Stickers on my skin vs. the light within
Whenever I get complicated about my mission in life, I think of Adele.
Joy & Happiness
Your source of supply
Recently a concept came to me and blew my mind so hard that I had to chew on it for a few days. It derailed me and confused me to the extent that my husband was asking what was wrong as I had been silent for days.
Lean into Joy (and abundance will follow)
No matter how many times I read about it and hear about it, I still seem to struggle with the simple fact that we should always, and I mean always, lean into joy in life.
Why happiness is a choice
Happiness is a state of being we all seek, as if it’s something grand and majestic. We seem to structurally forget that happiness is actually hiding in the smallest of moments in life, happiness is actually a choice.
Space for love
My body now carries two souls, yours and mine.
My body now carries two hearts, yours right below mine.
Just get here, little one, and I will show you the earth.
I will show you the earth and you will teach me of heaven.
The secret of seeking your purpose
For most of my twenties and thirties (although I still have some of my thirties left) I have been a seeker. I’m always seeking something or someone, seeking my purpose, seeking my passion, questioning everything but never truly finding what I thought I was after.
Let’s talk about freedom
Something quite unthinkable has happened to me. I have returned to Europe, I have returned to a corporate job, and I am feeling incredibly happy about it! Actually, it feels like freedom.
The elusiveness of happiness
“Maybe starting a happiness jar is not such a bad idea” I thought.
Who’s following you?
Lately I have been thinking a lot about helping others, and what really constitutes as help.
In her lovely book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert states that the primary reason for anybody to write/create anything should not be ‘helping others.’ But it often seeps in, doesn’t it. We are bombarded with all kinds of blogging schools and Pinterest courses to get our message out there, to teach others, to be the source of knowledge, the expert others look up to, to find our niche, to drill down on the unique selling point and then gain followers.
Dude, I just wanna write.
And when I write, I just want to express myself, to allow what is in me to surface and who ever wants to see it, fine. If someone gets something out of it, great, but that will never be the point. So how can I figure out a niche for my writing, it is what it is…
Well, I adore Elizabeth Gilbert for many reasons, one of them is the legendary book Eat Pray Love (no, not the movie, I fell a sleep), which sometimes gets bad rep especially in Bali, but say what you want, it helped me a lot during my pre-divorce fog. And recently Big Magic gave me another reason to adore her. She freed me from thinking that I should HELP someone with my writing. In the funny interview on Marie Forleo (another woman I adore), Elizabeth mentions how you know the people who are trying to help you by the confused look on the faces of those being helped (*chuckle*). When she was writing Eat Pray Love, the last thing she thought about was helping people with it. As she says, she was “a hot mess” herself just trying to find grace and make sense of the world.
When I listen to Adele I get it. She is not trying to help anyone with her art, she is just purely and simply singing about her own heartbreak. Coincidentally that raw honesty speaks to millions of people, and she has gained a steady following. All what is needed is raw honesty to our own craft.
So there goes that. I don’t have to help anyone with writing, I just have to write! How liberating, how honest, and how messed up that I ever thought otherwise!
Followers and an audience
Then there is the business side of things, which mixes into everything and anything, and the ever-growing and confusing world of social media. I have worked a lot with yoga teachers, and there seems to be a trend ongoing with hiring them, which is determined by how many people are following them. Do we all need followers in our lives, and what does that really even mean? What it comes down to is that if I don’t have followers, I don’t exist. But what if I don’t want to have followers, what if I don’t want to lead a tribe, I don’t want to be the expert in some field or the thought leader of my industry.
Dude, I just want to write.
Of course life as a creative person is easier when you have an audience and your work is actually received by someone out there, but should it be the main point, or the starting point? I don’t want to first look at the world and based on a gap in the market try to fill it with my creations. Dr. Wayne Dyer talks about it a lot as well, how we should just examine what lights us up and follow that. Letting go of the end result and just serving the world with your passion and your talent. Never mind if someone read it or pays for it. Create what comes, follow the river and most likely when done with this energy, everything else will fall into place perfectly.
Help yourself first. Light yourself up first. Get inspired first, and the rest will come.
The things I forgot about happy endings
We all have dreams. We cherish them and we chase them, and eventually we reach them (some of them, at least). When you are on your way to your dreams, it often seems like you’re running towards a standing, static goal. As if you can almost see how many laps you still have to run, and you can clearly see the finish line.
Once you cross, you can stop running. Right? I mean, that’s it and we’re done! Dream – CHECK and life can settle into happily ever after between you and your dream. The longer you have been running, the more you are expecting this happy ending to swoop you off your tired feet. Finally – you can stop running now.
The victory lap
Depending on the size of your dream you do the happy dance and run the victory lap for a while. Then as your pulse settles, you gather yourself, and inevitably find yourself in a moment of and-now-what?! This can come as quite a shocker, especially if you have been plotting your dream for some time. Because dreams should make you happy, and they do, but we tend to forget that it’s not the end station. As long as we are alive, we keep evolving and changing.
I seem to fall for it every time. Thinking that if I just achieve my wild, crazy dreams, I’m set for life. As if I would magically stop growing, developing and learning more, as if I would magically want to stop dreaming.
And while reaching my crazy dreams surely makes me happy, don’t get me wrong, I tend to forget the impermanence of things. After my latest major life-overhaul I thought blissfully that I was finally on track, life was going to be smooth sailing and all I needed to do was to drink mango shakes and stare at the ocean.
So when new dreams started to surface after some years, I grew anxious. Why was I dreaming again? Why did I feel the need to move on, I had already FOUND my dream, I had already changed everything around for this new life I was enjoying. Was I even allowed to dream anymore, and how many major life changes and over-hauls was one person allowed to do in life?
String your beads and be happy
I forgot the simple and delicious fact that life is a not a static race to the goal, simply because there is no goal. Life is like those colorful Mala beads, where the string travels in the middle and the 108 beads are woven into it like the dreams and events of life. One bead starts, and one bead ends.
I forgot that life is movement and growth, a cycle that never stops.
I forgot that I am allowed to continue dreaming, continue chasing and running. That my heart will form new desires from the basis of my continuously improving base-line.
I forgot that dreams are delicious, and we should never stop acquiring more of them.
I forgot that just because my beads may seem random, with their different colors and shapes, they are all connected by the same thread. And at the end of days they will form a beautiful, unique jewelry that I get to call my life.
Some accompanying thoughts from the Universe
“Coincidentally”, I found the following passage in the book I’m reading, Conversations with God Vol.3 by Neale Donald Walsch (or as I like to think of it – Conversations with the Universe).
ENJOY:
Stick to your beliefs, if that serves you. Hold tight. Do not waiver. For your ideas about “right and wrong” are your definitions of Who You Are. Yet do not require that others define themselves according to your terms. And do not stay so stuck in your present beliefs and customs that you halt the process of evolution itself.
Actually, you could not do that if you wanted to, for life goes on, with you or without you. Nothing stays the same, nor can anything remain unchanged. To be unchanged is to not move. And to not move is to die.
All of life is motion. Even rocks are filled with motion. Everything moves. Everything. There is nothing that is not in motion. Therefore, by the very fact of motion, nothing is the same from one moment to the next. Nothing.
Remaining the same, or seeking to, moves against the laws of life. This is foolish, because in this struggle, life will always win.
So change! Yes, change! Change your ideas of “right” and “wrong.” Change your notions of this and that. Change your structures, your constructions, your models, your theories.
Allow your deepest truths to be altered. Alter them yourself, for goodness’ sake! Because your new idea of Who You Are is where the growth is. Your new idea of What Is So is where evolution accelerates. Your new idea of the Who, What, Where, When, How and Why of it is where the mystery gets solved, the plot unravels, the story ends. Then you can begin a new story, and a grander one.
No matter how “good” you think things have been, they can be better. No matter how wonderful your theologies, your ideologies, your cosmologies, they can be full of even more wonder. For there are “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Be open, therefore. Be OPEN. Don’t close off the possibility of new truth because you have been comfortable with an old one. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
***This article first appeared on Reconnect Inspire***