The dawn of individuation

Every personal encounter reminds me of life’s potential. We all resonate in different ways. Some walk by form afar and their brief smile is the sole concrete way in which our lives enliven each other. No minor passage, this coincidence precisely highlights the inescapable intimate nature of our interdependency.

Others are radically close, I try my hardest to keep them on a distance by producing radically contracting smiles, trying to manipulate the impending intimacy into a form that feels suitable to my frightened heart. Some of them don't mind, they just wait patiently and contain the autonomous space I need to relax and invite them over. In.

My intensity may intimidate. It seems to offer nutrients, courage, rest, clarity and at times a good portion of frivolous ecstasy. The intimidation, honestly, is also reflective of the mentalized walls inside. I know, I might as well call them by their names. Your patience, trust and fearlessness erodes them.

Truly opening all your sensorial eyes, letting a life beyond the tangible guide you from the inside out and the outside in, renders the whole world a part of your inner most being. It seems we can’t easily access this intensity all at once. For many it is an incremental process. Next to learning, a lot of unlearning paves the way for an effortless kind of presence with the emerging present.

I am shaping my ability to love. Love is an activity and process more than a moment of heightened connection. Peak experiences do offer glimpses into reality as it is unfolding from the depth of our magical unconscious. Here we intuit transformations that cannot be tempered, that can be hindered though by context and resistance. Can we allow all of life, can we allow the porous encounter with (the) other, to show us what is most truthful to our ever-changing selves?

Dear friendships offer containment for subtle and gross lessons in intimacy; how do I love them deeply. We all embody different intensities of polarities, and we all enjoy dancing with each other – that is not a coincidence. Every dance is a practice. Practicing our full, awakened vitality, a bundle of unutterable emotional shades is expressed, polarities merge into one collective being. We offer each other awe, renewed confidence, and the refreshing lack of self-defying control.

Our longing for this dance is our longing to awaken. To be present with life as it is. Aliveness is rising from within my pelvis. Subtly but surely, I consciously allow myself to feel into that birthplace of forms. Do I dare to do so while holding your gaze?

Dauntingly intimate, there is no escape route, whatever I thought was ‘mine’ annihilates as we exhale in synchrony.

Dance with me darling, dance towards the dawn of your individuation.

A clapping of awareness away

My bed served as a cushion. I closed my eyes and quickly entered a blank space. I felt an enormous amount of concentration between my eyes, a release of tension throughout my body, some very slight shaking of my upper body, very slow breathing and a total reset of my overall body’s energy balance.

A couple of minutes before I started the meditation, I decided to sit once more quietly next to my daughter’s bed and softly tickle her. Deep sighs and an expressive yawn affirmed her body’s need to slow down. When I accompanied her to bed and read to her that evening, I was a bit in a rush. Tiredness of ongoing concentration that day, unspoken irritations with respect to a friend and a lack of silent moments throughout the day led to impatience towards my daughters after-preschool emotional regulation. She clearly enjoys it there, and at the end of the day, returning home, when requested to brush her teeth, she lets go of the latter itsy-bitsy force of adaptation. The word ‘no’ echoes through our second floor – besides practicing autonomy, I know it is also her way of responding to my communication of agitation. How I understand the situation, we are resonating and before we know it, enmeshed.

After putting her to bed, hearing her call me, trying to communicate from across the room and sitting down for a minute or so in the hallway, I realized I was rushing her also and felt that her ongoing call for attention was just that: a call for attunement.

I got up and as mentioned sat myself next to her bed, whispered some sweets words into her ears, stroke her cheeks and went on talking with my fingers along her back, arms and through her tender blond hair. She could hardly keep her eyes open; I encouraged her to hold on to her cuddle toys, she curled up into the fetal position and within a minute, she fell asleep.

The meditative state I entered into a couple of minutes later, might have been just as deep. Somehow, thoughtlessness is a snap away these days, even though that does not undermine the need for emotional awareness (like the interaction with my daughter exemplified) and the intend to practice relaxation throughout the day. While I had my eyes closed (something I don’t usually do while meditating), an intense blue light appeared in front of me, more or less a shining blue dot. I could have been intrigued by its beautiful cobalt color, but I wasn’t. It seemed to fit perfectly with the intensity of pointed concentration that I felt, and any story about it felt far away from the openness beginning to rush through my vessels. The concentration transformed into an expansion beyond the bedroom’s walls, and my body did not feel very substantial anymore. Some anxiety popped up, I observed the mind’s tendency to want to hold on, felt a bit amused, also relaxed that qualification by again becoming one with my breathing. The meditation really felt like an energetic rebalancing, and like an entrance to some different dimension beyond solid form. It seemed, as I look back at it, every-thing became awareness – my ego was not enjoying this transition and tried to resist the expansion several times, with my mind trying to tame this experience conceptually by naming it ‘death anxiety’. Observer-me guided me in union with the breath of life.

After opening my eyes, I felt compassion towards those parts of me trying to resist the expansion. I listened to my partner’s words about his meditation experience and noticed my body and mind seemed receptive, not reactive. Again, a shot of that death anxiety swiftly passed through my existence. Hmm, awareness sighed inside. Spontaneously I offered my partner gentle caresses after he told me he was tired. Meanwhile, feeling the presence of my fingers through his hair, all I felt doing was looking out of the window and feel one with the world of all senses, beyond the usual focus on visual perception.

Still feeling slightly touched and gently grateful for this experience, I woke up this morning and noticed that the emotional undercurrent of my dreams affected my thinking processes. Just this observation created spaciousness and facilitated the simple act of getting up and writing this diary entry. Writing offers me the opportunity to connect feelings with my verbal fluency and it filters the internalized voices in my head that aren’t in tune anymore with my unfolding existential melodies. Words become music, an act of respect when it comes to their actual emotional meaning, their ‘embodiedness’. I feel the muscles in my jaw relaxing. No more to say than precisely that which I am sharing. Maybe stilness is always a clapping of awareness away.

Attachment is sacred

Attachment is sacred

even though

thousand of years of brilliant traditions

echoed the power of detachment

some renouncing the earthly related

some proclaiming touchy inhibitions

as if, when reaching out,

and nobody is there

you delight in the illusion

of overpowering

the finest intricacies of

enlightenment

called attachment

Now let me tell you

Dear heart

Dear heart broken

dare to attach

dare to see

you and life

are a perfect match

and then feel

heal

what in earth

is love

and thus has awoken

Flow through to your outreaching love

connect your spirits

Nourish your heart’s spaciousness

integrate our interdependency

at the deepest level possible

this is

the true gateway to being humble

Our heart is for a reason voracious

you and I are always here

to feed each other’s soul songs

interconnected spontaneously

then listen to the resonance of your body

in my attachment to you

the purest admitting of

life’s unity

her sacred embodiment of two-spirit

There is no other way

no path to not be connected

Sink into this truth

erode the illusion of separation

your life is overwhelmingly embedded

fall deeper into this non-duality

with the trust and relation

you build with those that embody union

together with you

That, I tell you

is love’s way of liberating

you from you

only

Dakini inpowerment

I just finished reading 'Dakini power' by journalist Michaela de Haas. The book narrates the life stories and activities of twelve women “shaping the transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in the West”. The word ‘dakini’ refers to a female messenger of wisdom. Hold on, wisdom in this sense is actually reflected by transcendence of dualities.

“The Tibetan word for dakini, khandro, means “sky-goer” or “space-dancer,” which indicates that these ethereal awakened ones have left the confinements of solid earth and have the vastness of open space to play in.”

Doesn’t that sound vividly free? Want to join?

Thirsty for inspiration, I explored the lives of those women dedicating themselves to the enlightenment of all sentient beings while practicing what Lama Tsultrim calls "inpowerment". Notably, all these women did or do this in their unique, contextualized ways and anchored in centuries old traditions.

My heart filled with courage when I encountered descriptions of intuitive decisions, the role independent thinking, community, dreams and recurring themes had (and have) for these women, how for some being a mother has been integrated in their daily life practice of awareness and connection (!), how deeply cherished bonds with spiritual companions play(ed) an important role in the development of their teachings, and how their personal character can be seen as a signature of the refreshing selflessness that they embodied or embody.

Jumping of joy on the inside, I noticed that some of them actually live and work in Colorado, the state where the next Dabrowski’s congress will be held. Surely, I can’t deny that this feels like a strong symbolic sign that I have to visit some of their retreat centres next year .

Through reading the book I got inspired to design an at-home retreat for the upcoming months, during the period in which I will share my reflections, diary entries and…who knows what? The designing has just started and can’t share details yet, but most importantly it will be an ongoing process – what else could it be?

Today I feel thrilled to be inspired by Lama Tsultrim and how she interweaves her life as a (grand) mother into her daily practice and study of Tibetan Buddhism. Maybe this also resonates with your inner processes and outer challenges, and you want to get inspired by this interview.

Meanwhile wishing you a Lot of love !

The no-things that matter

We were brushing our teeth and doing our habitual dance in the meantime, creating a fresh moment of shared childlike fun just before we entered the private space of our dreams. After this playful in-between time, I was staring briefly into the mirror of our bathroom. My mind equivalent to a silent observer, my face muscles tender, my eyes both foreign and mine, if you will. I saw myself and my partner, time stood still, any sense of separation melted. Unity consciousness. Instead of striving to under stripe unity by frequent rephrasing of shared meaning giving processes, I simply saw myself in the reflection of my partners face. Self-recognition annihilated any sense of a limited self. No striving whatsoever occurred. So simple and elegant, inner and outer resolved into being. The moment we were one, we were also no-thing. Any sense of separation felt illusionary afterwards, recurring glimpses of that sudden unity swiftly softened my attention into a good night sleep full of surrender.

I woke up this morning and felt empty inside. No tiredness, no disconnection. An ongoing stream of energy that didn’t contract somewhere in my body. My felt sense was unusually impersonally calm. The voices inside my head weren’t mine, just a small fraction of all available energy.

It’s kind of funny that I am reflecting on these experiences. I tried it several times during the day and I lacked the words. The process is still going strong, what is there to say? Well, it serves gratefulness to look back on the no-things that matter.

The most beautiful moments of this day, cherished by the tears slowly rolling over my face, was when my daughter lay her head on my shoulder and slept for half an hour while I was slowly dancing on a collection of soulful, healing songs. While she was sleeping, I was mourning the state of our world today and the existential uncertainty of many generations that came before us. The songs tapped into the experience of individual and collective suffering. Suffering that runs through my vessels but is easily circumvented by everyday chores. Surrendering her body in my arms, quietly asking me to keep on dancing when I briefly got distracted, her presence and the calmness of the day rendered every moment the perfect moment to connect with the deeper process of strength affirming grief. While I took a photo, I jokingly imagined a future full of unrecorded immersion. Seriously, her vitality is a heart awakening.

Good mourning

Immersion in life has left a thoughtless silence. Nourishing connections, dancing, painting, drawing, clear thinking, and straightforward communication. I feel grateful for having spend my time with a close circle of loved ones offering each other intimate joy, mindful wandering and the liberation that can be found in untying emotional knots. I am also tired because of all the impressions, less sleep and getting used to intensity as a normal feature of life’s experience (ha!).

In the midst of the cocreated warm social bath, I try to be aware of my own tendencies. Here and there I notice resistance when it comes to the reality of certain unfulfilled needs; when it comes to full embodiment of my vulnerability, of my inability to shape the world precisely according to my demanding needs while sensitively acknowledging those vibrant needs at the same time. While feeling joyful and connected, sadness rises. It is a longing to be seen by a distant beloved that, in my little private experience of reality, mirrors those parts that I haven’t taken full ownership of. The joy of the weekend provides passage to mourning. Mourning is important to set myself and loved ones free. The other is not merely a projection - and it is okay to long for intimacy.

Always in search of the answer to the question what love truly is, I lean into situations that challenge me to make space for both diversity and intensity of connection and resonance. Intimacy can be a synonym for the word ‘trigger’. A shared space that is easily filled with, or even blown out of proportion due to personal projections. A space that is easily restyled into a familiar emotional landscape, structured by what I think I want, undermining the fact that reality actually accommodates all perspectives and perceptions and that which is most vivid in myself may not be what has been socialized as a priority. Love is much more spacious and attuned, I am sure.

What essence is left of me when I allow myself the risk of annihilation, when I am not tamed by fear, when I allow myself an unrelenting look into the eyes of the frozen, fleeing and fighting animal inside? As a child, we grow up so deeply interdependent that we ostracize authenticity to secure attachment needs on the short term. We do this because it is life threatening not to. A baby can’t survive without care. Death anxiety, the root of all our demons. Years later, we can decide to consciously and mindfully take the risk and shape conditions in which we are challenged to overcome, or at least face, death anxiety. A full embrace of reality, we might call this presence, renders confrontation with vulnerability inevitable. Moving through the grand and subtle emotional storms, something indestructible that transcends the confinement of ego identification is lived. Untied energy in motion, all-encompassing, integrated mind included.

My eyes wander across our terrace. I feel that same mourning again. My heart misses the intimacy of being utterly one with nature. I have projected death anxiety upon others and upon the natural world around me. Understandably, but it flattens the intensity of life. Intimacy, whether that be social, spiritual, creative, or otherwise, is the ultimate joy of life. Exposure to natural elements will disintegrate my body, but this porous embodied being-here also mirrors the depth and breadth of being undeniably at home in an expanding instead of contracting universe.

Thoughtlessly my hand creates shapes. There is nobody overlooking the process, the process is the expression of life’s I-overpowering potential.

Buzzingly normal

After a reinvigorating warm-up, she tapped my sternum and arms, gently pressed my stomach and firmly whispered some of my own words into my ear. Vibrating air reached my stereocilia and materialized into embodied truth:

“Okay, now let us hear about all that love that is inside of you. Do not hold back.”

Twinkles all over my body. The inner guidance of introspective awareness and mentalized willingness to decondition and transform took over the process. Something more profound and exalted let me to overcome the constraints of inauthentically patterned selves. Deep from the inner realms of rock-solid earth, high into the overpowering and expanding, ethereal landscape of the universe, life’s energy found its way straight along my spine. The expressiveness of the highly inimitable human voice, mastering even the details of fingerprints. Opening the core of my body, I instantly found the technique to flowingly let go of all inhaled disintegrations, no body part nor related memory left out of this release.

Multiple generations of agony ran straight through the top of the cabin – I imagined this set the whole place on fire. With the speed of light my previously concentrated pain body dissolved into broadening and broadening circles of vibrations. “This must be the end of it,” a thought passed quickly through my mind, but a transpersonal body changed the rules of the game my lungs and untrained vocal cords adhered to.

“Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

I could not have imagined more releasement of build-up tension. More than seven breaths of volumized strength, here it was. Finally releasing the last contracted vibrations my body absorbed too long out of fear of being nothing, a rainbow of colors flashed in front of my just opened eyes. An incredible amount of energy streamed through my body. Clearly a transcendent experience, transcendental wonder took over. I just lost many pounds of personal, and I would even say transpersonal emotional weight. I felt empty and inexplicably firm at the same time.

No academic test, no profile, could have ever mirrored my life’s energy in such an awakening manner. Guided embodiment of intensity never was this straightforward.

Thanks to the extremely present, professional, and integral guidance of Julliana Goodblood (https://www.juliannabloodgood.com/), this voice release session made me transform so much suffering into total authentic presence that I felt newborn.

In the days that followed, I allowed myself the imagination of demons checking out of the hostel for suffering some of my body parts were. My participation at the tantra festival of which this release session was part, felt equally transformative as ten years of psychological puzzle making. Every workshop, from breath work to learning how to fully, interconnectedly say yes to life, incrementally brought me closer to my abandoned emotional home. The existential training* leading up to my participation at the festival already offered the practice of exhaling anger – compression of bodily power frequently disguised as self-rejection – in a collectively created holding space. The voice release session at the end of the festival felt like the apotheosis of a couple of years of seeking existential freedom.

Communication, decision making, creativity. Everything is pouring out of my being, while an organizing power experientally seated in between my eyes takes notice of this process, learning to surrender to it with its own potential pointedness. Silently overjoyed, I feel the strength to write my own vows and finally yet humbly, through ongoing practice and all too human detours my everyday life contains, embody what I have always felt to be true all along.

A daimon awakened, and ‘I’ am its momentaneous expression. However esoteric this might sound, however unearthly lyrical these narrated processes may be perceived, life this way feels actually buzzingly normal.

Grant oneself

Back to the reflections.

So, I ended my previous reflection with a reference to the training in existential skills I decided to participate in. Before deciding to take part, my heart was weighing the yeses and the nos. I intuited, also because of my previous collaborations with trainer Stijn, that my participation in his training would be a jump into the abyss. This type of training, this type of being together under the guidance of someone who has already done a lot of existential research into the spectrum of human experience, would surely reflect the longed-for depth of feeling, complexity of thinking and life-affirming authenticity. Surely, there would be no escape to look for the deeper meaning of my restlessness in the eyes of an eerie familiar feeling beloved! Life’s experience had already shown me that a jump into the unknown, the shivers such as an action sent along the spine, is what makes for the feeling of aliveness. Meaning in the immediacy of the moment. And so, I decided to test my wings…

It is kind of funny. I have been writing about the topic of intensity (embedded in the fields of giftedness, creativity and existential development) for over ten years now. And here I was, longing again for that lost intensity... The training offered a great variety of practices from eastern and western traditions. We practiced with honest emotional communication, we explored the territory of the imaginal, got a visceral taste of dying thanks to a Tibetan ritual, we danced attuned to one another even if blindfolded, escalating vibrations articulating our boundaries found their way out of our contracting lungs and we held each other firmly, or softly caressed the parts of our bodies that were in need of rudimentary recognition. The trainig was, to me, an open exploration of how life can express itself creatively through our udiscovered, or rediscovered selves. How life essentially always seeks unstrapped expression through the roots and flowers of our overall being, beyond the internalized psychic structures that socialize our movements, decisions, ways of relating and expressing (in Dabrowskian terms one might say the training offered conditions in which ways of being alive beyond the influence of the second factor - socialization - were explored and embodied).

The seeker in me did find – remembered - the intensity she was looking for. My body and mind started to respond, something came over me, got a hold on me, and an all too familiar expression of that intensity, one that can have an obsessive quality to it, filled my existence. A profound concentration on the question what love is orchestrated the electric concert of my thousandfold psychic preoccupations. Existential fire was one! What makes life worth living in the face of death? I read on the website of House of Beloved, an urban monastery, a communal effort in Brussels initiated by Stijn. Oh no, some part of me grieved silently, now that somebody else, someone I know firsthand and feel clearly drawn to, exclaims this question I must listen to my own resonating desires…. I was lucky to be inspired by someone that felt dedicated to the practice of ownership of one’s experience and lot (pun intended). Identification, remembering Dabrowski’s reflections on the topic, pointed towards personal authenticity. My journey continued, I started visiting House of the Beloved quite often, and whatever was restless in me transformed more and more into passion.

A passion that has been thwarted into conflictual forms quite often. An intense drive, in interaction with traumatic life experiences and sensitivities, turned into eating disorders, other addictions and recurring ambivalences.

Could I sit with the passion long enough to viscerally know that I am not this, but a vessel of life, ever changing and uncontrollable? The paradox being that this thorough knowing requires simultaneously the act of allowing the passion to freely flow and the act of perceiving its motions razor sharply, embodying the passion full heartedly, allowing impulses to be fully felt and transforming this intensity into fierce mental discernment and compassionate action.

Now, a couple of months after the ending of the training, I find myself contemplating a next step. Besides working together with Stijn on the next cohort of the training authentic presence, I am looking into the option to create a (part time) home retreat for the upcoming months. My heart longs for the space to untether life’s potential while sharpening my minds capacity to be one with the process.

I have been alone for long hours before, the idea of offering myself undirected time and space brings back the felt sense of life back then. However insightful the suffering that I encountered in those enduring hours of aloneness, my recent mourning for the pain my body was in (for example, during the time I wrestled with eating disorders), and the inspiration I get from being surrounded by equally intensity voicing human beings, drive me to reunite with all those parts of me that have never felt that emptiness, being no-thing, was truly the birthplace of creation. Am I ready to walk into that vital void? The never-ending expanding and threatening space that solitude often was to my younger self. Is the emptiness I long for similar to the boundarylessness that felt neglectful back then – do I dare to embrace the rising feelings? It would be an opening towards deeper desires. Artistic drives, those parts that long for clearcut research into the workings of the mind, the expression and transformation of my calling, a restraint from stimuli seemingly confirming the right to be, to be connected. I long for a type of existential research that is by no means encapsulated by grudges towards the experience of being alive in this particular body, mind, place, these relationships, and processes. A total yes to life, really.

Can I fully lean into my own glaring impulses, decide to not follow through on tendencies, being authentic by not automatically following my good-old self but inviting to accommodate more and more of her unexplored potential, including (neglected) painful memories? Is this something that I can grant myself, along the way learning how to be of deeper service to the environment?

PS: interested in doing existential research? This invitation might be interesting!

If dreams be told

In my dreams
I intuit
lives unspoken
realms of deeper meanings
whatever could
a narrator without a body
to fixate on endings
out of fear

In my dreams
I’m birthing imagery
impressions, withhold expressions
a sense of aliveness
rooted in the expansion
of universal consciousness

In my dreams
Some silent foreseer
takes hold of ripening fruits
germinating seeds
inquisitive inner beasts
and the oceans immense capacity
to ride any emotional wave
mirroring the depths of unconscious feeling
if truth be told
our everyday grave

Dreams beg for attention
a weary feeling we’ve baptized
tiredness
a daily dread, lack of life’s energy
a silent longing for sweet affection
a fine-tuning into the inner
the moment all our supposed knowing
dissolves into a sober sixth sense
a quick sharpening of the psychic lens

My dreams
right before I fall asleep
I’m thirsting for the transition
of
flat into deep

Emergence room

“It’s an emergent process,” I said with my hands theatrically emphasizing a fluid movement from toe to head.

“Yes, yes, you know your words…,” my partner said characteristically playful with, I imagine, a hint of uncertainty.

Admittedly, I felt kind of proud of what was transforming between us and this emotional intensity filled the space in between our bodies. Proudness can be an overcompensation for the contractions that build up in my stomach area. A release.

Our interaction might have stopped the buzzing connection right away, triggering anxiety and a sense of separation on both ends.
We are doing relational research into these dynamics and are exploring different ways of being together (also inspired by the training in existential development I mentioned yesterday, https://lavantgarde.be/training/ ). All vulnerabilities considered; we are learning to trust the process.

We entertained the idea to connect his musical and visual creations with my existential journey. That feels synergetic and like a newborn sequence to our previous collaborations (such as the podcasts we’ve made, for example, in Dutch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYv78PrMMcA ).

I don’t feel that this co-creative process needs to be structured on forehand nor do I feel a - demanding - need to push things towards a certain direction. Rather, I notice the attention-grabbing quality of the need and take it to be less ego-threathening than I often experienced. Work in progress.

It's always work 'to be' in the process.

To me, this time, the process is very much about openly discovering what is there. Limitlessly, not following the conditioned tendency to fully frame the how and what of the project to be sure we are like-minded. There is a why and that is ‘we,’ the entity we call our relationship or even our family. An open exploration of the dialogue that will and might flourish between his and my artistic life, within our family’s life, between his musical muses and my writings.

For the upcoming time, I am writing these diary fragments, sharing them online. A search for a calling, and a process of cutting through authenticity-undermining-attachments. He feels the impetus to create music. There is no strict framework to adhere to, it will be a potential encounter and a dialogue, but none of it comes with a fixed result in mind. Or at least, I am not fixating on the imagery in my mind .

Instead of trying to see whether his or mine projections resonate, I feel we are now working on a different kind of collaboration. A form that might suit us both, feels artistically free and includes the emotional growth of our family as part of it (he he, okay, at the end of this sentence my voice starts to become louder indeed, the echo of a calling). Instead of talking interminably and irritated about the precise definitions of whatever we are doing and how we should be doing this, something we can find ourselves intensly enmeshed in, there is the light promise of ‘just being authentically ourselves’ and seeing what emerges from that co-created space.

Oh dear, letting go of control! All the while embodying the full intensity of being alive and creativity driven.

‘Feel into what works for you,’ I hear myself say a couple of times.

Ha, that good-old tendency to name and tame, to emphasize, take care of, make sure that…. A loved expression of intensity that might undermine the others autonomy. I breathe and let go of the sentences.

Silence. The birthplace of creation.

Stay tuned, this diary might sound very vivid along the way. We will see how reality's melody will unfold.

Home is where the whole is

Yesterday I wrote about the experience of ‘not feeling at home.’ The words repeatedly bubbled up in my mind afterwards. This happens often, like a mantra words ebb and flow inside my mind and their visceral resonance in my body reflect emotional truth to me. Listening is all there is to it...

When I set out to explore the restlessness that I became much more aware of during the first two and a half years of our daughter’s postnatal life, I was seeking more than listening. In my lyrical book ‘Intens mens’ you can find a reflection titled ‘what you seek, is seeking you.’
Somehow, this previously recognized wisdom was uprooted.

The corona pandemic also had an impact on our family’s wellbeing. I was working from home, mostly online. I missed essential ingredients of the warm – embodied - interaction I had with friends, family and the participants of my workshops and trainings. Also, publication of my first book meant that I felt somewhat empty afterwards. This was an intense creative birth that also led me feeling 'artistically dead' for a while. Combine this with the already ‘home intensive’ situation of nursing our daughter and rewiring the love relationship as partners, and it becomes quite sensible that clearcut constraints with respect to time, space and sleep would lead to new forms of being and feeling human...

I noticed that my mind wanted to run away, skinny dip imagination and think about all kinds of possible, divergent futures. My value system, my emotional guiding system, stuttered. Here I was with a magnetic expression of life force, a fiercely growing baby, that surely needed my sensitive attention and devotion in the here and now. Old tendencies to cope with frustrated needs rose to their feet. I cried out sometimes, this was not the kind of mother that I felt like being... This was not ‘being.’ External restrictions made me look in the mirror once more. It reflected an image that felt foreign and anything but free. Did I choose this life for myself? Was it pure biology - and am I now becoming aware of the fact that motherhood is not my destiny?

No, my body mourned. Before choosing to try to get pregnant, I decided to sleep alone for a week. Essentially, I created a ritual without framing it this way at the time. My workspace became a cave. During that week, I deeply retreated into myself and silenced my thinking. I knew the answer to the question – do I want to become a mother? – would express itself spontaneously if I did not intervene with rising emotions and swirling thoughts, with projections and internalized norms. After five days, I woke up one morning and started to cry immediately. I felt called to say yes to the process of potentially giving birth to a new life and motherhood. And that was it. This was my, our, path wherever it would lead us. This was a practice of surrender even though suffering would inevitably be part of it. However uncertain this queeste would be, and even though I could not directly ask our potential child whether he, she or they wanted to live, I felt somehow that we were called to surrender to this process.

So, back to the unrest that I felt after giving birth. The constraints of that situation heightened my self-awareness. By being in a complex situation, by being deprived on different dimensions, and by not getting what I thought I wanted (business as usual), I was challenged to rethink what it was that I wanted. There were also parts of myself that I could not claim anymore as ‘typically Lotte-like,’ some of my supposed dearest hobbies (reading theory, ha!) seemed so futile. The whole situation forced me to rethink, to re-feel and include more honest mental discernment about what I had been doing the last couple of years and whether that was truly reflective of my calling in life.

The presence of our daughter, the 24/7 devotion to her wellbeing, amplified my capacity to feel into what a calling can be…The depth of desire I feel towards our daughter’s wellbeing made me more aware of life’s potential. The constraints of the situation made it possible to sense that desire and not run away from it, not flatten the depth of the insight like I might have done previously.

The situation forced me to listen. To listen more deeply on a daily basis and to perceive the ‘feeling of homelessness’ as a way of being in this world and in this body in and of itself. I had to learn, and in some cases relearn this existential skill.

Gratefully, something crossed my path that matched perfectly with the situation I was in. The seeking of course led to a discovery. Colleague, psychologist, and trans spiritual monk Stijn Smeets offered a new training in existential development. Intuitively and clearly knowing that my participation would stir up a lot of intensity and thus mental work to discern what this is all about, I decided to go for it. In the meantime, the fact that my partner and I were becoming more aware of our interdependency with the broader community would bring about many changes in the way we relate to each other and our social network.

Maybe ‘not feeling at home’ meant that our home is much bigger than we could have ever imagined…

To be continued!

Shaken, not Broken: the next chapter…

I am (re)starting a diary and I will share these fragments online. Also catalyzed by the keynote that I will give at the International Dabrowski congress 2024 in Denver, I will share reflections on my current existential journey under the working title ‘Shaken, not Broken: personal transformation in times of global, existential threat.’ While heat waves are defying the lives of many sentient beings around the globe, and I am personally undergoing a disintegration of limiting beliefs, actions and supposed freedom, I feel increasingly drawn towards an integration of a calling that goes beyond short-term personal safety and satisfaction.

The theme of next year’s congress is ‘Living the theory’. Ironically, my own journey has a lot to do with ‘shedding the theoretical skin’ and focusing more on the actual practices that challenge, condition and embody what is real to me (and, from hindsight, might or might not reflect Dabrowski’s view). Besides as a fruit of growing awareness of our global ecological situation, this process has come about as a response to the deep existential experience of becoming a mother. The pre-natal growth of our daughter drew my attention back into my body. On the experiential level, this came with an intense calmness that I had not known before or could only remember vaguely. At the same time, this calmness felt very real, a heartfelt remembrance of inner truths that made life so much more vivid and powerful in the moment, as such. After birth, parenting has been challenging and confrontational. A restlessness stirred up, egotistical tendencies had to disintegrate to make room for the profound interdependency with our daughter and us, both as parents and partners. Whilst creating a home for the mesmerizing little human being our daughter is, I noticed that I was not feeling at home. In the house, in my body, in my persona. A truth that I had knew all along rose to the surface and wasn’t deniable, or ‘managed intellectually,’ anymore. I felt a fervent desire to recognize, explore and integrate this truth, both for myself and my loved ones, although it wasn’t clear to me how this would translate into a practical form. Furthermore, both the desire to protect my daughter’s and other generations’ future and the experience of living in a small ecosystem (our family) rather than a somewhat confined individual psychic landscape made me even more sensitive towards the state of our planet’s ecosystems. What is my calling, how do I live this calling, and how does this practice relate to conscious care of my environment?

For more insight into the social and emotional processes leading up to this diary and existential journey, please see our video Shaken, not Broken (part of International Dabrowski Congress 2022).

Stay tuned 😊….

Hearable silence

Words come less. Uttering a word – seeking meaning out there – feels increasingly needless. Before words come into pronounced existence, I notice the dynamic energy ‘underneath’ their potential expression. In this ocean of unimaginable meaning waves carrying emotional patterns seek to manifest, such as the need for recognition, the need to assert existence, but even more so there is an ongoing stream of subtle energy shifting shape continuously. Words which do find their way into ‘airtime’ feel more like music than any other medium, their meaning intensifies as such.

Intonation, timing, rhythm – their aliveness and supposed meaning are directly intertwined with how I say these words and at which moment in time they become a shared shifting reality of an unfolding narrative.
The taste of these words is quite intense and intensely fluid, changeable at the same time. They never loose connection with the whole of the story while no listener knows precisely when and how this tale will end – there is no overview, the coastline is continuously on the move, waves and ocean are one.

There is a depth to this disintegration that I haven’t experienced before – consciously. Even though something feels so familiar, every moment an encounter with a person that I have known forever for as far as I can feel, the freshness of my tears births a sense of unknown aliveness.
I recently listened to Ólafur Arnalds' music with dear friends. One of them asked my partner what this music means to him, what it 'is' really. My partner mentioned loneliness, sadness, and beauty. He gently asked me how I would describe it. My thoughts became thinner and thinner, my sensorial body opened up. I listened to the sounds which did not reach the musical coastline.

'It makes silence hearable.'

Huisclown

Ik dij energetisch uit, leef wat meer in de ruimte. Vertragend, doorademend, verzet ontspannend. Gedachteconstructies vallen langzaam uit eén. Sommige zijn hardnekkig zwart-wit. Lachwekkend, dat ook. Met daaronder soms een zilte storm tranen. Mag ook. In de ruimte is er ruimte. Ruimte voor spontane, innerlijke bewegingen. Wat ontstaat er dan zoal?

Een huisclown. Eens per dag of enkele dagen zet ik spontaan die rode neus op. Onze dochter geniet. Het was even wennen, maar nu is er sprake van regelmatige boekingen door ons jongste gezinslid. En ik hoor mezelf dan grootmoederlijk zeggen 'We gaan het zien of ie er vandaag ook is, dat zou gezellig zijn'. De leefvoorwaarde van de clown is leegte, onzekerheid, potentieel, ruimte, noem het wat voor jou nu past. Soms borrelt ie op tijdens het ontbijt, dan weer direct bij thuiskomst van de opvang. Onbepaalde samenzijn momenten blijken te broeien van potentieel plezier.

Des te sprekend is dat ook partnerlief af en toe eén wordt met mij-als-clown. 'Je was het echt even!' Animistisch mooi!

De huisclown, deze 'familiar fool', intensiveert het gevoel oké te zijn met de vele uitingsvormen van 'mezelf'. Thuis is waar ik voel contextueel 'te ontstaan'.

Het experiment ontspant sociale patronen. Wat maakt het mij - de clown - ook uit, ik zet die transformationele neus ook op straat op, hand-in-hand wandelend met dochterlief. Oh, onverwachte winst, anderen genieten mee.... Maar dat is geen doel op voorhand, deze clown toont zich onwetend als het op verwachtingen aankomt, dat maakt hem zo aimabel. Het maakt hem niet uit en niet niet uít wat anderen van hem vinden. Fijne vent, ik zal blij zijn als ie er weer eens is. We zullen zien!

To allow life to play itself all the way out

"I am asking that we make space, phsyical, psychic room to allow life to play itself all the way out, so that rather than just getting out of the way, aging and dying can become a process of crescendo through to the end."

Op 13-jarige leeftijd schreef ik schijnbaar overtuigd: liefde is alles en het ultieme doel van leven is de dood. Wat....bedoelde ik nu? De levenswijsheid in - en uitademend voel ik die diepere zin en echtheid ervan. Ik proef het, het raakt me, het spitst mijn zintuigen. Ik voel een opening en weet waar dit over gaat. Al zou ik het op ontelbare wijze, schijnbaar tegenstrijdig, in woorden kunnen vatten, ik blijf nu. De beleving neemt en geeft ruimte. Tranen vinden hun weg naar mijn netvlies, het leven wil toegang, wil stromen. Ze wordt vastgehouden in mijn middenrif, maar breekt door tot de oppervlakte en ter plekke is de diepte vanzelflevend in lijf en geest. Intensiteit.

Zoals BJ Miller verwoordt:

"Parts of me died early on, and that's something we can all say one way or another. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left, like that snowball lasting for a perfect moment, all the while melting away. If we love such moments ferociously then maybe we can learn to live well - not in spite of death, but because of it."

Invest… and/or expand

“When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called "cathexis". I his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us "confuse cathecting with loving." We all know how often individuals of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting of neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.”

Bell Hooks

So, what is love anyway? We may use the word gregariously, but do we really know what we mean by it?

In my own context and process, I have been challenged often and recently also to understand this more deeply.

In the past, what I called love included a diversity of emotional experiences ranging from a disorienting loss of self (oftentimes with the lack of an existential expansion) or an adoration for the color ochre, the joyful hobby of dancing for hours on end, and the sound of the human voice sharing intimate experiences.

Clearly, I can get deeply emotionally invested in something or someone, but is that the same thing as loving?

It has been quite a path.

“Oh my, a dream has turned into a nightmare!” I yelled thirteen years ago in response to my father’s care when, after a very intense period of fusion, my partner and I went through our first cycle of disintegration. My own words echoed in the chambers of my compartmentalized mind, and I immediately reflected that I was clearly investing my projections in my partner – an awareness that did not immediately translated into the ability to transcend this all too human tendency in connection with my partner.

On a similar note, I had a tough time understanding how my partner could not be as enthusiastic and passionate about the things that I ‘loved’ such as personal development, a fascination for offbeat personalities or expressive soul singers. I also felt confused, sometimes irritated, and angry, when his way of working through conflicts was so very different from mine, or when he did not want to take on all the unsolicited advice and help I gave him .

Of course, relationships are creatively messy and my partner and I both experienced increasing moments and processes of expanding love and recurring moments of confronting, contracting projections.

What characterizes these processes of love, of loving?

What I have learned along the way, is that love in its different manifestations has a lot to do with acceptance. Deep acceptance of ‘what is,’ of who and ‘how’ the other is. This is an active acceptance, it sounds easier than (I find) it is in practice, because it ‘demands’ we work through whatever comes up for us emotionally and don’t project that upon our significant others. Hello top level deconditioning!

As I fall into love, I try to 'rise through the process' and to see the workings of emotional investment play out in my mind and body. I contemplate the potential expansion that love can be, that I can embody. I contemplate it through breathing, analyzing my thought and dream processes, embodying the intensity through dance, singing and writing, and by slowing down.

Slowing down is not easy when the body is charged. Slowing down is not easy for a mind that can run fast. Slowing down is challenging for a little girl trying to survive the emotional consequences of a lack of expanding love. But slowing down is the best recipe for a human being experimenting with love. At least, so it appears to be for me, and for the fluid entity called a relationship growing out of the reciprocal process of nurturing the spiritual growth of all involved. This way, the relationship also becomes an intense meditation on love and our growing awareness turns into the arena in which we contemplate the intense waves stirred up in the all-encompassing ocean of love we share beyond the borders of one particular relationship.

Existential study of love

My existential study of love continues. This time I am accompanied by the philosopher Alain Badiou in his ‘In praise of love’:

“Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference.”

In a social world dressed up by identities and the search for likeminded, my heart beats a little faster when I read Badiou’s words. Yes, thank you. Love in its different manifestations is an exploration of differences, of the perspective of difference. Somehow, when we commit to the experience and expression of love, we commit to the creation of a shared destiny, even though this destiny does not mean we share the same identity. And as we know, one of the hardest things, one of the ways love is also ongoing ‘emotional work’, is the active acceptance of creating a life together while being different together.

This also touches upon the question whether one can fall in love with the experience of being gifted. Really leaning into this question, I sense this has a lot to do with accepting the diverse ways in which we can be gifted, with (funny enough) looking at the world from the perspective of two, seeing difference as the starting point for our personal research on (not into) giftedness. This may sound strange, because often enough we project a search of belonging upon each other, and while doing so tend to reduce our differences and emphasize particular similarities while leaving out those parts that feel uncomfortable or threatening. But that may not be the most loving way to embrace giftedness. Someday soon we may find out our conceptions of giftedness had a lot of blind spots and little space for unconventional growth.

Badiou again:

“Love… is a quest for truth… truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.”

How can a recognition of giftedness be a stimulus to search for deeper, positively maladjusted existential truths? Can we mirror each other’s giftedness and let that be an invitation for everybody to explore their unique ways of being human? Is it possible to co-create a field of gifted awareness while not reducing our developmental complexities and intensities along the way?

The practice of love, as Badiou writes convincingly, is a search for truth. Seeing reality for what it is, not for what a thirst for identity demands. What about fully embodying giftedness, embracing its fluid character and its potential expansion into forms, relationships, creative processes, and worlds we haven’t occupied or even imagined yet? If love would lead the way, we may find out that our ‘truthful selves’ diverge in magical, colourful ways.

Connection - on and off

“You connect so easily”, my dear friend tells me with a heartwarming smile. She is right, to a certain degree. I connect easily with people, I can be socially joyous and generous, I often connect the social dots and I am eager to learn more about everybody’s emotional landscape. My body feels very open towards loving. At the same time, I feel there are parts inside of me that tend to keep people at a distance, and sometimes even more so those that actually are emotionally very dear and close to me. At times, my outgoing generous approach is in and of itself a “tool” to not connect with those deeper parts inside of myself.

Attachment style comes in. Protection styles are subtly active. A lonely little child resides in the deeper layers of my stomach area. She has internalized a map of the world based on feeling utterly desperate and abandoned. She barely has a voice, so its hard to hear her calls. She whispers gently, she cries silently, her song is made up of emotional tones that only listening to the body can convey.

These last years I have had the grateful luck to connect deeply with a group of friends that truly take the time to get to know each other and respect and appreciate diversity, attachment wounds and gifted complexity and intensity. Attachment, a sense of belonging and intimacy come together to form an alchemy of trust and surrender, honesty, and respect. Slowly but surely, I learned, and I am learning to communicate the needs of that little voiceless human being inside. It turns out we are all singing a similar song and the harmonious sound of the colorful choir fills my existence with existential depth and truth.

On a certain level I feel a relaxation of the need to love and be loved (wonderful podcast about this: https://podcasters.spotify.com/.../A-case-against-love... ). Mildness is growing, but it has its own pace and rhythm. Slowing down is essential, this way I can notice the little one’s experiental hole in her stomach. By giving her space to breathe consciously and receive connection, she slowly transforms that hole-ness into a sense of wholeness - love actually. I am shaken, not broken.

Ethisch verantwoord doorvoelen

"Om de juiste ethische keuzes te kunnen maken, om klaar en helder te kijken naar de wereld, moet je stevig in je schoenen staan, zegt Lotte Van Lith, docent, spreker en auteur zelfontwikkeling. En dat kan enkel als je jezelf beter leert kennen, als je weet wat jouw waarden en drijfveren zijn. Na de talk van Eelco vraagt Lotte het publiek om even de ogen te sluiten en te voelen wat ons tot mens maakt. “Wat heb jij nodig om jezelf te kunnen zijn?”, vraagt ze ons. Voldoening, zegt iemand. Perspectief, vult een ander aan.

“Het is een moeilijke vraag”, beaamt Lotte. Een vraag die enkel op te lossen valt door eerlijk naar jezelf te durven kijken op momenten dat je het moeilijk hebt. “ Innerlijke conflicten zijn ontwrichtende psychologische groeipijnen”, legt Lotte uit. “Het is lastig om erdoor te gaan, maar het resultaat kan zijn dat je je eigen complexiteit leert begrijpen en als kracht te zien.” Lotte sluit af met de raad om complexiteit te omarmen, zowel bij jezelf als bij medewerkers en stakeholders, zodat we positieve impact kunnen hebben op de toekomst."

Verslag van de CFO day 2023

Ongeroerd mij

Er is iets ongeroerd in mij

Het is niet in mij

en niet niet in mij

Open, eindeloze, grenzeloze

Ruimte

Omspannend al

dat er is

Los van voorkeur

neiging, concept of emotie

Impermanent

noch eén intens mens

Eeuwig weids

Ongezocht wijs

Het is wat het is

wat het niet is

omdat het nu is

Helder

Krakend helder

Overweldigend

als doortrokken aardse vorm

Verliefd

op haar

volledige

extatische ontstaansrecht

vanuit leegte

Gewaarzijn

ontmoet

opgehelderd

Zijn

Ongeroerd

in volle overgave

De Liefde.