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.
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.
I can see it now clearly unfolding.
My life’s story.
My trajectory.The old voices have faded.
This morning I rediscovered the flame that is burning inside of me.
Calm and beautifully, undisturbed.
It burnt all the way through.
The soft power of the flame is relentless.
I knew it deep down inside.
There is something “more”…
There is a force beyond my perception.
As the conditions get worse, severe weather is impeding the sight, evil forces are dragging my will….
A fundamental strength establishes and executes.
Sudden revelations are the result.
A physical destruction of patterns and control.
This morning it was there: The flame.
Burning and nurturing my wild self.
Be a symbol for change.
Be a beacon of transformation.
Be an example.
Do you live your life? Or do you focus on the outcome?
The story of your life is not achievement.
It is not only adventure.
Your story is failure. It is pain. It is taking the wrong path. It is detours. It is twists and turns.
Companionship in one chapter.
Loneliness in the other.
Your story is bravery. It is torture. It is joy.
It is every choice you make.
Your story is unfolding every step of the way.
Only in the aftermath you do understand a part of its meaning.
If you focus on the goal. If you are only attached to the outcome, you will miss the whole point.
Life is in the moments….. The heavy and the light.
Life’s unfolding in ALL moments; in the dark AND in the bright….
All of it makes your story.
And this story is of significance.
You are not here to tell or to judge.
Your story is life itself. It’s us.
Do you take pride in your unworthiness? What would happen if you’d give it up? What would happen to your life if you’d take pride in your story?
When the old voices become quieter and quieter.
When the new story is not being told.
This is the time when you step into your creation.
This is the time to act.
Yes, I do struggle.
Yes, I don’t know.
And yes, here it is again: “Hello darkness my old friend”* – and the blank page, my salvation…
I recently finished a ten-day Vipassana course and I have to say that it shattered something inside of me to an immeasurable degree. It shook me and my, still so precious, existence. It shifted my perspective on basically everything I have ever done in a subtle and at the same time fundamental way I had never experienced before.
Don’t get me wrong: I know that everything I have ever done is perfect. My past is perfect. My future is perfect. And the presence is what I still long for. And probably this is what made me sign up for the Vipassana course.
In a brief conversation I had today, this person said: “We always have expectations. Otherwise we wouldn’t do a thing.” This was very interesting for me to hear. And it reminded me of how I am creating black and white stories around what “proper” detachment should look like….
It’s OKAY to have expecations. All is okay…. Anyway, later on you will eventually get the point (maybe, maybe not;).
Sooo. What did change through Vipassana? I realized how much I was (and still am!) searching for ‘something’ outside of myself. Yes, I investigate, I reflect.
Life forced me inward several times in my life. To be much more accurate MY PAIN forced me inward, because when the pain became unbearable I had to find resources inside – just to find out that THEY ARE THERE! There ARE resources!!
I internalized, but most of the time I analyzed:
And that is the point. At the end of the day I was always looking for an abstract answer. I was, unwillingly, looking for “an easy to digest” answer – an answer that is still, more or less, acceptable by my upbringing or by my conditioning, my inner voices and internal judges…
It sounds kinda cool to move through the dark night of the soul. It sounds impressive to move kundalini energy. It sounds amazing to “walk the camino”. Nothing more and nothing less.
I confess: I like “the sounds of it”… Transformation. Healing. Yoga and so on.
So. What Vipassana did was that it stripped allll these cozy wordings, definitions, explanations, RITUALS and STORIES off me….
I could finally breathe again.
Vipassana does not serve the answer on a golden platter. It does not give constructive feedback or valuable advice.
‘Gotama showed the path…,’ they say. Yes. Figuratively. “The path” is nothing conceptual. It is nothing logical. It is nothing to map out or to comprehend. It is nothing to understand or to study. It can only – and ONLY be walked. One-step-at-a-time. One sensation after another after another after another….
To be fair: There is no freakin’ path (no offence). There is only life itself. And when I say life I don’t mean “this one life”…. Not at all. There is life vibrating through our cells. There is life sprouting from our veins.
There is no such thing as “the core of our being”. There is only being.
It’s the conceptualization, the intellectualization that is keeping me trapped within my own mind.
Vipassana forced me to open the gate. Or did it rip apart the fence? I don’t know and it honestly does not matter.
Vipassana let life within me run free. And this left traces in my consciousness.
There is some novelty, a new realization awakening within myself…
The purges have been purged. And now life is urging to move me the way I’m supposed to move…. And now writing this down here I can feel the ‘intellect’ creeping in asking: “What are you talking about?”
To use the words of Satya Narayan Goenka, one of the leading teachers of the method of Vipassana: “There is only flux and flow.”
Nothing to suppose. Only to surrender.
And today I do surrender to darkness, because darkness knows more than me. It grounds me. It helps me grow if I let it….
* Simon & Garfunkel, 1964 😉