JOURNAL
Many times on my journey
insightful words lifted me, inspired and gave me hope.
You may find them helpful too.
Closer to yourself
You are the most important person in the world.
Did you know that?
After all, none of this would have existed if you were not here...
You could not read this text, smile or be sad.
You could not drink cacao in the morning or have a shower.
You could not dance, laugh, cry or celebrate.
You are the greatest treasure to yourself,
all you really have is YOU.
Do you know how to look after yourself ?
The mind creates many stories and has many ideas of how you should or should not be or do.
But, do YOU really know who you are?
Do you know what is nourishing your body and soul ?
What makes you smile?
What wakes you up in the morning with the appetite for life?
You are with yourself 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Days, weeks, years pass...
Who are you?
What do you want..?
Where are you going ...?
What do you want to experience ?
What would you leave behind ...?
Aren't you curious about yourself..?
Don't you want to know...
Ewa Helena Pietras
Be soulful. Be kind. Be in love.
"I’ve been looking for a long, long time,
for this thing called love,
I’ve ridden comets across the sky,
and I’ve looked below and above.
Then one day I looked inside myself,
and this is what I found,
a golden sun residing there,
beaming forth God’s light and sound." - Rumi
ON TELLING THE TRUTH
There is something so healing about simply telling the truth.
To ourselves. To a trusted, non-judgemental friend. To a journal. To the gods, to the mountains, to the wild animals of the forest.
Not the ‘nice’ truth, the stale, regurgitated truth designed to please. Not the conceptual truth of the mind. But the raw, messy, present-moment truth of our wild hearts. Destroying the self-image, the persona (mask) designed to win love, or impress people, or just keep ourselves ‘safe’ and ‘out of trouble’.
Well, sometimes what was once ‘safe’ has become a self-imposed prison. You long to lose control and speak the wild truth.
Or whisper it. Or shout it to the heavens.
Not the convenient, socially-acceptable, “nice guy” truth. Not the “spiritual” truth crafted to impress teachers and gurus
and friends and gain a million followers.
But the truth you are a little scared to speak. The truth that makes your heart pound.
The truth that makes you go a little dizzy when you speak it.
The vulnerable truth. The shaky, sweaty, what-the-fuck-am-I-doing, dry-mouthed truth.
The truth of your immense loneliness. Your raging doubt. Your piercing shame. The truth of your ‘sinful’ longings and desires, cravings, jealousies. The ‘out of control’ joy that you just can’t squash down anymore. The anger that has been suppressed for too long and is making you physically sick. The frustration, the boredom, the hope or the hopelessness, the ‘madness’ you just cannot push down anymore.
What you hold down ends up holding you down. And what you depress ends up depressing you.
It can be so relieving, so liberating, to just tell the truth. To have a breakdown, a healing crisis, and just tell the truth, birth it, mother it into existence. To sing it, to dance it, to put it into a poem. To write it on a piece of paper and burn it. To silently – or very loudly – proclaim it to all the gods and goddesses. You will find your own way. You will find your own unique expression of truth. Or it will find you.
To tell the truth of this moment, and let love in. The truth that shatters old safety but gives new safety. The truth that may upset a few people, shock those who thought they knew you, anger those who wanted to control you, disappoint those who’d hoped you were different. But that’s how real our self-images are. That’s how stable our ‘personality’ really is. It can shatter, break, rebuild itself a billion times.
It’s so exhausting to keep pretending. It gets more exhausting as the lies deepen.
Truth can hurt, and shock, but it can also heal. It can open up old wounds, break up relationships, unravel the status quo, leave you with nothing, except your self-worth and new dignity. It can feel terrifying to speak it, yes, but a life of lies ultimately murders the soul and that is far more terrifying in the long run. The fears we face are far less terrifying than they seem before we face them. The medicine is in the pain, sometimes. The healing is in the telling.
Find a trusted friend. A therapist. A teacher. A partner. An animal, a mountain, a loving family member, alive or dead, who can hold your shame and guilt and fear as you speak. Someone who will believe you. Someone who wants the real you, flaws and fuck-ups, failures and fears and all.
Someone who will stay present as you break.
Who will not try to fix you, or vomit out easy platitudes and stale spiritual teachings.
Who will hold you in your crisis by holding themselves.
Find a fire.
A lake.
A vast night sky.
A stage. A canvas. A dance-floor.
A fucking rock with a face painted on it, if that’s what it takes.
And just tell the damn truth.
- Jeff Foster
www.lifewithoutacentre.com
Would You..?
Death will arrive, it is coming but would we be willing to be open to life, fully open.
Would we allow ourself to live?
I want to live, I do.
I want to feel the thrill of dancing in the rain during the summer day, splashing the water in the puddle.
I want to vigil the whole night to be able to bow to the sun in the morning.
I want to swim naked in the cold river and shiver to the bones.
I want to deeply breathe the air and be grateful that I can do so.
I want to feel the beat of my Heart.
I want to buzzz and tweeet with all the little creatures around me.
I want to taste God/Goddess by admiring the wonders they created and start my pilgrimage with nature.
I want to stare at the clouds in the sky and touch the flowers in the meadow.
I want to feel the sun and the morning breeze on my skin.
I want to lie down on the ground and breathe together with mother Earth.
I want to spend all night under the arms of a big tree wrapped warmly and sleep.
Only to wake up in the morning to start admiring the wonders of Life all over again.
Will you join me?
Would you dare to leave your persona behind?
Would you be willing to drop all you know about me, yourself and life to only be here and now?
Would you be willing to open yourself up to Life one more time?
Would you?
Ewa Helena Pietras
YOU CHILD
May you be blessed with a child... who defies you.
So you may learn to release control.
With one who doesn't listen
So you may learn to tune in
With one who loves to procrastinate
So you learn the beauty of stillness
With one who forgets things
So you learn to let go of attachments
With one who is extra-sensitive
So you learn to be grounded
With one who is inattentive
So you learn to be focused
With one who dares to rebel
So you learn to think outside the box
With one who feels afraid
So you learn to trust the Universe
May you be blessed with a child...
Who teaches you
That it is never about them
And all about you.
Namaste, Dr. Shefali
The Invitation
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day.
And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.
By Oriah Mountain Dreamer
NO, YOU ARE NOT ROTTEN INSIDE
Trauma is not some big dark scary monster inside of us, some mysterious evil force working against us. Trauma is simply undigested life energy. It’s the tears we need to cry but have not yet cried, the screams we wanted to scream but didn’t. It is the shakes left unshaken, the loneliness left unfelt, the feelings repressed and stifled in order to hold up a self-image and stay safe and not fall apart.
It’s not our fault. We simply weren’t taught how to let terror, rage, or grief move through us safely to completion and we were only trying to protect ourselves. We weren’t shown how to feel it all and give it all conscious expression. Some of us as children were shamed or mocked for our thoughts, opinions, beliefs. Some of us were judged or even punished for having or showing certain feelings. Some of us were outright abused and had to squash down our authentic rage, grief, terror, or joy, in order to survive. Some of us were so neglected we wondered if we even existed at all.
That was the past. In the safety of the present we can begin to thaw. To recontact our precious authentic wild selves. To allow ourselves to think our original thoughts, and come to realise that we aren’t going to be struck down by some vengeful god, or punished, or damaged, for having ‘bad’ thoughts. We are free to think up entire universes, to fantasise, to have dark negative thoughts, and sexual thoughts, and ungodly thoughts, and thoughts are just thoughts, and all thoughts are allowed on the movie screen of awareness, and awareness doesn’t judge.
We aren’t going to die if we feel rage, or grief, or let fear move through us. We aren’t going to go mad or lose control. We can begin to discover that all our feelings are safe, and we can actually allow them in our bodies instead of reacting to them and running from them and numbing them out and fleeing into the mind.
In short, we can begin to bring love to the unloved regions of the body-mind, we can illuminate the achy, lonely, painful places inside with the warm, radiant light of our curious attention. We can begin to give ourselves the love and empathy we were starved of as children, begin to thaw the icy places, and breathe into the abandoned children inside.
As all our outdated coping strategies (which is what trauma really is) begin to collapse and deconstruct themselves in the light of love, we can recontact all the repressed energies that originally just wanted to move through us, and discover how damn safe they actually are. Anger is safe to feel, it won’t kill us. Sadness is safe, it won’t take us down. Fear is safe, it’s uncomfortable and intense but safe. Loneliness is safe, it can be hot and sticky and heavy inside but it’s safe.
We come out of our heads and return to our humanity, to our bodies, to our vulnerable hearts, and to the present moment itself.
We don’t have to live inside of our fear and shame any longer.
We can take the risk of letting love in. Of letting ourselves be seen without the mask. Of opening up our deepest truths to other safe human beings, showing them our awkwardness, our mess, our imperfections, revealing our secret thoughts and ‘shameful’ feelings, and let them love us for who we really are.
It is love that heals trauma. Love, and time, and patience, and a willingness to lean into the painful and contracted and lonely places inside.
- Jeff Foster
www.lifewithoutacentre.com
"Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is the only moment."
Thich Nhat Hanh
THE VIGIL
Don’t go to sleep one night.
What you most want will come to you then.
Warmed by a sun inside, you’ll see wonders.
Tonight, don’t put your head down.
Be tough, and strength will come.
That which adoration adores
appears at night. Those asleep
may miss it. One night Moses stayed awake
and asked, and saw a light in a tree.
Then he walked at night for ten years,
until finally he saw the whole tree
illuminated. Muhammad rode his horse
through the night sky. The day is for work.
The night for love. Don’t let someone
bewitch you. Some people sleep at night.
But not lovers. They sit in the dark
and talk to God, who told David,
“Those who sleep all night every night
and claim to be connected to us, they lie.”
Lovers can’t sleep when they feel the privacy
of the beloved all around them. Someone
who’s thirsty may sleep for a little while,
but he or she will dream of water, a full jar
beside a creek, or the spiritual water you get
from another person. All night, listen
to the conversation. Stay up.
This moment is all there is.
Death will take it away soon enough.
You’ll be gone, and this earth will be left
without a sweetheart, nothing but weeds
growing inside thorns.
I’m through. Read the rest of this poem
in the dark tonight.
Do I have a head? And feet?
Shams, so loved by Tabrizians, I close my lips.
I wait for you to come and open them.
from The Essential Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
SOON YOU WILL RISE LIKE A PHOENIX
One of the most dangerous myths we have inherited from our superficial culture is that healing is always supposed to 'feel good'.
No. Sometimes our discomfort actually intensifies as darkness emerges into light, as unconscious material makes its way into present awareness, as our old illusions burn up in a fever of healing.
Perhaps our discomfort is not wrong, a mistake, or a sign that we have lost our healing path.
Remember, the presence of pain today may actually indicate that our healing process is intensifying, not stalling; that we are actually more awake and sensitive than ever now, less numb, less willing to turn away, more in touch with our sacred vulnerability.
There is such a tendency in our culture to avoid discomfort of any kind, distract ourselves from it, label it as 'wrong' or 'negative' or even ‘unspiritual’, meditate or medicate it away. Much of our Western medicine is geared towards the removal of symptoms, the silencing of disruption, the numbing of chaos and the journey towards some socially acceptable 'normality'.
But sometimes, friends, we no longer have any interest in 'returning to normal'! The 'normal' was the problem, not the solution! The status quo needed to shift. It was unstable and false. Our old conception of reality was keeping us trapped and we needed to break free! Sometimes a deadening and soul-destroying 'normality' needs to shatter into chaos and crisis; our pain and sorrow, frustration, exhaustion, fear and doubts need to be felt more fully than ever before, and the heart needs to break open more completely.
So let the winds blow, let the tempests rage, let all that is false be purified, let all that is dead remain dead, let life explode where you are! You are only being invited now to a deeper healing, friend, even though it feels like you're getting 'worse', even though the heart is tender and raw, even though you cannot yet feel your tomorrows!
Soon you will rise like a phoenix!
- Jeff Foster
www.lifewithoutacentre.com