Losing something or someone you’ve treasured is tough business. It robs of a part of your life. Yet there is also this other aspect, that losing clears out space that can be filled by something new, something yet unknown to you.
Life is the school of hard knocks, or at least it likely can be. The path can be confusing up until that point when you realize that you’ve been looking in the wrong direction all that time. And what you’ve been looking is already here in your hand.
The only thing that is permanent is change. Some of those changes can rough you up quite drastically. Others are so sweet, you wish they would never end. Yet all of them will eventually pass.
So the real question is, how you deal with changes? In there lies the secret of who You will become. The secret sauce in all of this is choice, which is informed and determined by the perspective you take. So how I position myself when it comes to the wild turns of life makes all the difference.
I am sure you remember moments when something has touched you so deeply that it left a mark in you – it’s going to stay with you for the rest of your life. And for all the thinking you might do as to why that is, no doubt remains about the depth of your experience.
There is a magic about allowing yourself to let something touch you – be it a moment, a person, another being, a piece of art… Having had such an experience, the old question of „why?“ then turns into something different. Or maybe it is you who turns into someone different?
We don’t want to get a no as an answer. Or, do we? In our communication there are lots of yesses we make shine as bright as billboards on a main road. But oh so often a yes does not mean a yes, but simply avoids saying a no.
Here’s a high praise to the art of saying no, for while it may feel harsch in the moment, it opens up routes of new possibility. It get’s rid of mind-junk and allows you to focus your energy at where it’s really happening.
Awareness is a condition for freedom. But how do I increase my awareness? There is an age-old and proven way to do so which goes by the term meditation. A lot of us associate meditation with the idea of sitting cross-legged in a lotus position with closed eyes. And of course one can do that, and for good reasons. The true magic of meditation, though, is the space it opens up inside of me.
As Buddhist teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche has put it so nicely, it’s about accessing stillness, silence and spaciousness inside of me. There I find the room to wiggle, which will allow me to chose where I want to go. If I don’t *have to* do something, then I’m truly free to choose. So, follow the white rabbit into the wonderland of becoming aware that you are aware…
Problem solving is a skill, non-action seems nonsense. And yet, we can get lost in trying to solve problems by scrambling about. For some things cannot be addressed by going at them directly, they need a different path – one that requires some sort of acceptance, stepping back, letting it be and letting go. Then something might open which is beyond our control and sometimes beyond our imagination.
This is by no means a passive, fatalistic way of being in the world. Just the opposite, it is a way in which I flow with the energies and dynamics of life in a creative way. Such a way might look very different from how I am used to go about things, and that exactly might be what turns it into an exhilarating adventure. All I need to do is get out of my way
In our Western, especially English speaking culture, we consider everything sensual and sexual as a taboo as far as public discourse is concerned. It is somehow considered dangerous, disturbing or even degrading, and hence we try to ban it from being present in the open. By banning intercourse from discourse, though, we’ve not only thrown out the baby with the bathwater, but the whole bathtub as well.
There is so much of aliveness lost in trying to ban sexuality and, in it’s wake, what we now deem ”sensuality“ – the term originally refers to ”anything senses“. How could you expect life to be full and real when you are dimming and obstructing your sensors?
This is a poem and a reflection about how we handle this topic in our culture.
Dark and light are intertwined – like in the Yin and Yang symbol. There is power and strength in walking towards the dark deliberately and consciously. And this has nothing to do with being masochistic. It is simply that a lot of things can only be gained for a price I have to pay.
And there is a magic ingredient to it. In the Yin and Yang symbol there is a tiny spot of light in the dark. That is the spark that shows us the direction in which to go, and in it lies all the difference for why I may choose deliberately to walk towards some darkness.
When the bubble bursts and nothing is like it was before. The world has become differently in a blink of an eye and there is no way you could go back into that old life again.
This is a poem about new beginnings and the magic of such a moment.
What would it be like to be, but be in a very different way, without an ego – this part of us, that says ”I“ and sees everything from a personal perspective? Not to want, not to cling, not to chase – just be? Well now, isn’t that how the world around us ist?
This state happens to be very much what mindfulness practices and meditation leads us to. This episode has a playful poem that invites you to let your mind go on a journey beyond itself.