Company number 17530192. That is Bee Mindful Together CIC, registered at Companies House in October 2026. After years of chanting Daimoku, I finally have a company, and the idea I’ve carried for so long is finally coming together.
A number that took years
A company number is a small, dry thing. It is a string of digits on a public register. But for me it holds years. I started chanting in my early forties, with SGI, the community I still practise with, and I have kept going since. The registration didn’t arrive because I chanted the right number of times. Chanting is how I kept going while it took the time it took.
Bee Mindful Together is the meeting place growing out of that idea, what I’d call a mindfulness hub, starting in Bradford and aiming to grow nationwide. It isn’t open yet. There is no door to walk through today. What exists now is the company, and the intention behind it.
It is being built from experience, by someone who walked through hell and is still walking out of it. In my drinking years I lied to people, manipulated them and did very bad things. Long before that, I had learned to lie to put off punishment. I have used soup kitchens and food banks, and now I volunteer in kitchens for homeless people. I know that table from the other side, and I want to help others regain what they lost. Volunteering taught me patience and not judging, though it took time. In the “New Year’s Gosho”, written to the wife of Omosu, Nichiren says of hell and the Buddha: “Closer examination, however, reveals that both exist in our five-foot body.” A few lines later he adds: “In the same way, the Buddha dwells within our hearts.” Hell wasn’t somewhere I escaped from once and for all. It was a state I lived in, and it stays possible. The same life turned out to hold something else too. That human revolution, changing from the inside, is what I want the meeting place to share.
When I meet with fellow SGI members, we recite Gongyo together, which includes verses from the “Life Span” chapter of the Lotus Sutra. At home I chant Daimoku. In that chapter the Buddha says: “At all times I think to myself: / How can I cause living beings / to gain entry into the unsurpassed way / and quickly acquire the body of a Buddha?”
What Daimoku is
In Nichiren Buddhism, Daimoku is the practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Myoho-renge-kyo is the title of the Lotus Sutra, and Nam expresses devotion to it. For Nichiren, that title also names the truth inside every life. In “On Attaining Buddhahood in This Lifetime” he writes: “This truth is Myoho-renge-kyo.” The phrase is, at its simplest, devotion to that truth, spoken out loud, again and again.
Nichiren Daishonin, the thirteenth-century Japanese teacher whose letters shape this practice, compared it to cleaning a mirror. In “On Attaining Buddhahood in This Lifetime”, written in 1255 to Toki Jōnin, he says: “Arouse deep faith, and diligently polish your mirror day and night. How should you polish it? Only by chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.” I like that the image is about polishing, not buying. Nothing is added to the mirror. The dust just comes off, a little each day.
Winter, and the long wait
The letter I come back to most is a short one. In 1275 Nichiren wrote to the lay nun Myōichi, a widow raising children alone, a letter now called “Winter Always Turns to Spring”. In it he writes: “Those who believe in the Lotus Sutra are as if in winter, but winter always turns to spring.”
He wasn’t writing to someone who was succeeding. He was writing to someone in the middle of hardship. That is why it speaks to me. The letter doesn’t promise when the spring comes. It only says it comes.
Suffer, enjoy, keep chanting
Waiting is where it is easiest to give up, and where the second letter matters most. In 1276 Nichiren wrote to his follower Shijō Kingo, in a letter known as “Happiness in This World”: “Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life, and continue chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, no matter what happens.”
I read that as permission not to pretend. Some days are suffering. Some days are joy. Neither one is the signal to stop. Today is a joyful day, and the instruction is the same as on the hard ones: keep chanting.
Chanting and sitting still
Chanting isn’t my only practice. I also meditate. The two feel different to me. Chanting is sound and rhythm, something I do out loud. Meditation is quiet, a way of watching what the mind does when nothing is asked of it.
Other traditions point at the same effort in their own words. In the Theravada collection called the Dhammapada, verse 276 (translated by Acharya Buddharakkhita) says: “You yourselves must strive; the Buddhas only point the way.” And Jesus, in Matthew 7:7 (KJV): “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Each says it differently, and I keep them separate. What they share, for me, is that the walking is ours to do.
Spur yourself on
A registered company isn’t the end of anything. It is a beginning, and beginnings need the most effort. In 1279, again to Shijō Kingo, in “The Strategy of the Lotus Sutra”, Nichiren writes: “Spur yourself to muster the power of faith.” That is the line I’m taking forward. The meeting place still has to be built, starting in Bradford, step by step, without promising anything it isn’t yet.
A question for you
I believe in Daimoku. Not because it delivered a company, but because it kept me going until the company could exist. What is the idea you’ve been carrying through your own winter, and what keeps you going while you wait for spring?