Happy NOW year, Happy NEW you – Frank Liddy
Welcome to this week’s Inspire Mindfulness Corner.
Happy NOW year, Happy NEW you
Here we are once again on the threshold of a new year and I wish to take this opportunity to wish you a happy NEW you.
In the world of zen there is a wonderful story of beginners mind. In the beginners mind there are many opportunities, in the experts mind there are few.
What this means for me is that we are always starting over again and we are able to embrace each moment with what is described as skilful means as we experience NOW for the first time. Here’s a story that I hope you enjoy.
A man was walking through the jungle when suddenly a tiger pounced out of the trees. The man ran and guess what, he came to the end of the path and was standing at a cliff edge.
The man turned and looked back and the tiger was leaping towards him. The man jumped over the cliff and on the way down caught on to a vine. As he swung on the vine, he looked up and saw the tiger and then he looked down and lo and behold he saw two tigers. He looked at the vine and there was two mice, a black mouse and a white mouse both gnawing away at the vine. From the corner of his eye, he saw a branch and on the end of the branch was a wild berry. He reached out and plucked the berry and popped it in his mouth.
It was the sweetest most delicious berry he had ever tasted.
The moral of the story is that when we look back into our past you will find a tiger (worry) and when we look into the future we see two tigers (anxiety) but this moment is the sweetest most delicious moment just like the berry. I hope you enjoy each moment of your precious life. Wishing you a Happy New year and a Happy NEW you!

Frank Liddy, Lead Mindfulness Practitioner for Inspire Professional Services | B.A, A.Dip.
About Frank Liddy
Frank has worked in the community care voluntary mental health sector for over twenty-five years and currently delivers Mindfulness Programmes for Inspire.
He is the founding Director of the Belfast Mindfulness Centre, co-founder of Compassion City Belfast and Northern Ireland’s representative for The Mindfulness Initiative.
Frank studied mindfulness at the University of Wales and is a qualified integrative humanistic Counsellor and holds certificate of registration for NI social care Council.
As well as teaching mindfulness compassion through the life-long learning programme at Queen’s University Belfast, he has also successfully delivered experiential and practice-based training programmes to mental health and allied professionals working in psychiatry, nursing, social work and the criminal justice system.
This series of #MindfulnessMonday is kindly supported by Inspire Wellbeing and the Change Your Mind programme. Change Your Mind It is a joint programme run by Inspire and the Public Health Agency. It is Northern Ireland’s regional campaign to tackle stigma and discrimination around mental health. They are funded by Comic Relief and work in partnership with a range of organisations and community networks across Northern Ireland.
They are a grassroots campaign shaped by the collaboration of communities, organisations and individuals who are championing the message against mental health stigma across society – a campaign for people, driven by people. Read more here.