, or learn to take care of our body, mind, and spirit?

We don’t need to be controlled by the media; we can use a smartphone or other TV programs in a balanced way. You can respect but you don’t have to follow everyone’s opinion. Use your internal wisdom to decipher what is true and what is not true.

When the mind goes chaotic, our life will soon be chaotic. We need to protect our brains, learn to quiet our minds, and nurture our bodies by doing meditation, Qi Gong, Tai Chi, and other wellness exercises.

In a pandemic, we need to sacrifice our comfort or convenience to protect others and ourselves. We should not just think of ourselves “My freedom is not to wear the mask.”

We should be more thoughtful and practice sacrifice. Think about how many people had sacrificed their lives for us, how many lost their lives to save us. Never try to make things more complicated; the world has enough complications.

When the outbreak happens, please wear a mask no matter what. Please don’t make things more complicated. Let’s obey the law, follow the regulation and guidelines to make things easy and to end the pandemic.

We have created enough complications, no more. Let’s practice the “Simplify.” This is another daily practice for us to try: simplify our mind, simplify our life, and simplify our desires