My life changed…
when I allowed lightness.
when I let myself harvest the fruits.
when I acknowledged my work.
when I appreciated my own journey. Every step of it.
For a long time something was missing in my life and I could not grasp what it was.
Until I found it within myself. This female role model that puts me at ease.
See your blocks. Face them.
Explore your emotions. Live them.
Appreciate your experience. Take it in.Be proud of who you are. No matter what.
What’s the worst that can happen?
You might start living your life.
“I want it to be easy!” – I’m punching my pillow.
“Let it be hard!” – An internal voice releases my vigor.
Recently I’ve made some tough decisions. And for a moment I fell for the panic, the doubt and the despair…
Until I remembered:
In order to live an exceptional life we get to make exceptional decisions. Decisions no one has ever made before, because no one has ever walked in our shoes…
Decisions that move our life path away from the “crowd”.
It is tough. It brings up fears of rejection, of loss or of poverty.
But you know what?
It’s part of the game!
This is what unleashes the wild self within!
This is what strengthens our resolve!
I want to encourage you:
DO the step you are so scared of but you kept pondering for years.
MOVE where destiny is calling you.
YOU know it. No one else.
No fortune teller can tell you what to do.
Only you are in charge.
And this is not a top-to-bottom advice of some sort.
I encourage myself too with a livin’ prayer. 😉
It’s easy to talk about it.
It is freakin’ hard to WALK it!!
The path no one has walked before.
Your path.
It’s easy to learn a lot of things but actually putting them into action: this is the hard part! Yes. It is hard and it is beautiful.
It’s, without a doubt, the most satisfying thing in the world.
Focus.
Dive deeper.
Quench the thirst.
Extract the essence.
Grow like moss.
Absorb the nutrients.
Receive what is being fed.
I just had an interesting revelation about now.
To respond to life means to respond to now.
This is what it means to take responsibility for my own life.
For some reason I always projected responsibility outwards to some point in the future.
This caused distress in my life, because it enforces constant worry about the future.
How will I take responsibility for my life?
What does this question actually mean?!
There is no right answer.
The moment to respond to life is now.
What can I do now?
Everything else is projection.
And by projecting some potential outcome into the future I’m giving away control.
And this is what I suffer from every so often….
For the past couple of days I’ve been pondering the question: “How am I in control of my life?”
The answer is: By being present! That’s it.
It is so simple. And it is such a relief….
I realized it on my walk this morning. I have neglected these walks, but this morning I understood how much it helps me to arrive.
If I don’t arrive I will never be able to take responsibility. The phrase “taking responsibility” is actually misleading, because I can’t take responsibility.
I can only respond to life. Now.
The harvest is over. Now what?
Preserve, prepare and offer.
It’s time to bear the fruit and
present it to the world.
The winds of change are blowing strong these days…
It’s a good time to, finally, share another moment with you.
Slowly I’m swallowing my own medicine. I find wisdom in pain.
“Nobody’s wise who doesn’t know darkness.”
This quote by Hermann Hesse has been hanging on my wall for a couple of years now.
Only now, I understood its fundamental meaning:
I don’t overcome darkness.
I embody it.
This is basically what I have been practicing with this blog. And what I have been recovering over and over again:
Pain wants to tell me something. It is here for me and not against me.
I’m doing integration work.
I find wisdom in pain – and not despite the pain.
I integrate what is – and not what’s supposed to be.
This is called tantra in the widest sense.
I expand by integrating what is there.
What I integrate has been a part of me ever since – a part that I neglected for the longest time. A dark part.
A dark part of my psyche, of my physical body or of my emotional body that I would prefer to hide.
Instead of facing it I tend to set goals, aim higher, dig for more…
“The dark days will be over, if….,” for a very long time I fell for this hedonistic idea.
They are not. They never will be. Because there is always the next step, the next goal, the next thread that fills my heart and head with worry if I let it.
The dark days will never be over, because “the suffering is endless” to say it with the words of Viktor Frankl, author of the fundamental work “Man’s search for meaning”.
Frankl himself a Auschwitz-survivor describes the psychological states of KZ-inmates, which build the fundation for his psychological discipline called logotherapy.
This book translates the wisdom of suffering in a way that is so touching, so precise and so vital – I think every person in the world should read it.
What’s so special about it?
Psychologist and KZ-survivor Frankl transcends misery into hope and retrieves life energy, the life force – ‘the mystical’ that is all around and within us….
‘From mysery to mystery’ – Frankl uncovers the truth of life hidden in a disastrous part of history that we prefer not to think of.
The example of Frankl might be extreme, but the wisdom to be found in this book is applicable to all of our lives:
The earlier we accept that suffering is a part of our lives the more lightness we will find.
What most of us close our eyes from: Our pain is here to teach us something. (I wrote about pain so many times on this blog.)
There is an energy stored in suffering. And that energy wants to be transformed into acts of courage, hope and strong belief in life.
And that is roughly what Frankl describes as the motors of survival, even under devastating circumstances like enduring a concentration camp.
Nothing will ever be solved completely.
There is always some hidden grief. Some deep sadness or collective trauma that is stored in our cells, tissue or memory.
What we can do is: Meet ourselves and the ones around us with compassion.
This is how we befriend darkness and find purpose.
Ride the wave of gratitude
and then land.
Plant the seeds.
Nurture them and see them grow.
Say YES to your unfulfillment.
OPEN yourself up.
LEARN forward.