Tag Archives: travel

Love the Life You Live!

Going places to meet unknown people, unknown cultures and unfamiliar situations. I find it challenging and it makes me feel alive.

I am so fortunate to be in a deeply loving relationship. He lives at the opposite side of the globe. Melbourne < > Amsterdam. We travel many miles to see each other. And we are so fortunate to be able to see each other often. Which is great. Back home I look after my 14 years old daughter. The 21 years old one is looking after herself. Which is also a very fortunate situation. In Amsterdam I teach yoga. Which I love. While traveling I upscale my yoga practice. By attending yoga classes in foreign yoga studios. Which is pretty fucking awesome.

If anyone would have asked me eight years ago if I would love to live this life, I’d smile broadly and grab the opportunity with both hands. Even more, it’d be a dream come true.

The dream is true. But the reality of it is not one would expect it to be. Or at least my reaction to and feelings about this dream-come-true are not as I expect them to be. I certainly don’t find myself in a constant state of bliss. Quite the opposite. No matter how much I love being with my partner, love looking after my 14 years old, love teaching yoga and love to travel the world, life is forever challenging as can be.

I worry about my children’s happiness, about money, the health of my partner, my family and myself. I worry about relationships with friends and family. I don’t get to worry much about the state of the world, politics and climate change. Which turns against me. Because not worrying about it actually seems worrying in itself. And most of all I worry about myself. Doubting myself, do I do the right thing? Am I looking after my kids, my partner and my life as good as possible? With my life I mean, the life thrown at me on this planet. Do I live it as potent as possible? While focusing 95% of my attention on things that need to be done or can be improved. Every day. Satisfaction and contentment seem to present themselves as enemies to my existence.

So what gives me the right to exclaim ‘Love the life you live!’?

The experience that no matter how fantastic my life seems to be or how bad, it doesn’t change feelings of overwhelm, depletion, satisfaction, contentment or happiness from occurring.

What strikes me about it is that unlike what we think creates feelings of happiness – for example the security of a nice house or the health and prosperity of our children, moments of happiness occur when there’s nothing to strive for, when there’s no expectations or when there’s a sense of acceptance of everything that is.

How to trigger or induce such moments? And here I won’t give any of the best-selling answers our book stores are filled up with until the highest shelf and the internet can’t be stopped overflowing from. Treaties on how to do this or how to not do that, preferably quick and simple solutions to live one’s best life. It doesn’t exist. There’s no worse, better or best life. There’s just one life. You are living it. The only potential, the only option, the only choice or whatever you prefer to call it, is the life you live now. Complete, truthful, real, uncompromising, straightforward and happening every split-second.

Listen to it, see it, feel it, taste it, hear it, enjoy or despise what it does to you. But most of all open up to it, do not resist, accept it. Let it in, like water flowing into the bath tub you sit in. Warming the bones of your body, lubricating your soul, slowly transforming the skin of your fingertips into old people’s wrinkles. Did you know that the wrinkly skin on your fingertips and toes as a result of soaking long enough in water, is actually a biological phenomenon that enables you to hold more grip on slippery surfaces!

Life is as beautiful as it is devastating. Like love. Like you. Like the oceans. Like the climate. Like group energy and the ostracizing power of an individual.

Love the life you live. For no other reason than it being impossible to actually truly interact with it in any other way.

The Meditation Paradox

The Sanskrit word Dhyana refers to what we call meditation. Dhyana literally means absorption and goes back as far as the 6th Century before Christ.

The root of the Western word meditation originates in the Latin verb meditari meaning ‘to think, contemplate, ponder’. It appeared ‘only’ in the 12th Century after Christ.

That’s a difference of 18 centuries.

Absorption and contemplation are both superficially and in its essence quite different concepts. Only when in the 1800’s Eastern spiritual practices found their way to the West, the word meditation started to gain momentum.

Is this causing confusion instead of clarity? The answer is yes.

Absorption, with the mind as the absorber, think of a sponge sucking up its surroundings, seems to be more about heightening a sense of awareness of one’s surroundings. Whereas contemplation and pondering are often perceived as a journey inside, finding calm within while shutting one off from one’s surroundings. Two different paths.

So are we to dive into an abyss of stillness, labeled by some as the sub or un-conscious mind? Or are we to open up and connect with an immense ‘greater’ consciousness? The answer depends on who you ask.

These questions lead me to ‘ponder’ over Freud’s concept of the sub-conscious and its correspondence with the universal ‘great’ consciousness. It wouldn’t for the world be feasible that the individual un-consciousness equals the universal consciousness, would it?!

The confusion of concepts and words is a bit inappropriate if it comes to such thing as the practice of meditation. It is supposed to bring us clarity and peacefulness.

How do the sub-conscious,the un-consciousness and the ‘greater’ consciousness – or the ‘beyond’, the ‘above’, the ‘anything bigger than you’ – relate to each other? And while hanging ‘out there’, what is it we are looking for?

Could it possibly be that universal consciousness is the same as the individual un-consciousness?

Everything = Nothing

Eternity is in the present moment

There’s no dualism when there’s unity and wholeness.

While meditating, my sense of self dissolves into the surroundings of the greater consciousness. I absorb and simultaneously am absorbed. I no longer am and yet start to manifest the purest form of me.

Let’s pick up that sponge again and observe how it absorbs water. The same sponge when squeezed spills water. While meditating we take in as much as we squeeze out.

And as such we are preparing for to live happily ever after.

To be continued.

The Endless Journey

 
Let’s just be difficult. And challenge our fellow souls who successfully demonstrate the purpose of traveling rather then that of reaching a destination. So let’s just be annoying and ask ourselves the question: ‘what if the beginning and the end are contrary to current wisdom, all about the destination rather then about the journey? Just for the sake of it. Or to be brutally honest, because reality has it that sometimes or suddenly, life, or at least my life, is all about a certain, specific destination. Which wonderfully leads me to the realization that without realizing it, at specific yet undefined moments the present is presenting me with an endless, continuous journey.

‘What ifs’ bring me in a wondrous world of fantasy and imagination, seducing me straight onto the way out of a sound and surrounding reality. Exit, green signs pointing towards flights of stairs. The ones you physically find next to and metaphysically as opposed to, the elevation mechanism called a lift. What ifs generally don’t have the tendency to lift you up. What ifs often lead to a place where it isn’t about logic and cognitive abilities. It makes me browse another reality. An inner reality of inside stories that float and rave upon the waves of feelings, cravings and longings. It made me tattoo at the back of my shoulder: ‘dreams are wishes of the heart’. A reality where satisfaction hardly is possible, yet always just around the corner. A reality shaped by the rhythm of a constant pendulum of frantically searching and researching at one end, while at it’s other extremity finding balance by blockage and deprivation.

Let’s assume that the concept of destiny equals our so called point of satisfaction. We assume things the whole day. In particular about other people’s thoughts, emotions and intentions. So now let us assume something about our own conception. We do have the capacity to feed ourselves with whatever it is we want, to such an extent that at a certain point we say: I’ve had enough, I am done, full, satisfied. At that point we experience a sense of satisfaction. But then, as chance unsurprisingly has it, we quickly find a new spot at the horizon to reach for. And so we accumulate a wealth in experiences. We diversify the richness of our taste palette. We widen the scope of our possessions, let them be made of material, bare power or fulfilling relationships. Eventually we end up being experienced, rich and possessed. But are we ever really satisfied? Or let’s put it this way: does satisfaction actually exist? It makes me compare a sense of satisfaction to the concept of destiny – or there being a destination in life.

What if? I bluntly put forward that a destination does not exist other then in our mind. That the concept of destiny merely functions as a tool, an apparent focus point, allowing us to thrive, move forward, push along, using, or driven by, forces of nature comparable to water whirls, blazing winds and striking lightning. We need our destination and our point of focus as an excuse to flow with those forces of nature. The conceptualization of a destiny, a point of focus and the idea that it is due to our own doings, that it’s us ourselves getting us there, give us a sense of mastering those forces of nature, that we control and that we lead instead of being led by human nature. Why do we call such a vast thing as nature, human anyway? Smells like an effort to master or at least control The Force.

We assume the continuous development, proactively unrolling, dynamically pushing like sprouts do, is led by our own genius. And it’s exactly this assumption that tricks us into being haunted. As human beings, we turn into human doings, restless, never satisfied, always (de)parting, never arriving. And you know what? To stop the motion is not an option. Stop, hold back, like pulling the reins of a galloping Arabian horse, resist the race, back out of it by trying to repress forces of nature that are so much bigger then a bit of consciousness wrapped in a human body. Inertia makes us wonder about the difference between repression and depression. Inertia leads us to believe, have faith, divert into the realm of dreaming, finding distraction and the ephemere satisfaction of multiple addictions. Closing the circle I like to put forth that the absence of a conceptual triplet evolving around being destined, destiny and destination frees the way to literally realize what it actually is that the present beholds. I assure you it’s more then just cruising along.

Going to Kathmandu


In Bhaktapur’s busy bus station’s street, the pavement is swept immaculately clean. Big chicken are foraging, most shop owners with a damping cup of tea between the palms of their hands. It ‘s not that cold, 8.30 am. I change bus on my way from Nepal Yoga Retreat in Telkot to Kathmandu, on my first day off. Quickly taking a super sweet black tea at a little café outside. I am not into sugar. Maybe because I used to like it too much I try to avoid it now as much as possible. Not today. I am excited to be where I am. I order a second tea right away against any mindful objections. Not much later on the bus to Kathmandu I feel pretty sick. Sugar overload on an empty stomach. But feeling sick in an overcrowded bus in Nepal is somehow the way it should be. I accept my condition. No regrets. I love being here.
Ayurveda favors eating with your hands. Aside from seeing, smelling and tasting food, one should feel it as well. Makes perfect sense to me. And certainly to my kids. Can’t wait to tell them. It is awkward though, sitting in a quality food café – a name much preferred here for lunchrooms – where the food looks absolutely delicious. Instead of sandwiches or a salad, here lunch is served as a plate of rice with a variety of condiments, freshly made, freshly ground, lovely scents. Some use a spoon. Most eat with one of their hands. Mixing rice with sauce or curry and aptly shoveling it up into their mouth using three or four fingers. Although the garnished rice sticks all over the hand, it does look quite civilized actually.

This will make my kids very happy.