When it comes to bad experiences, everyone must have experienced them or been through them. No one wants to remember them or want them to happen to us again. But why do the things we fear, the things that made us fail or regret, have to come back and hurt us again and again?
“The reason we keep getting disappointed is because we don’t learn from it and don’t do anything differently from what happened.”
Joan Jandai is another person who has experienced many disappointments. He tells us that we can all be teachers to ourselves because we can learn from these experiences.
For Joan Jandai, he chose to use his own direct experience of pain from being looked down upon and humiliated by others as a basis for learning. He chose to face those feelings patiently, absorbed every feeling that arose, and carefully reflected on his thoughts until he discovered that those pains did not actually exist.
This allows him to improve himself to become a new person, happier and more enjoyable to live with a much more open perspective. This allows him to understand people, understand the world, and be able to live in it. He can also offer ways to change the world to make it more beautiful and livable.
“Bad experiences are also teachers who teach us the hardest lessons.”
Over the years, Jon Jandai has focused on and believed in self-reliance. He established Suan Panpan , a self-reliance learning center. Here, there are activities to learn about self-reliance, such as learning how to build a mud house to live in, collecting seeds of local plants that are becoming increasingly extinct, and learning about organic farming to create food security.
At Suan Panpan , Jon Jandai uses this as a place to share his knowledge of self-reliance, as well as his stories and ideas to inspire people in society who want and want to live a good life by facing everything that comes into their lives with their own two hands.
But before Joan Jandai could get to this point, he had to go through many bad experiences and bad stories as well. Let’s follow his story to see how he got through these things.
When life has to face a big challenge
Jon Jandai grew up in a village in Yasothon Province. The lives of the villagers there were not complicated. They lived a simple life by farming and finding raw materials from the forest and streams to cook for their daily living.
Joan tells us that growing up in such a way of life made him full of self-belief, until later when so-called civilization crept into the village, little by little changes began to change the way people lived.
“When the first television came into the village, the word poverty came. To solve poverty, money was needed. From then on, I began to see that the villagers worked harder than ever. My neighbor was the first to wake up at 4 am and arrive in the forest just in time for dawn. He then started clearing the forest to plant hemp. After planting hemp for 2-3 years, he earned money to buy a motorbike and a television. That was the turning point that made society and the community change rapidly because everyone wanted a television, everyone wanted a motorbike. People started working harder, competing to earn money. From then on, the fun and proud life disappeared.”
These changes are forcing many young people to leave their hometowns and seek work in big cities. Joan is no different. Responsibilities of life and family have forced him to leave his village to seek work in Bangkok, a city that is very different from his hometown.
And there, Joan had to face the humiliation and class discrimination, such as working-class people like him and many of his friends being aliens in the capital. In his opinion, this was an indescribable cruelty. The feeling of inferiority slowly ate at the heart of the Isaan man, and this was a challenge in a way that he had never faced before in his life.
An important step towards standing up and facing the situation
Because of the pain from being looked down on and humiliated, it pushed Jon Jandai to decide to keep the pain in his heart and learn to live in a world that made him feel insecure in a new way. What he chose to do was to confront the society that hurt him directly.
“We will not run away from it. We will face the shame to the fullest extent.”
“So I wore a torn shirt, flip-flops of different colors on each foot, and a torn farmer’s hat. I got on a bus in Bangkok. When I got on, people would step back and look at me out of the corner of their eyes. I felt like, why are people so afraid of me when I have nothing? It shows that other people are more afraid than me. They just hide their fear better than me. They have more clothes, looks, and assets than me, but they are afraid of me who has nothing. So I felt it was strange. Even though other people are more afraid than me, why do I feel worse than other people?”
This is what Joan saw, and when he decided to face it head-on, Joan said that what he experienced became even clearer. He still felt ashamed of the eyes of those who looked down on him, but this time he didn’t hide anymore, to learn that feeling, to the end, how would it affect him in the end?
“At that moment, I noticed the embarrassment that happened to me. I felt so embarrassed, my face went numb, my hair stood on end. My emotions told me that I had to run away, that I had to stop doing this crazy thing. No one said I was normal, they said I was crazy. But I didn’t run away. I wanted to continue living. I wanted to know if I would die if I was embarrassed to the max. When I thought about it like that, I faced it. Finally, when my emotions rose to the point that I could hardly stand it, it made me understand the phrase “embarrassed to the point of wanting to bury myself in the ground.” When I really faced it, I understood what it was like to be embarrassed to the point of not knowing where to put my face.”
Until he had to live with that feeling to a certain point, he discovered a new feeling that changed him into a different person and never went back to being the same person again.
“But when the embarrassment peaked, it went down. When it went down, I felt that it was normal. Other people looking at me with contempt was their business. It was none of my business. When I thought about it this way, it was good. After a while, the embarrassment came back and went down again. It went up and down like this until I saw my emotions and realized that the embarrassment and fear that I had were nothing. They were just things that my emotions created. When I didn’t run away from it, I told myself that it would go down in a while. When I did this often, I didn’t pay any attention to it.”
And this is the important learning process in the life of Joan Jandai.
Reflect and ponder
From that experience, Joan Jandai saw the importance of standing up and facing his own feelings. He took the feelings from his first-hand experience and reflected on them, crystallizing them into a new way of life that changed his perception of the world forever.
“After that, I used confrontation as an important weapon to change my whole life. Whether it was fear, dislike, or hate, I lived with it all. If I was afraid, it meant that I didn’t understand. If I hated it, it meant that I didn’t understand it either. If I liked it, it meant that I didn’t understand it either. Because if I understood, I would see both sides, both good and bad. I would see it as normal, not blindly obsessed. I wasn’t so afraid or hated that I didn’t want to see it again. If I felt that way, it meant that I hadn’t seen it yet. I didn’t understand the feeling.”
Joan Jandai told us that understanding is the most important thing because if we understand, it will make us relax, feel normal, not push away, not be fascinated by anything and not be afraid. Understanding makes fear disappear or decrease. That makes him think differently from others in that he does not seek anything in this life. He does not seek money, fame, or property. But he seeks understanding because understanding makes him feel free, light, comfortable and very open.
Extending learning
Joan Jandai told us, “Ordinary people think that working more than others is a disadvantage. But in fact, from his perspective, it gives us an advantage because we gain more skills. When he worked in Bangkok, he worked more than others, but other people said he was stupid.”
But Joan felt that it was okay to think that way. But she felt that she had to train herself. When he went to work in a restaurant, the boss was very bad. He cursed at him and threw things at him all the time. Joan would smile at him even though he cursed at her. She still smiled to train her mind. Training her body and mind all the time made Joan understand the meaning of living.
“We have a duty to take care of ourselves, not others.”
These lifelong experiences have given him a clear perspective on learning, that action and reflection on the experiences gained are the most important for personal development, which is a never-ending learning.
“Money robs us of the opportunity to learn, robs us of the opportunity to understand, because every time we spend money, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to understand.”
Joan gave us an example: “For example, if I want to eat food and I go to buy food, I lose the opportunity to practice my cooking skills. I lose the opportunity to learn what is edible and what is not. So if I spend money to buy everything every time, my potential will decrease and I will become more vulnerable in this cruel world.”
Therefore, if we spend less money, spend only when necessary, it will increase our potential. The potential to be self-reliant will make us more stable and secure than those who do not have the potential to help themselves, especially in times of crisis.
Conclusion
“Because a good life doesn’t come easy. Everyone has to go through difficult things.”
The story of Joan Jandai shows that the learning process and past experiences of all of us, no matter how bad or how small, can still be used to change our perspectives, thinking methods, and behaviors for the better.
The story is based on an interview with Joan Jandai.
From the Transformative Learning Project
Supported by the Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth)
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Kru Lek – Phatrawadi Meechuthan Learning is not limited to the classroom. We can also learn from what we like.
