Don’t dream about the destination but enjoy your views.
Keep walking even though the trail gets narrow at times.
The conditions might change.
Intimidated by the fog you doubt the path.You may have to double check your map – make small adjustments.
Sometimes you might have to go back and change the route completely.
Or you have to drop weight because the load gets too heavy.The secret is to start every day with the first step.
It’s up to you either to resign – puzzled and paralyzed.
Or to keep calm, to settle within, to study the weather conditions. To adjust and equip and keep walking.
Don’t let the circumstances scare you. Be well aware and well prepared for change.
Let awe and admiration guide you, not dread and doubt or agitation.
This is perseverance. This is the path.
Change Of Thinking
What Would Happen To Your Life If You Turned All The “Shoulds” Into “Dos”?
What would happen if you would pursue the thing you are the most interested in? What if you would choose the one thing you really want to have learnt at the end of your life?
Just imagine it for a moment. How would you feel? And now imagine you wouldn’t pursue this goal?
Yeah, you might fail. Yeah, maybe you will loose all your money, but what if you wouldn’t ever have tried?
What is holding you back from doing it? Is the voice in your head telling you that you don’t have time? You are not good enough? You were never good at it? You don’t have money? You are too old? Your friends won’t like you anymore?
“Your thoughts become your reality.” Yeah right, we’ve heard this a hundred of times.
Only now I understand how fundamental this impact is. If I think negative about myself, if I don’t trust myself, if I continuously think I’m not good enough I will never achieve anything. I will never feel content or satisfied with myself.
More than that: Self-hatred is what manifests. If I don’t change these thoughts I will never manifest self-worth. This is something I have to generate from the core of myself.
You might ask: ‘What does self-worth have to do with pursuing your passion?’
Everything! I have an example for this: Since some time I’m offering coaching in the field of my profession. I give storytelling and video production workshops.
But the beginning was rough. I thought “I’m not good enough.”, “What if I don’t have an answer to all the questions?” The first time I was really fucking nervous. I thought I can never master this. I can never carry the audience. I can never teach anything.
Now, nearly two years later I did it five times and my perspective changed completely.
The other day one girl from a course last year honoured me with the best compliment I’ve ever received in my entire life: “I learnt from you because you are so passionate about it.”
What did I do? I helped her editing a video. Together we shortened a four minute clip to 40 seconds. She told me the way I did it was so inspiring – so calm, with patience and sure instinct.
This blew my mind.
How did I get there? Yes, I learnt the software in university. Yes, I did a lot of internships. What happened? I just liked it. I started to experiment. I edited as much as I could and over the years snipping moving images became a second nature.
But how did this happen? I liked editing, so I edited.
“Make your passion your addiction.”
Now that I write it down here it sounds like a romantic life story. But I tell you what: There are dozens of skills I haven’t started learning yet, because I think I’m not good enough.
How could I not understand this? It is just about doing it. Doing one step at a time. Of course you are not a Mozart from the moment you are starting to compose music and you are not a Picasso the first time you wield the paintbrush. But you are getting there eventually (or at least a bit closer).
Your mind will find thousands of reasons not to aim for the things you really want to do. Is it a lack of money or talent. There will always be something else to do. Something more convenient, something easier or socially more accepted.
The secret is to just get started, to do the first step, to make space for the things you like, to make your passion your priority.
And what happens if you do something you like? You feel joy. So why not make it your addiction?
Make Your Passion Your Priority
Yesterday I was speaking with some people about this topic. There was a guy who just went through a similar learning experience like me.
Our question was: “What do people do differently who are always on ‘doer mode’?” Or my interpretation: What do people do differently who immerse fully in an activity? What do they do to not have these big walls of self-doubt? How do they make the critic shut up?
The secret is that they just follow their intuition. They don’t listen to these voices in their head.
And – if we want to hear it or not – we have the choice if we listen to the voices in our head or not.
What would happen if you would turn all the “I should’s” into “I do’s”? Your life might finally moves into the direction you want. You might discover joy within yourself.
If anybody tells you “follow your passion” is bullshit please don’t believe them.
Go on! “Follow your bliss” as Joseph Campbell would say.
“Finding your passion is the natural outgrowth of healing.”
Margaret Paul, Psychologist
Find your bliss or you will never find joy in your life. Be as passionate as you want. But be passionate. Make it your life mission. What else is this life about?
Life is about feeling alive. So do what makes you feel the most alive.
If you have other suggestions let me know. I’m open minded, but I prefer to do what makes me feel most alive rather than anything else.
“It is not a luxury to pursue this experience [passion], but a necessity. Without this special experience that gives meaning to our lives we tend to wander about, aimlessly looking for someone, something, or some substance to fill the void within us.,” says Margaret Paul. The author of the book I’m studying currently. It is called “Healing Your Aloneness: Finding Love and Wholeness Through Your Inner Child.”
When we are passionate we forget our problems. We are in the flow. We feel content. We get in touch with our true nature. If we manage to fully immerse in an activity there is no future and no past. We arrive in the present moment.
Is there anything healthier in this life than this feeling? I doubt it. By not pursuing our passion, we exist, but do we live? Come on…
Please double check your “I should’s”, your “I always wanted’s” and your “As a kid I always liked to do’s”.
It is up to you to fuel what you are passionate about.
If you can’t find anything it is might be a sign that you are caught up in self-hatred. Then this is might be something you want to deal with?
Go on. Aim for healing, but be nice to you. Give yourself time. Whenever you are impatient ask yourself, why you are in such a hurry to get through your life.
Be patient. Feed your body and nourish your soul and the rest will come.
Start with small changes. Surround yourself with people who do something completely else then you are doing. Get inspired. Don’t resign the battle.
Observe. Soak in the positive vibes of the people who found their bliss – without envy or resentment.
Just be happy to have the chance to be a part of it.
Go ahead and find your happy place!
“The ego is concerned with getting something while the inner self is creating. In this way creation is the motor for unconditional love. “
The Magic of Observation
It was one of those early summer days in the beginning of June. I went for an extensive walk to cherish the long afternoons.
The sky was clear and the sun still gentile over the hilltop of this tiny village in Tuscany that I called my home at this point in time.
I passed a field of barley. Effortlessly the ears were dancing in the wind. In awe I watched this spectacle.
The ears were not thinking about the direction they were moving. They seemed to be touched by the essence of life itself.
I noticed the trees swinging in conjunction with the grain. The sun was showing her last warm rays of the day. It seemed like the whole environment was in peaceful communion.
Watching this organic play soothed my turbulent mind. All of a sudden I was projected into the present moment.
And this is what observation does. It maneuvers us into the presence.
What happens when we observe?
It forces us into the now, because the object we look at can only be in the now.
Observation doesn’t allow yearning for the future or longing for the past.
Registration doesn’t allow judgement. We detach from opinions and assumptions. It holds us back from overinterpreting.
What happens if we look long enough?
We are able to create a gap between us and our reality.
Looking longer allows us to get a new perspective on something.
If we look deep into the things we discover something new. We discover the details. We discover the edges of something – or the softness.
We discover the things that are invisible. And eventually the blur clears. And this is how we reach a new layer of consciousness.
We get to see the world how it really is. By observation we see the real connection, the real relation of things – without unnecessary entanglements.
We are giving up the power of our mind. By giving up this power we start to not-control things anymore.
We finally get to relax. But first we need to sit still. Without stillness we will never be able to create this gap that allows us to be the observer.
The registration of ‘what is’ directs our actions in the right way.
By observing we find out that we don’t have to react all the time. It is a way of meditation.
We can go with the flow just like the cereal ears.
Inspired by Nyanaponika, buddhist monk for 57 years.
The Lonesome Warriors
We are throwing ourselves out there.
We are growing deep roots while reaching out for eternal connection.We challenge the current state by challenging our own convenience.
With reverence not with resistance we are breaking down our own walls.We rip ourselves apart to give you a clear sight to the core of human nature. Mind-stretching and heart-opening we elevate the planet’s vibration.
Questions are our weapons, discomfort our means of transport and unconditional love our fuel. Our vulnerability is what makes us invincible.
We are the lonesome warriors fighting for existence.
With every barrier we break the battlefield extends. What we conquer is consciousness – layer after layer.
There is no way back – only forward.
Let’s team up and be the change.
Head In The Clouds
The map is laid open.
The land is free.
There is only love and security.
I’m a part of the net, a part of the whole.
There is no way to take control.
There is only life – no questions no doubts.
So I lift my head up – up into the clouds.
Beyond Pain Lies Compassion
Okay – as this is a writing experiment I’m going to be brave today on “Day Two” of my “Writing Transformation Challenge”. Straight out of my notes from this morning:
How to do the work? How to look at life with compassion and fearlessness?
It means to look at ALL situations as part of THE enlightenment (process). More precisely: All situations ARE enlightenment.
The transformation takes place if we use all situations.
It doesn’t matter if the water is hot or cold. It doesn’t matter if we sleep alone or in a room with 20 people. It doesn’t matter if we call anything material our own or not.
The transformation takes place as soon as we are no longer afraid to lose it all.
Uncomfortable situations are our means of transport in order to accept / embody our non-being / detachment. But for this we have to give up our comfort.
We have to lose our necessities, our desires, our pride. Because all these things are trivial. They are rooted in our ego. And our ego keeps us trapped.
As long as we are wanting to ‘receive’ we only feed our ego. Why? Because this is the wrong focus.
We receive nothing before we are connecting with the warmth of compassion, the warmth of unconditional love, because this is compassion. We receive when we give. And I mean really give – without expecting any reward.
When we are able to shine our light even though we just went through the deepest emotional pain, this is when we reached unconditional love.
We are able to shine our light when all the masks are falling. If we are unmasking all the lies we are telling ourselves.
As long as we are looking for protection we cling to our desires and we are closing ourselves off from compassion – the true source of energy.
Of course I’m writing this all from the perspective of a westerner. I have in fact nothing to worry about. But exactly because of this I have to be willing to give it all up. It is my obligation to go further, because other people can’t. They are born into oppression, poverty or starvation.
Compassion for all beings includes compassion for our own selves.
You may ask: But how can I be compassionate with myself?! If this is your question (as it is mine) you are still a victim to the wrong ideals. You didn’t take the time to find what nourishes you.
You are still ‘not there’. You haven’t opened the door yet. The real door is still closed and you are hoping for ‘release’ from the external.
This release doesn’t come as long as you are lying to yourself. As long as you chase and rush and hustle you get blinded by superficiality.
I chose the path. I saw too much. I felt too much. I can’t ‘go back’.
This is why I reply ‘I really don’t know’ when somebody asks me ‘What do you want?’.
I’m not doing this ‘for fun’. I’m not running away.
What I know is that this is not about me.
It’s about us.
Getting in touch with our fears is something we are forced to. We are facing loss, illness and physical pain. From the moment we are born we are used to suffering.
The secret is to re-discover the compassion that connects and comforts us all – behind the pain.
The pain is only one side of the coin. The other is compassion.
‘To free ourselves from all fear we must touch the ground of our being and train ourselves to look directly into the light of compassion.’, says Thich Nhat Hanh.
The real question is not: How to overcome the pain, but how to find compassion beyond the pain?
Morning Conversations
Good morning human,
who? Yes, you!
How are you today? You don’t know? You look worried. What’s up? Is the future scaring you? Don’t worry it does only look threatening from the distance. And what are you carrying on your shoulders? Oh, it’s the past. Drop it, it’s too heavy. You don’t need it as long as you stay with me.
Why don’t you leave it where it is? It will get heavier and heavier. You can’t move on like this.
Please human, why can’t you see that you have everything right here?
And why are you in such a hurry? Yeah right, slow down a bit. Take a look around. It’s nice here in the present moment. Can you see the blue of the sky? The green of the trees? This planet is here – for you too. And what are you doing? You are creating your own reality instead of appreciating this one.
The light breeze that plays in the tree tops. It is the same breeze that gives you your life energy.
I invite you to take it all in. As deep as you can. Every moment you are invited. You want to meet me more often? Don’t forget to breathe, because it is your mean of transport.
My door is always open for you. I’m here for you.The past is gone. You can remember her, she is a close friend of mine too. But we never get to meet.
And the future? Well, I’m paving your way. If you walk with me I will guide you. You want to see a map? Well, maps are something you invented. You don’t need it. All you need is to trust me.
I will hand you the right tools, I will prepare you. I will show you the direction. But only if you take the time to stay with me.
What’s up? I can see you rushing again. Only by watching you I get dizzy. You are getting lost.
Please take a moment to inhale deeply. As deeep as you can. And now again and again and again.
Here we go. Do you notice something?
Stay present, stay here.
Where are you going.
Don’t disappear.
I’m always here for you.
“The Now”
Reclaiming Happiness
On a random morning a little girl grabbed my hand in the hallway. She was neither my daughter nor related to me in any other way. “Mama, unten”, she pulled my arm pointing down the stairway in anticipation. Her mom was waiting for her in front of the door together with her sister. We proceeded down the stairs with care. It took a few minutes until her mother could welcome us with a warm smile.
A “dankeschön” from this two-year-old and the blink of gratefulness in the eyes of her mother would make this start of the day a special one.
These little fingers squeezing my hands reminded me of what real happiness is. It is connection. It is understanding. It is trust. It is this feeling of being in the right place at the right time.
Happiness is being in the flow. It is merging into the presence. Being one with the moment – without any obligations. It is a moment of unity in this highly individualized world.
When was the last time you experienced a moment like this?
In Wrong Pursuit of Happiness
How many times are we wrapped up in our head? In our personal reality?
We are busy ticking off to-do-lists, achieving the next career level, finding the right partner or financial investment. We network, we ‘do business’, we socialize, but are we happy? Are we really connecting with each other? Or are we so caught up in our bright future?
“We have been taught that freedom is the freedom to pursue our petty, trivial desires. Real freedom is freedom from our petty, trivial desires.” I stumbled upon this quote the other day. Adam Curtis is talking about addiction here, but isn’t our obsession of pursuing material (or immaterial) wealth also some kind of addiction?
Instead of pursuing our real needs we are misleading ourselves with substitutions.
Are We Slaves to Our Desires?
We mistaken ‘fulfilling our petty trivial desires’ with ‘happiness’. And this is what makes us feel discontent: As long as we are only longing for satisfaction we are pursuing happiness from an ego perspective.
What do I mean by that? We are compensating our search for meaning / figuring out what we really want with substitutions. ‘Making a living’ on this planet seems to be a very big issue for us whereas an ant can easily subsist.
But ants are might be a topic for another article. Back to us: Pursuing our desires – that means we value what is ‘of use’ for us. With this attempt we bound our ability to connect with the people around us. And where we are meant to find connection we are closing ourselves off.
This is addictive behavior. All we do is consuming fast food for our soul. We fill ourselves, but we don’t nourish us. We are so busy ‘creating’ ourselves that we don’t conceive that we are already here. We think we are freeing ourselves, but in reality we trap ourselves.
Everything that is accessible has to be achieved as fast as possible. Delay of gratification outworn its significance in our society. Like an addict always looking for the next thrill we blur our senses.
In the end our desire ‘to be happy’ is what holds us back from being happy.
The Circle of Happiness
What we don’t understand is that we find happiness only by connecting with each other in the real world. Life is what happens in the hallway or on the street or at the dinner table. Life is real time experience.
The circle of happiness starts in the presence. It starts with being aware of the small moments. Being ready to connect with the outside world and the people around us at any moment in time.
Instead of aiming for a certain lifestyle we should re-discover our true values: sharing love, cultivating a sense of community, being ‘there’ for each other. ‘Creating ourselves’ should be replaced with ‘self-care’ or ‘creating healthy relationships’. This is what makes us happy.
It seems like the circle of happiness becomes a thing on this blog.
Learning to Unlearn
At the beginning of this blog in summer 2017 I thought this is all about ‘learning’. My aim was to expand my toolbox in order to be more productive, more balanced, more happy (Whatever that meant to me at this point in time.). I thought: “If I’d just learnt this lifehack.” “If I’d just be able to master my mind like successful person xy.”, everything would be perfect.
I failed adapting most of productivity hacks. I couldn’t develop these ‘healthy routines’ that supposedly would project an undreamt-of-degree of happiness into my life. Nothing improved. I might got slightly more stuff done, but my overall well-being hadn’t improved. And: I didn’t have the slightest idea how I wanted to feel.
“Why do you only think black and white?”, my therapist during this time called upon my lacking self-compassion. I didn’t have a proper answer. There was only this massive wall of perfectionism sealing off my potential. I could touch it, but I didn’t know how to demolish it.
I had to dig deeper. This was for sure. What I found was a lot of pain buried deep down under my obsessive will to ‘improve myself’. Under the pain there were my strengths downtrodden by my negative thinking patterns and destructive behaviours.
My mission was not to add something to my personality, but to reveal my individual traits. These characteristics are my weapons. These are the tools that help me to fulfill my purpose in this world. Happiness or let’s call it contentment is what comes naturally with accepting and integrating these peculiarities.
My task in this lifetime is to eradicate toxic habits in order to root up my real me. This requires commitment and courage. I can’t just ‘adapt’ other peoples methods of being productive, creative or self-disciplined. I have to develop my own strategies.
What I found out was that my bad habits and my thinking-patterns are not my own. I adopted them. I’m conditioned to think in a certain way. I’m conditioned to judge, to react, to be afraid. The good news is: I have the power to change.
But how? How do I unlearn? How do I re-condition? By pausing. By observing and by questioning my behaviour and my thoughts. The following to-do’s are not necessarily consecutive, they are interdependent. You will understand why:
1. Observe Your Behaviour
The first step in our process of unlearning is to observe. By observing we create a gap between us and our actions. Things change aggregate state as soon as we look at them. Habits lose their power as soon as we catch them unattended. They move from a subconscious level to consciousness.
This is something we can integrate into our daily life. “Again I wasted my energy for some stupid shit.” So what? This realization is the type of observation we need in order to create a gap.
It doesn’t only apply to actions, but also to thoughts. If the immoderate perfectionism is lurking, we just ask him what he wants. And there it is again: The gap. As soon as you look right into the eyes of your perfectionism it loses its power.
2. Detach From Your Conditions
If I keep telling myself “Stop this stupid perfectionism” I’m narrowing this gap again. I become a victim of the characteristic that I want to eliminate.
By punishing myself my mind becomes my enemy again. My whole body gets tight. I’m falling into subconscious behaviour.
The only option is “to let go”, to detach from it. To not see it as my trait, but as something that occurs every now and then. This way I look at my supposedly mistakes and surrender. If I take them lightly I don’t get trapped again.
3. Question Your Desires
Questioning became my tool to explore my needs and get to the core of my being. I found out that I can’t know what I want, but I can feel it – if I ask honest questions and take the time to find the answer.
To stay with the example of poisonous perfectionism: I asked myself. “Why am I such a perfectionist?”. The answer is that I’m not allowing myself mistakes, because I’m afraid to not be lovable. So, the desire under my desire to be perfect is to be loved. This reveals a complete different need. My need is not to be perfect, but to be loved.
More and more it becomes obvious why all my attempts to live happily failed. By following all these notions and desires blindly I distracted myself. I cured the symtoms, but I didn’t try to heal myself.
4. Connect With Yourself
I didn’t question if what I wanted was what I really wanted or just what I was told to be wanting or what I thought could fix my lack of self-esteem.
I wanted to become somebody instead of accepting who I am. I was not able to connect with myself and find out about my real qualities. It is not possible to find purpose anywhere else apart from at the very core of my being.
5. Alter Your Habits
There is always this thin line between not being too hard on myself and becoming the person who I want to be. But after all it is inevitable to start walking on the tight-rope of self-improvement.
In order to unlearn we need to be willing to change. That’s the only reason why we should look at our behaviours, question them, detach from them and finally connect with ourselves. The next step is to do what is good for you – for your real you. And then DO IT. Alter it. Don’t do what doesn’t serve you anymore…. (I know, it’s harder said than done, but it is possible by making conscious choices!).
Through this whole procedure we reach a complete new layer of consciousness. This is how we are diving into the unknown – how we connect with the divine of our existence. This is how we enter new territory – by overcoming our old destructive behavioral patterns and reconstructing our self-worth.
Why Gratefulness is a Practice
… and three ways to practice it.
“You don’t know why you do it, but life will reward you. It’s like going to the gym,” Adriano is annotating my – at times exhausting – nomad life style. I still have to smile about the metaphor as my lifestyle is not at all healthy at times.
I learn a lot during travelling – about: being happy with less, appreciating privacy or a space to live in, valuing a fully equipped kitchen, absorbing hugs from people I just met a few moments earlier… These are a few of many things travelling taught me. But what do I benefit the most from? Probably it is the skill of ‘being grateful’.
‘Be grateful’ might sounds a bit platitudinous. It is one of the phrases that got exploited by our ‘cultural narrators’ (I have to admit, I stole this expression from school of life.)
Nevertheless it is so important to cultivate this well-quoted ‘gratefulness’ in order to live life properly. Recently I found out that it is actually a skill to be grateful.
First you might have to think about things to be grateful for: “Today I had a coffee and a really good chat with a friend, my boss or the taxi driver was in a good mood, the weather was good…”
Appreciation grows exponentially.
If you practice being grateful everyday, you will notice more and more things to be grateful for. Appreciation grows exponentially. It’s like a perpetuum mobile that keeps moving as soon as you prompt it.
One day, you don’t need to tell yourself anymore to ‘be grateful’. It becomes your natural trait.
What happens when you are grateful? Life loses its tightness automatically. You are beginning to appreciate the huge miracle you are a part of. It is here. It is you. You are beginning to appreciate the beauty.
When you know good things will come float into your life, you will walk through life only with curiosity. But you need to initiate it. You need to get in touch with the core of joy in order to cultivate it. At the beginning you need to search for the beauty. But as soon as you find it, you can nourish it – like a plant that grows inside of you.
Alright, but how do we practice gratefulness? Here we go with the not-so-threesome-style threesome.
1. List of Gratefulness
Write down what you are grateful for regularly. Maybe you even start a small book only for things to be grateful for. It can be the tiniest things, you will see how this will change your whole perspective on your day.
2. Gratefulness as a Reward System
Let gratefulness be your reward system – appreciate your own achievements. Every time you finish something during the day take a moment of appreciation. For example if you tick off a task of your To-Do-List, this can be a reason to smile. It can be the smallest task. But if you take a moment every time you accomplish something, you will automatically gain gratitude. A positive side-effect is a rise of motivation as you honour yourself much more.
3. Minute of Appreciation
It took a while – but nowadays I’m trying to use technology as my tool (and not my undertaker as it used to be due to self-diagnosed social-media-addiction.) Set a daily alarm for a “Minute of Appreciation” (or three or five minutes, it is up to you.). Only one minutes a day will help you to activate the flow of gratitude. It doesn’t matter which time of the day it will be. In the morning it will boost your energy level, but also it can be a good way to balance the afternoon low. Or even before going to sleep it can be a good fertilizer for positive dreams.
All this – of course – is perceived from the perspective of a spoilt western european. But funnily I learnt the most about appreciation/gratefulness from people who have the least.