Enlightly

"It is dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.Yes, feel lightly even though you are feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it's the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So, throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear, self-pity, and despair.
That's why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”

Aldous Huxley

Should I even write a blogpost inspired by this, to the shadiest light adjusting, life's advice? How to hold the pen so lightly that it does communicate but does not suffocate? Smothering streams of endless consciousness with words loaded with repeated, unquestioned, unshattered, taken to be more than what it is, unlived-through meaning? Even these questions seem to weigh on my shoulders, pressing the pen on the imagined paper, disacknowledging the heightened weight of life already imbued in the imagined trees cut down to produce that same paper. Does the world need more meaning than it intrinsically has - is? How often has the seeking of aliveness surpassed the casually carried experience as such?

Often times torn between a fixated seriousness and childish playfulness, searching for the tone of life suiting all the curves, upheavals, secret dances in the darkness, including the longed for rush which our pain reveals. Huxley’s words are quite painful, reminding me of how pleasure and pain can reveal themselves to be nontangible. A lesson romantic love more than any other reflect back on our yearning hearts, hearts grasping for someone always out of reach since the source is to be found the other way around.

If anything, I want to hold my love lightly. Symbolized by letting go of my anguish projected upon the lover’s firing passion in my physical, restless home, letting them walk their own path, enjoying the crossing of our roads but never demanding them to be merged into a one-way street. How I love them so deeply and yet try to love them so lightly reflects how all the seriousness, dreadfulness and even injustice in the world cannot defy the absolute answer death gives to our questioning, at times bargaining, of the meaning of life.

However painful the acknowledgement that I will never hold the lovers like I hold the pen at any time supposedly needed, I rest this daunting case by falling in love with the image of being a source of light to all of them. The readers and the lovers.

Dancing my way into the vibers of the paper, rooting life’s energy in such a way that it is easily transforms in new, fresh flowering of open-ended narratives.... Love another so lightly that it nourishes them into loving anybody else passing through their heart, even those far away or those dauntingly close by. Do not weigh their awareness with your suffering, Lot. Let them thrive in the unmistakable complexity life is anyhow, anyway. Don't get in the way of light yearning to pass through, vitalizing life beyond skinned boundaries. Do not create a wall with your words, theories, judgements, unfulfilled needs, asynchronous development, human suffering. Be transparent.

Lightly dear, you have taught me to love lightly. Thank you for being so unapologetically bright.

Mystery-me and much more

Early on I noticed certain thought patterns repeatedly filling my mental space. Ideas about how I should behave, what I should and should not do. Looking back, I can narrate several sources catalyzing that inner critic. To name a phew important ones, parental styles, feedback from teachers, and an inner tendency to systemize my social and emotional understanding of life all fed the tendency to impose order from the inside out.

Although I also felt energized by what was in some way equally a keen sense of self directing this ‘force,’ it did come with an energetic cost due to the many inhibitions, and suppressing of spontaneity, involved.

At some point, I clearly remember a new thought cracking through the thick surface of a by now well-developed super-ego. It shone a light on potential new emotional roads to travel by pointing me towards the profound need for ‘monstruous freedom.’

“I can not keep on doing this. If I go on, I will become suffocatingly rigid. I need to go against my own habits.” I might have groaned several times.

The harsh internal developmental tension spurred me to positively maladjust to myself, one could say. As I didn’t know how to direct that tension in a self-caring way, the maladjustment was also fueled by self-rejection, the inward suppressive tendencies were redirected ‘outside.’ Instead of inhibiting, I became much more impulsive, eagerly extravert, pressingly outgoing. The exploratory nature offered liberatory experiences in the context of meeting people, a refreshing openness to experience and alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding myself and others. At the same time, a lack of deeper self-insight made me vulnerable to harmful behavior in relationships and lifestyles.

Along the way I felt a need to balance the 'swinging' seeking in me. Trying to juggle the inhibiting and impulsive tendencies has been challenging. Feeling under – and then overregulated often; at the top of feeling more than okay one moment, and then feeling overwhelmed by stimuli and a lack of boundaries the other moment.

Different processes have helped me to streamline these ambivalences. One thing is recognizing how rigidity is intertwined with a need for safety and predictability. As the complexity of life seemen to grow exponentially throughout the years, I was increasingly in need to expand the parameters on which to anchore my navigating of complexity. A basic feeling of safety is important, but it could not be the ‘first and last answer,’ even if I am trying to be sensitively aware of how important this is for many of us and how many internal and external conditions might severely threaten our notions of safety.

The over-arching notion of not-knowing, of mystery, has ‘helped’ me for sure. Whenever I feel connected to a sense of existential mystery, facilitated by practices that nourish this spirituality, I feel ‘sourced,’ as they say, to embrace the complexity of emotional and energetic changes within and without. Just the sheer, but profound notion of being curious towards (my) experiences, helps tremendously in picking up the subtle changes and letting them blend in a wave of consciousness expanding beyond self-fixating categories.

The choice I made to go against my more rigid behavioral tendencies also inspired the integration of activities that allow this sense of mystery to be active in my emotional and energetic awareness.

In the words of Joost Vervoort, shared in this accompanying article spurring far-reaching imagination:

What kind of “infrastructuring for mystery” is part of my life, now?

What kind of “structural conditions […] allow for access to the mysterious and nurturing depth of life”?

A tremendous source of spiritual openness and depth are visits to the monastery House of the Beloved in Brussels, Belgium. The pluralistic approach to existential development and research, the traditional and experimental nature of rituals, the coming together of eastern and western traditions, and the central emphasis on “being different together” makes this a highly inspiring ‘infrastructure for mystery.’ Curious? Got it! Take a look at Beloved’s website.

A diversity of psychedelic experiences has infused my sensing of unmanageable mystery. A psychedelic experience can positively disintegrate, I think, conditioned perceptions of life when an internal awareness of this disintegration is ‘ready,’ so to speak, to integrate the intense experience into a refreshed, more deeper understanding of how everything is indeed delicately interconnected. These processes acquire caring (inner) guidance, a suited set and setting, and I have certainly also had experiences that felt more shattering than mysterious, even though these were eventually integrated into an expanding sense of self. Since I have a strong tendency towards systemization, and already non-induced heightened sensory perceptions, yet another intensification of sensory input by taking psychedelics can either be intensely calming or quite disturbing. Luckily, I am recognizing these patterns by now. And more societal, psychotherapeutic and academical attention is given to the potential transformational nature of psychedelic experiences and to the individual and contextual conditions that allow for such transformations.

I also access a sense of mystery through reading. Both fiction and non-fiction facilitate a fresh understanding of how much we know and even more, how much we do not know. Reading also comes with the practice of relating my sensing with conceptual ambiguities of being this human-animal, I feel my way into another’s life story or map of the world, it is a way of ‘othering.’ Slow reading is a context in which I can feel through subtle, inner energetic changes in response to the imaginational worlds, as if I am 'pre-reading' the 'real' world out there. Everytime I try to pre-read, I end up accepting more ambigituies, more ways to be in and of this world. Films and series can have a similar effect, particularly those disintegrating solidified beliefs about life and challenging the viewer to suspense disbelief and explore an emotional, intellectual, or other territory unknown or even ostracized before. The creation of art and the experiential process of creativity can offer a peek of conscious mystery as it is often intensely interesting to notice that somehow, at once, a great idea or the development of an unforeseen project materializes ‘through your workings.’ It is by letting mystery inform your notion of yourself and other life forms, that one enjoys art (and the creation thereof) to the max. And even if the creative process has its own logic and I am aware that we tend to project a lot of stereotypes upon the place of mystery in this process, the quality of the process remains enticingly mysterious nonetheless.

Same goes for vivid embodied experiences of being in and part, expression of nature. The overpowering power of the ocean, the mysterious whereabouts behind mountain peaks, the intricacies of the tiniest lives underneath our feet, the sensorial differences making up the psychology of other sentient beings; the list of wonder goes on and on. Hopefully and importanly this sense of mystery induces also a sense of respect for and accompaniment with non-humans expressions of nature.

Caring, such as the many encounters I have with my friends, family, clients, and just people right around the corner…., is evenly such a source of unknowing generalizations and categorically dried up understanding of life as "such and such", or this versus that. Every person, when approached from a deep curiosity, has an inner world reflecting the complexity of the so-called outer world. Being together in openness and transparency catalyzes the experience of love, the wonder of interdependency as the bedrock of all life and the impossibility of one ultimate perspective other than the aknowledgement of mystery. I also remember looking at our dog, interacting with her playfully, and oftentimes just letting my mind wonder about her inner experience....

And last but not least, I want to share with you how my understanding of ‘intensity’ has evolved - or unlocked - over the years. More than a personality characteristic, it has taken on a processual quality. In the immediacy of what is present this moment, intensity ís. There is nothing to be done with it, it does not have to become anything (thanks to Eric Baret for the inspiration). I don’t know how to become anything else than what is here, and that is the great mystery.

As I wrote in ‘Intens mens’ in 2021:

"Intens Durven Leven. Dát moet jouw slogan zijn. Daar vaar je goed op, dat golft en geeft mee.

Intensiteit, niet als kwalificatie, niet als persoonlijkheidskenmerk. Niet als synoniem van instabiliteit. Emotionaliteit. Kleverige emoties en onbedachtzame keuzes. Geen labeltje zijn van andermans persoonlijkheidslasten.

Nee.

Dieper.

Hoger.

Basaler.

Frivoler.

Intensiteit als een gegeven van het leven waar jij je natuurlijkerwijs en gevoelswijs toe aangetrokken voelt."

Paraphrased:

“Intensity as a given fact to which you feel naturally and emotionally-wise drawn to.

And I would add now:

Immersed in.

It does not get any more mysterious, does it?

Curious to hear more about the ways in which you infrastructure for mystery in your life. Feel free and invited to share!

*And stay tuned: I will share a community event about cultivating a sense of mystery soon!

Restrictive reach

“All creative activities is, to some extent, done partly with the intention to rectify or fix yourself. In other words, by relativizing yourself, by adapting your soul to a form that's different from what it is now, you can resolve - or sublimate - the contradictions, rifts, and distortions that inevitably crop up in the process of being alive. And if things go well, this effect can be shared with readers.”

Haruki Murakami

End summer last year, I was enjoying an evening full of warm connection with two of our closest friends. Looking out over North Italian mountains, a question bubbled up. When the feeling of life’s potential and depth naturally expands by imagining what lies behind mountain tops, the mind effortlessly eases into an affinity with mystery.

“What kind of narrative has been most vital in your understanding of life, up till now?”

We had an interesting exchange. Even in everyone’s brief answers I saw their personalities, upbringing, hardships, their study, interests and encounters with others deep thinkers and feelers reflected. Meta thinking our way through the answers, we saw both the degrees of freedom certain logic brought and the accompanying constraints in everybody’s conditionings.

When it was my turn I laughed at the question. It is a habit of mine. Thinking up intriguing questions, posing them eagerly and then struggling to, even resisting, to give an answer myself. A bit of self-irony goes a long way.

Eventually, my answer was something in the line of: “Expansion is continuous.” Tight in with physics and intertwined with a felt sense of life. My co-thinkers intelligently responded that there are more laws of nature, ha! And for someone specialized in the theory of positive disintegration, my answer was also quite funny….

I tried to think my way out of the potential inconsistencies and mentioned that expansion also means disintegration, to me. In any case I noticed how the image of an ever-expanding universe had taken hold on my imagination. The impression that this universe has nowhere particular to go but is reaching out anyhow, soothes existential fears. Maybe I am seeking freedom from something…

My answer also says something about my challenges in finding my ‘place’, if you will. Spaciousness has not been a problem, far-reaching imagination neither. But I have struggled with understanding which conditions do me any good. I have had trouble with having a clear self-understanding, puzzled by paradoxes such as being a very socially engaged and open person, but also very private with a strong preference to work alone and according to my own ideas, schedule, and needs. Working in a group is quite taxing, emotionally, and intellectually. I find it challenging to find my position in a group, tend to either be very present and lively or disoriented and preferably invisible, observing from the margins.

Giftedness as a perspective provided understanding of several paradoxes. In particular the emotional intensity and sensitivity, the deep questioning and social experience of being different. But the gifted lens promoted in literature was often not precise enough, somehow. As if it only expanded my understanding but didn’t focus it enough to extract practices out if that would help me make clear decisions and promote self-care. Understanding my life’s experiences was very vital, but not every struggle or characteristic I noticed is explained by the impact of intense situations or trauma. Not everything has to be healed. I kept missing a piece of the personal puzzle.

I found out that it was crucial to ‘just’ accept certain tendencies. Tendencies which I had often understood as a result of trauma, or something that was just inherently strange or even wrong. At an early age, I decided I wouldn’t show anyone “this part” – giftedness came in hand here, masking the challenges. That part is not so much about expansion. One could say it frequently has the opposite tendency. It wants to contract. It wants predictability, clarity of values, rules, and appointments, not so many social encounters, and a lot of alone time, not solely after an expanse of stimuli, but as a given way of organizing my life(‘s energy). This part cannot really relax when communication contains practical uncertainties, when my schedule is impacted spontaneously and I can’t find a way to optimize the structure of the day anyhow, when people are being unpolite and unconscious about it. It finds the intensity of summer sunlight too much, numbers or phrases or things to do keep repeating in this part of the mind, hyperfocus is a way for this part to relax, it feels emotions intensely yet approaches them very abstractly. It tends to self soothe by repeating certain behavior. This part has been called controlling, bossy, distant, vague, overly sensitive, rude, babbly, threateningly verbal, shy. It is the part that needs my softest attention, because it is the same part that tends to be hard towards myself – some of its focused energy has been submersed in rigid self-rejection after being overwhelmed by a lack of guidance, loss, and separation. Chaos is often nearby, according to this part, and reordering is its outwardly, fluid flexibility. It is at times painfully honest, conscientious, punctual, and easily overwhelmed in crowded situations. It often didn’t understand why people are the way they are, tremendously contradictious – and because of this, it has enabled me to thoroughly study people and their psychology. Through keen observations, it detects, if you will, very subtle changes in facial expression or posture, details that allow me to organize a deeper understanding of what is happening in the emotional undercurrent of connections.

It is the part that offers me the enabling constraints. Its ‘restrictive’ wiring comes with creativity, juvenile enthusiasm, long lasting loyalty, and easy generosity – one could say it is also quite gifted . It pierces through complexity by hyper focusing on the basic rules and remarkable exceptions reflected by unnoticeable details.

It is especially important to accept that “this part” needs help, if you will. I can’t overlook its twice-exceptional needs by focusing on my gifted, expansionary capacity. However intense I am meta thinking my way into life, this part systemizes all the jumpy associations – denying it has the vibrant need to do so, is undermining a lively fragility of being me.

Life is expanding – and contracting. Commitment to restrictions, to hidden parts of who I am, is one of the most liberating acts in this journey of self-development. In some way, ironically, it arrests the developmental focus and eases into what is, inviting me to be authentic, the freedom to be whatever creatively pops up in interaction with contraction. Always fixing, so that I have nothing to fix.

Theorizing developmentally

"I came to theory because I was hurting- the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.”

And so, Bell Hooks starts off chapter 5, 'Theory as a liberatory practice', part of her book “Teaching to Transgress”. In many of her writings, and this one particular, I find clear words that have a profound mirroring effect on me. Silent inner streams of consciousness find their articulation on paper even if, clearly, I come to her work from a different perspective and context.

I also came to the theory of positive disintegration because I was hurting. In my private life, and in the social system surrounding the family circle, I could not find any emotional guidance. And I was in deep need, highly conflicted, struggling with eating disorders and, little did I know, with new addictions just around on the corner. But the system had only reflected that there was something wrong with me, and ofcourse that did not sooth the pain. There must have been some disorder, a 'clarification' lacking any reference to context, development, or individual power. I was angry. Frustrated and disillusioned, again. Those with authority deemed it right to reduce my world to a diagnosis instead of expanding it through deep connection, respect, warmth, and freeing education.

Something in me always thought there had to be more, that a little place full of love tucked far away in my gut could be mirrored by others, their actions and my growth. I knew disintegration. In such a shattering existential process I had discovered some enduring quality of love, even if I did not have the wisdom nor experience to create a practice out of this insight.

Then someone referred me to Dabrowski’s work. I found an understanding of my effort to make sense out of life. It echoed my efforst to try to intervene in ways that might have been beneficial to my wellbeing and holistic growth beyond what was considered normal.

His was a view that challenged the status quo, at least in the regular mental health system in which, I thought and experienced, the emphasis lay on dis-ease instead of development. I felt empowered. Impowered. Here was also someone talking about sensitivity as central to emotional development. A sense of belonging filled my stomach, passion felt much more rooted, inner conflicts understood on many levels, and a form of social activism, or the image of contributing to society in a deeply committed way focused on emotional liberation, was born.

Hooks again:

“I found a place of sanctuary in "theorizing," in making sense out of what was happening. I found a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently. This "lived" experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis, became a place where I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away. Fundamentally, I learned from this experience that theory could be a healing place.”

Theory as a healing place. Dabrowski might have agreed. I remember him somewhere referring to the idea (I use my own wording here) that if someone recognizes themselves in his theory, he or she could re-read it and reflect upon points of recognition or development, and this may bring about developmental insight and perspective. Sounds quite liberatory.

Funny enough, throughout the years, theorizing itself got disintegrated - and newly integrated - by a thirst for (new) practices and a fully lived experience of reality. I will share more about this process in my contribution to the International Dabrowski Congress 2024. Still theorizing (about) it !

Life is intense

“I like to live, to live my life intensely. I am the type of person who loves his life passionately. Of course, someday, I will die, but I have the impression that when I die, I will die intensely as well. I will die experimenting with myself intensely. For this reason, I am going to die with an immense longing for life, since this is the way I have been living.”

Paulo Freire

Rereading this quote, my body comes to feel increasingly open, accepting the shivers, the conflicts, the exalted states, the uncertainty, the loneliness, and the frightening deep connections with those I could never call my own.

Fine, this is just another way of being in this world, of being this world, of inhabiting, incorporating, its intensity.

I never settled for ‘intensity’ to be solely a qualitative description of giftedness. Life is intense. I guess this, to me, was also a transformation of seeking intensity into opening up to the full spectrum of experience.

I remember sitting in the classroom. I was 6, 7, 9, or so. Sitting and sitting, noticing how the auditorial information sounded more like a scattered song or someone attempting but failing to get out of bed than something to organize my praxis around. Whenever a teacher was finished giving yet another example, I quickly looked at the other students to see what we were supposed to do.

Looking out of the window, it was my own attention which caught my attention.

Distracted according to one norm, fully engaged according to another. I just felt baffled by this strange life. How does this work, really? What is everybody experiencing, deep down? Who is she, he, who are we? Why is something important and something else apparently not? Could I ever stop questioning?

My emotionally intense inner landscape always drew me towards some kind of existential questioning and heightened sensuality stimulated me to create beauty and a renewed sense of unity out of the disintegrative, not so much shared questioning. I think all the artistic effort I can look back on and forward to, is rooted in my attempts to safeguard a longing for intensity. Echoing Freire, as if something inside of me wants to make sure that I will die deeply longing for life. In this longing, there is some resistance. Death will not bring about a diminishing of intensity. If anything, an intensification!

Rest assured; longing can be greedy. It takes more than a bit of Buddhist practice to let it flow through me instead of letting it overtake my awareness.

Longing can be melancholic, and it takes more than a bit of clear discernment to distinguish past pains from uncertainty filled present yearning.

Nonetheless, longing is what keeps me centered in aliveness. At times, and luckily, its objects are lost – or free from conditioned grasping - and all what is left is an intense surge of life’s energy. Throughout this body, degenerating towards the catharsis of that same longing. Floating in between past and present, grounded in a radically engaged emotionality. It is a praxis, actually. One that grew out of accumulating moments of profound distraction. Whatever is deemed boring may become this acute sense of longing.

Wilderdaad

Zij zien een familielid, toevallige passant, misschien de postbode

Hij erkent een monster

Zij zien de norm, eén van velen, de nooit terug tikkende tijd

Hij herkent zijn lijden, ziet een voorbode

van wat zou kunnen, de magie

van anders-zijn, ook gruwelijk-zijn

hoe zijn scheppende schaduw door de scheurtjes

van normaal schijnt

Zij zien keuzes, succes en een prima aan het einde van de dag

Zij ziet een verborgen leven

Zij horen moeilijke vragen, een periode die wel overgaat

Zij voorvoelt verlangens, onderdrukking

is maar zolang vol te houden

zo lang als vol voor te houden

Zij willen

maar zíj twee verlangen

om te verwilderen

Zij zien een wij versus zij, een ik en een jij

Hij voelt alleen in allen eén

Verschillen van elke toonaard

Ongeacht je burgerlijke staat

Zij verwachten, Zij rekt de tijd

Zij maken onderscheid, Zij solidariteit

Zij klappen voor de aangepasten

Zij ziet aangedosten

Iedereen is een vagebond

Leert zij van mond-tot-mond

Intense mensjes

denken voorbij grensjes

herkennen wensjes

voorafgaand aan woorden

daden en stoffige lesjes

Een wereld in wording

De beste theoretici

zijn van nature intimi

van het Leven, spel en natuur

als geboortegrond

van een verwelkomende

woekerende cultuur

Geïnspireerd op dit essay en deze quote:

“Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as "natural," and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp 'our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently (Terry Eagleton).”

Waardenvol

"Dus, meisjes: het leven zal niet beter worden en niet makkelijker, maar het wordt anders, en zelf zal je ook veranderen. Maar blijf wel voelen, zoveel mogelijk, zonder zelf kapot te gaan."

Wijze woorden van Eva Meijer*. Blijven voelen. Zoveel mogelijk zelfs.

Toen ik 13 was, schreef ik tussen ondertussen gerafelde rapporten, knipsels en verbleekt gedoodle:

"Het gevoel van de mens. De geest. Nooit wordt het gevoel helemaal blootgesteld, omdat dat het diepste in je hart is. Dát ben jij! Het gevoel dat je bang, blij, angstig, verdrietig, vrolijk en zoveel andere gedaantes geeft. Het is, vind ik, het belangrijkste van een mens, het maakt je waardevol."

Ik ga door en schrijf over hoe gevoel allerlei staten kent, kwetsbaar is en respect verdient. Om de zoveel tijd, of gevoelsstaten, herlees ik deze vroeg-puberlijke reflecties en waardeer ik de ontpoppende, of eigenlijk al doorleefde wijsheid. Wist ik veel.

Ja. Gevoelens maken je waardenvol, letterlijk.

Eva Meijer schrijft over het intensieve, psychisch lijden onder meisjes en jonge vrouwen. Over hoe zij een werkelijkheid leven die ook waar is, hoe ongemakkelijk ook. Er is veel ellende, onzekerheid, gemis aan verbinding. Een realiteit die, in lijn met de categorische adviezen van mijn 13-jarige ik, waard is erkend te worden. Het is er.

Meijer: "Misschien is ze iets aangedaan, misschien voelen ze het gewoon, onder alles."

Omdat ik zelf zo geleden heb, wil ik het wel uitschreeuwen. Uitschreeuwen doet me wel goed, voorkomt verder lijden. Lieve allen, leef je niet alleen ín, leef je ook uit, uít het leven.

Meijer:

"In plaats van de meisjes en hun gevoel als afwijking te beschouwen, zouden we allemaal beter kunnen leren meer en beter te voelen, over anderen, de wereld, jezelf. Als beginpunt om beter voor elkaar te zorgen. En een andere taal te vinden voor gevoel – want beleidstaal of medische taal hebben er niets mee te maken."

Schrijven is mijn vrije haven geworden. Tegenwoordig zit ik vaak achter een piano. Spelen kan ik technisch gezien nog lang niet. Menselijk gezien kan ik het wel. Op gevoel. Elke noot, elk akkoord, een wereld zonder woorden, vol waarden en - ja - ook lijden. Ik vind een nieuwe taal. Dankbaar dat het kan.

Voor even klopt alles precies op de melodie van mijn gevoel.

*De column van Eva Meijer lees je via deze link.

A protected way of being awakened

"I can see myself in your eyes. You see yourself in my eyes."

Many moments in time intensify yearning for plain and profound wisdom. A little yet big human being just found words for a concrete, sensorial experience of interconnection, laying in my arms, nearing sleep, a protected way of being awakened.

Slowly her eyes closed. A week of many first impressions left her body tense. My high body temperature, an internal fight with a rising inflammation, made it extra cozy for her to be held, kissed, and rocked. I felt intensely energy low. Nonetheless, having her in my arms that way, in that state, with the slowing of time and expansion of space, also felt quite hallucinogenic and meditative. A deep-rooted yet floating sense of love fueled blood vessels and warm vibes. Her face was the ultimate beauty of the universe, nothing in nor around me could escape the accompanying sense of unity.

Like happens often when something feels precious, my mind imagines sentient beings enduring extreme hardships, violence, and alienation – those in deep need for precisely these moments. Oh please, take care…. It starts to ache more when the imagination reaches the outer areas of my heart’s bodily connections. It is of importance to me that this stream of consciousness does not stop at sentiment. It is a visceral experience of interconnection, a being in-hereness together. Without embodiment, wisdom gets lost in duality.

And I was silently hoping I could somehow savor some love for those in serious need, to go beyond the ‘wired up’ love that kinship is. There is much to honestly say and de -glorify about parenthood. But, I just knew, absolutely sure of myself, this was one of the most transcendent moments I had known up till now. It is medicinal, really.

It is in the bodily expressed trust of a vulnerable child that awareness can re-embody confidence in becoming a responsible human-animal acting beyond conditioned binaries. Diaper changing can also be game changing.

In our brief moment of prosocial sharing, our mutual caressing and untroubled caretaking, union between instinct and intuition, intellect and emotions was loud and clear. We slowly stroked each other’s cheeks and shared the heat of the incarnated moment when, finally, her awareness entered one of the biggest mysterious so close to her day-to-day wisdom, dreams.

I also have dreams. Encompassing love. Yes, I do believe this exists – in unimaginably multiple forms and moments. Want to share your experience?

Tearified

“I heard a story from a friend about a woman who was always laughing, always happy. She was this happy person, very attractive, attractive in the sense that people just surrounded her because of the joy she radiated. And one day, it was either him or someone else met with her and said, "So why, what's your secret? What's the secret of your joy?" And she said, "I'm joyful. I'm happy because I know how to cry. I know how to cry." And maybe that is the thing for me here: there's something reductionistic about the pursuit of happiness – i.e., let's build a tower of Babble and climb into the ethereal regions, the atmospheric regions, the highs. Let's get high, let's escape the lows, the doldrums, the depressive, let's escape the flood of tears.” (See this link )

That sounds crushingly simple. Crushing a learned need for complicatedness – a way of justifying my observative, interconnected, associative and embodied experience of life by rendering it more “expertise-like.” “I’m happy because I know how to cry” – yes, please. It sounds vividly playful, also. Not a rigid categorization of negative versus positive or good versus evil, but a very layered, dynamic, dialectical, and indeterminate process, our minds communicating their bodiliness, not bodylines. No need to pursue lightness to counterbalance the darkness. Difficulty with tears, to be direct. We project disharmonies upon the performative nature of tears. As if we are “tearified". Something might overwhelm us. Life will.

I have been sick, laying in bed with intense aching muscles. Feverishly, I notice how being drawn into bed is silencing some traces of a psychological sense of being existentially threatened. Being pulled into this body is like being pulled in the shapeshifting world. I give in to the limbo reflected by a changing body temperature. My skin hurts as it does easily. It is the otherwise soothing because suiting blanket that feels awkwardly uncomfortable, but I rest my case anyhow.

This pain will probably pass.

While I am slowly recovering from this almost traditional New Years flu it is the resistance that comes with an increasingly less steamed mind that creates suffering. Getting-better now sounds paradoxical.

How to be happy? This “how to” is an interesting question. It pulls me back into my also increasingly more yearning mind. The “how to” is precisely this. The pain is “intertaining” me, laying with it comes with some happiness, not only because I lost track of many pursuits of future joy, also because the pain undermines a sense of separateness. I need to ask for help, cancel appointments, and certainly not overcomplicate this particular experience. I am because I am process.

Some tears ran over my cheek as I allowed myself to experience the painful skin. It was no fun, but it was a ritual birthing gratefulness for this bodily process. I don’t want to bypass physical suffering, but I do see it as an opening towards life’s experience. At some point in the process, this mindful seeing will diminish and life experience – what we coined dying – will fully take-over. Or so I imagine it to be by now.

Every time we get out of bed, we implicitly strengthen certain power structures over others. Being healthy over being sick, being useful over being useless, being beautiful over….Through the cracks in habitual thinking that being-sick offers, I notice certain mental and behavioral tendencies with brightness. Listening to the so-called sick is insightful for our social beings to learn how to be and become with these ever-changing complex worlds amidst an existential falling apart.

Intense permeability

How shyness is best transformed into an even more intense permeability

I remember quite a lot of people talking about my supposed shyness above and beyond my head, literally. Words flew over my body, casting a spell with the magic of the self-fulfilling prophecy that our socialized identities frequently are. Shyness meant being afraid – aware – of the impact of other people’s opinionated positions. More than often, this fear also related to those intimately close, suggesting some sort of existential sin in being together, in being sensitive and receptive, similar yet different. Maybe it wasn’t a lot of people. Important though. Those with authority.

Even if coined shy, I was already a verbally very intense child and was told numerous times to quiet down the first years in primary school. A combination of a need to imagine and associate rather than learn step-by-step, the becoming of a passionate word smith and an animated body made it challenging to sit still and pay attention to other people’s priorities. I found my way in the system by creating many hour-to-hour, or even 15 minute-to-15 minute schedules - and securing a world of my own, inside. I talked less and less aloud but enjoyed petit leadership qualities in interaction with the other kids. I also counter-intuited socialized or even disciplined shyness by running for the podia wherever I could, founding an outlet for authenticity, or at least certain creative forms, in dance, poetry, and public speaking. Once a performance was finished, I often ran off the stage, or so something inside of me holds on to as a vivid memory, trying to keep the subsequent encounters with students and teachers as brief as possible. But, I did not succeed, diligently I wanted to mirror everyone and – to be honest - deeply loved people’s otherness, in-thereness. And it was addictive, at least a bit, particularly winning.

Developmentally eager, I sought a different, additional approach to renewed self-expansion and knew by now that development is a manner of “othering” like I did on stage. By not-being-me I became more-of-me, or more creatively me, transcending the felt imprisonment a partially suppressive, socialized self was. So, I decided to experiment with a different kind of language and communication style, not so much fixated on being kind, to try out self-transcendent activities (from bungee jumping to the experiential study – that sounds eloquent - of psychedelics), and juggle identities with cloths, music, social preferences, and perspective taking through listening, reading and writing. No shying away from the promising complexity of adolescence…

As a young adult there was a fruitful follow-up to this exploration when I was evenly juggling different career paths, study wise and with respect to jobs and extracurricular activities. All these processes surely expanded my understanding of life, humans and what Báyò Akómoláfé calls the “trouble with authenticity” on LinkedIn:

“From a processual, non-representational, posthumanist perspective, every social encounter paraphrases bodies in the sweltering heat of intra-action. Indeed, one cannot meet another without becoming modified. 'Our' identities - never reducible to choice or preference - do not pre-date the relational arrangements that are the condition of their emergence.

In some sense then, we drunkenly tumble through a hall of distorting mirrors wherein every greeting surface is a risk, bending, stretching, pulling, re-threading the inauthentic, cavorting with unseen possibilities. Failure is the motif, the very ground of encounter. We will not be seen. We will not be heard. We will not be reproduced. We will be paraphrased.”

Whereas my potential “keeping the options open” was paraphrased as a “she can not make any decision” when I was younger, I came to see it (again and again) in a different light once the emotional contagious state of adolescence transformed into the more autonomous, even if still poignant existential seeking of the following period. Ambivalences were re-interpreted to be part of a process called positive disintegration.

I remember how fond I was of literary studies offering me a world of words engaged in overcoming the need to pin down the world in neat categories, engaging me in paradoxes and ambiguities that felt enlivening familiar to the innermost streams of my experience and thinking. Here enters a gratefulness towards my parents patience in letting me seek my own paths.

And here, I am.

I would like to live this life as if it is at risk because it is. There are at least some parts that don’t want to buy into a presumed safety or managed coherence, even though I don’t want to deny (possible blind spots with respect to) privilege, relative safety and comfortable, backward rationalization.

At times, it was difficult to disentangle black-and-white trauma reactions from a deeper sense of our life’s sacred motionfulness and thorough ungraspability. It took another decade, it is taking this decade, to integrate a yet more expanded, relaxed sense of my self by letting the wounds speak for themselves instead of trying to raise them to the level of eternal healing and health.

Learning about the roots of the shyness from the standpoint of individuality, recognizing a deep sensitivity, lead me back to a different lens, namely seeing the shyness as expressive for our thoroughly collective, communal, and becoming ways of being this life form. Emotions being in constant motion, learning to lean into my feeling body, shattering conditionings by actively inviting the felt sense of our interdependency, daring to be even more permeable than the identification of shyness seems to suggest, I experiment with overcoming those past “socializations,” re-rooting a fundamentally alive sense of being. Shying away from one fixated stance or identity, dancing generatively with the falling apart of our perceptions due to an ongoing stream of sensations embedded in relationality. What a trip!

I like to be hold, but there is no-thing to be held. It’s in the holding that we both come alive to a sensitivity neither characterizing me nor you, opening the gates towards a nourishing and expanding othering in our most intimate inner lives.

I was never solely sticky sticky shy, very much alive though. Like we all are, I intuit, existentially. Permeable, and – able at it, so I learned. Failure can be the leitmotif towards fresh aliveness, a process enriched by many paradoxes. Even during our dreams we keep our inner eyes open, I noticed.

How happy I am now to receive the following testimonial of a wonderful (also co-)creative journey. It is honoring to have experienced this trajectory with such an artistically alive, other human being :

'Journeying creatively with Lotte as my writing coach has been a truly unique and inspiring experience. During every session Lotte and I explored new perspectives that expanded and enriched my writing process. Lotte is incredibly easy to talk with and it was so refreshing to be able to discuss deep, complex themes. Lotte also gave insightful, encouraging, and useful feedback throughout and this has unquestionably made my work better. If you have the opportunity to creatively work with Lotte I highly recommend you do so.'

Lil Jedynak Ph.D.

PS: looking for creative accompaniment? Working on an intensely personal and/or artistically complex writing project and long for someone to think along, provide fruitful questioning, perspectives, sources, and/or activities to deepen and co-guide the process? Feel welcome to approach your project also in a lively processual, relational manner. You can mail me to schedule an explorative online meeting: lotte@alotofcomplexity.com

Sacred instead of scared

“The depression is recognizing the destruction of the sacred."

Daniel Schmachtenberger

Source: this video

I am struggling with my abstracts for the International Dabrowski Congress. Years ago - this phrasing is becoming an echo in these entries - I might have struggled with an inner critic stating that my work was not valuable enough to be part of the program. A struggle with self-esteem remnant of recurring disintegrative experiences and a deep seeded need for unconditional love. Now, I sense an existential desperateness at the root of my struggle with words, forms, and motivations.

“Ah yes, I see…..well…This is good,” Dabrowski might have said.

A well-effective reality function surely should spur the greatest imagination to get us out of these doomed dominant cultural narratives and conditionings leading to destruction of nature and wellbeing. But we tenderize first by familiarizing ourselves wholly with the bottomless desperateness.

A scared part of my mind cries: what good can this contribution do? My more mature, sacred instead of scared part knows; be gentle, reach far by allowing constraints to inform your creativity. This is critical work, precisely in the face of everything that is going on, going down.

Inhaling and exhaling, I find my way to the piano, pausing between words and tuning into sounds which will not express my emotional and creative views for many years to come, but nonetheless already isolate a horizon out of a resonating heart.

Evenly obtaining a sense of direction out of Dabrowski’s writings, I am again trying to find my words and cluster them into a coherent yet freeing abstract, communicating what feels both deeply personal and crushingly transpersonal. This sense of direction is more processual than ideal, and that feels vital.

“The period of real, essential moral maturation is often one of spiritual void: of isolation, loneliness, and misunderstanding. It is the time of the "soul's night," during which the then existing sense of life and forms of connection with life lose their value and force of attraction. The period will close, however, with the working out of an ideal, the arising of a new disposing and directing center, and the appearance of forces of disapproval, shutting out every possibility of a return to the initial level. This is the process of development of personality. The third agent, having now gained the right to be heard, will admit no retreat from the road ascending to a personal and group ideal (Dabrowski, 1964).”

The writing process makes me want to talk to a tree, let it turn my thinking upside down to let my sentences embody a collective wisdom like the roots naturally do, like we humans could do. I think of the performative talk "Rooted giftedness" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs-Kjj3_hEQ) and allow my mind to free float ideas, perspectives, transgenerational, emotionals streams, fitting creativity, and communally nourished courage. A mixture of ripening sadness and focused excitement will guide the way forward. Fluidly and - depending on the perspective - messy more than linearly.

Valuing inner work as part of the sacred, seeing our deeply personl relationship with life, this is critical.

Synthesizing the self

“It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does not live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption."

James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

How much analysis can a psyche bear? After a while there is a wholesome urge for synthesis, a dimming of self-related thoughts, a dimming of the flashing light of self-scrutiny one can shine on the perks and margins of one’s mind and habituations, a relaxing into the body, an incorporation of feeling and higher quality thought processes, a slowing down of developmental urges and a sinking into the flow of choices directed by an anew appreciated and refined inner knowing. I can only resist for so long, resist this sense of direction with respect to the creation of an everyday rhythm and routine and, in the midst of these caring acts, the growth of a grander scheme of actions born out of courageous imagination and previously guilt inducing decisions with respect to time and space, attention and focus. I can resist for long, but not forever, or this would bring about a tremendous lack of vitality.

It keeps on raining here. There is no end to our worlds changing weather patterns, can our emotional regulation keep up? Relational conflicts on micro and macro level will appear and disappear, but they cannot be at the center of my attention chronically, or continuously. An inner knowing is also an inner ordering. An inner emotional ordering with a practically worked out plan. The word ‘plan’ triggers that annoying and demanding resistance again. But the story attached to the resistance doesn’t do me any good, it is firmly rooted in by gone experience, I should only extract wisdom from these reappearing sensations and not dwell in their appealing sentiments.

These last years, I thought this house was broken and my home lost, but it was the first time I was building one with an emerging sense of togetherness, timelessness, and spaciousness. Having the experience of being (with) everything and everyone at once – nothing and no one to embody in the eyes of the frightening, distanced other - felt crushing at first, but it molded into the acceptance of the ebb and flow of life, the cherishing of what is aware at any moment in time, and a listening to what emerges instead of a pushing against reality.

A synthesis of reality and imagination now lies in the realization of caring deeds. Everyday. At some point the analysis slows down, all the questions can be kept awake without posing them repeatedly aloud, and one ‘lives in the answer’, as Rilke might say.

My mind is made of soundscapes telling it how it is, emotionally and existentially. Cultivating calmness, love, awareness, presence… is of upmost importance. The world is crying. Stress is triggered easily; I have seen and see it in our homes. Slown down even more and act with clarity and determination from that spacious place, Lot. The emotional spectrum of life is not integrated in me yet. Until that day I will be writing about it, no question about it.

Rock-solid sensitivity

Isn’t it remarkable how we can feel lost and disconnected, conflicted, and depressed, and then, sometimes and even suddenly, find our way back home in this world we all birth into awareness anyhow. So many years have passed since I, like I had experienced off and on from a young age, felt that daunting existential uprooting. Senselessness. If I could only replace my former, now bleeding passions with fresh ones, I thought, this would safe my searching, if existing soul. The task was not transactional though, and my repeated bodily ‘no’ to many internal and external creative suggestions kept pressing me to dig deeper.

And you know, when you dig deeper, there are all these emotional and existential layers to dislodge. In the background of one's complex psyche there is no running away from the unmet mommy and daddy issues, the cultural blind spots, devastating realities of this life and world, and, eventually, utter and disorienting uncertainty. Digging deeper was a way to consciously process an “emptying out”, solid, sometimes unwelcomed emotional work to have a felt sense of the spaciousness that surrounds us and, by inhaling it, expands our hearts also. Fully leaning into the interdependency of my life, lived through in the arms of a loving other, has changed my self-perception.

At some point, something inside of me also loosened the gratifying identification with emotional work. Now this is scary. Here, the question “Who am I?” has no answer but a pure, silent but all-encompassing sense of being. The ‘I’ that I knew to be did not give up easily and started to create new layers, new complications to fill up the excitable threat of emptiness. Identification with ‘doing’ and suffering goes a long way when it is entangled in an egoic, once needed grasping for safety.

But I experienced and acknowledged what love is, actually. A going beyond needs and deeds. Rock-solid sensitivity sipping through everything. Vulnerable without a doubt. Shaky, not broken.

I am sure this year will come with new layers and unpredictable kinds of unlayering. But this is not a house for all too complicated stories anymore, or so I intuit now. The sadness that for so long got stuck in my stomach and couldn’t find the way out of my toughened body other than wrapping it in longer and lengthier concepts, has found a welcoming, softening stream. How funny, I found the keys to the open door of my heart. Wordless, but intensely expressive, nonetheless.

Welcome to the awakened inner child spreading the vibrations of curiosity and renewal against the conditioned odds. I feel playfully senseless in this exploration.

Lost in translation

“Had I been given a clear definition of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person. Had I shared with others a common understanding of what it means to love it would have been easier to create love.”

Bell Hooks

Pieces of a healed heart, fragments of a long lost diary

"Our lives got lost in a particular type of hardness we both inherited. You kept diverting whenever emotions were verbalized, I lived on the surface of your easily irritable – and so firmly soft – skin. Equally, I was buried too deep under my words, verbal ferocity alternated icy silence. You spoke aloud, I got frightened enough to eventually fight back, but actually did so from the beginning by not showing my true colors. You had such an exquisite awareness of inauthenticity. I wondered, what does this tell me about you?

This time around, I learned, it wasn’t only those painful memories which I pushed brutally to the margins, I fought with your survival force and the baggage we both came with painted our relationship sinisterly blueish black, too often at least. We tried so hard to be kind that it, at times, surely failed. I tried to polish what was rocky. Poetic descriptions nourished intense moments of melting away our resonating resistance. Often enough, though, these were almost sentimental attempts to create romance out of suffering. You ignored your inner conscience and frequently, a test to your inner strength, you failed. Seemingly bitter at the outset, internally deemed by self-rejection, or so I learned along the way. A mirror that I longed for and always was there, or so I learned. Is it unlearned, maybe?

That crushing hardness got the best of us, dissecting even our perfected defense. We never stopped trying until we learned to let go. And here we are now, my love. Finally, my love. We are chopping our heads of as one might say in tantric tradition. Al those misfitting words, egoic grasping for deeply unnourishing safety; let us forego those prevailing instincts and highly personalized yet awkwardly recognizable demons. Let’s take care of our bruised memories. Remember consciously, forgive open heartedly. Let’s heal by stroking hands, breathing in sync and let loving others enrich our shared emotional landscapes. So that we finally define, together and in utter respect for the complex inner worlds contributing to the conversation, what love is. So that both practice and critical thinking immerse themselves in the embodied world of being human in the enlightening eyes of our lover. Our lovers, those teaching us through reflection to never shy away from being the courageous beloved willing to love beyond thoughts and fulfilment.

Gosh. We never defined it, Love. We just played by the rules. Either those inherited by our fragmented body, our family or by culture. Let us define what love is and start all over from there."

A passage is arriving

As a passage is arriving, time is ticking and creating heightened consciousness of where I was and where I am going. My eager heart and symbolism craving psyche try to run ahead, try to see beyond the enticing horizon, at times neglecting the existential truth that is found in the longing only uncertainty births vividly.

There may be some grasping, but it’s just a wave of emotional intensity rising in oceanic awareness. I try to keep my head above water, and then I dream of sitting on the bottom of the deep sea, peacefully awaiting how the rock-bottom means I will rise anyhow, anyway. Air bubbling up from my mouth symbolizes the first eruption of artistic outlet.

Years of existential unrest have come to an arrest, so it seems, and the slowing down that wintering invites us to, gives rise to a clear awareness of this new-found sense of direction. A sense of direction born out of release, anchored in the motionfull now, increasingly embodied in the relational realm of life, shaping the conditions for a creative spurt. Even if my body intuits a yet deeper integration of life’s presence in this life form, a gracious rest offered by listening to my being's need for relaxation, mediation and contemplation, there is nothing to steer or direct, for now. A settlement of the sense of direction on a new plane of development without some inner repressive force pushing the way forward to the detriment of my intrinsic trust. Not coincidentally this transition coincides with our daughter’s passage to school. My mind is thinking along with my pelvis, co-creating a home will mean the world to her, to us. I hear myself saying aloud: “I want to be sensitive and alert with respect to her wellbeing.” Practically, we are putting effort into making this parental awareness possible with the help of lively communal ties and most of all, moments of untroubled presence.

An embodied hierarchy of values is immerging out of four years of reorientation. That which gives voice to decisions vital to our parenting resonates with that which shapes a new creative, intellectual and social road. Suppressed ideas, critical questioning, and intuited road maps for my work in emotional development rise to the surface. This process is, next to being an offspring of, amongst others, motherhood, also inspired by my regular visits to the monastery House of the Beloved, a space and place, a gathering of people seeking deep connection, that surely fits - and 'awakingly' transgresses - the curiosities, values and passions driving me to study emotional development since many years. Less suppression leads to a firmer belief in the integration of many different disciplines, practices and perspectives in this life’s study and study of life; a loosening of my limbs stiffened by internalized power structures, stretching the emotional, intellectual and imaginational reach of my creations. As if everything that I have been delving into all those years, a grateful broadening of interests and social connections, is now ready for a ‘vertical integration.’ From head to toe, letting real life existential research guide the way (as it essentially always has), breaking the apparent walls between the personal, professional and spiritual, walls that were conditioned by cultural dominant narratives and personally endured hardships. An intensifying and sensitization of awareness, actually to discern what to focus on. How gratifying it is to look back on intensified ambivalences and sense how a shaking of the system encourages an actualization of seeded potential.

We will see. The eye that sees is one with the ‘I’ that shakes.

Not letting fear dictate this free fall called life, leaning into intuitions and questioning: what practice leads us to positive disintegration?

2024

"Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion."

Martha Graham

Thank you for all our online meetings, your heartfelt appreciation and loving kindness. Let's dance in our own idiosyncratic ways. Let us cherish and evolve precisely those moves and motions which fit the flow of your and your loved ones wellbeing and flourishing. Let's nourish and care a new world into being. Be fierce in your courageous love.

No one sees the tears

“There were many occasions when planning an out-of-order sign across your heart seemed the wisest decision to make. Only you didn't. Instead you kept your heart open, invited people in. And even when they were reckless, messy, and selfish, you chose to remain open: a shift that never ends, a light that always stays on, a beacon in the darkest nicht, a melody that carries on. I am in awe of you: an open prairie among an ever-changing cycle of wind."

Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts

And isn't this the ultimate quest? For what is life other than a test to the openness of ones heart, a profound questioning of your willingness to surrender to the overpowering magnitude of birth and death, even beyond the security of a wishful, binary understanding? So many lives and loves have travelled through my heart and, time and time again, challenged my tenderness, the little brittle way of being porousiously me, under a skin that is both holding me here and eating me up from the outside.

"I yearn too, my darling, you know…because...."

....No one sees the tears of a crying whale.”*

So many stressful conversations formed by the echoing residues of painful past lives, so many not-to-be endings and black-and-white defenses… Our hearts shatter when we turn on the television and watch how violence keeps running through our veins. But we must keep our faith, she must prevail over our minds preference for fate. If its not brutality towards the other that keeps our lifes energy stuttering, its often our desperate self rejection holding us back from supporting each other unconditionally till the open end. But we must. We were never born to be separate. Our very feelings, what else is there, depend on it. For it must be a devotion to the full emotional spectrum of being colorfully alive which fosters our courage to open up. Falling into grace, skin to skin melting away all our relative fears.

Do not close your heart. Breathe life into your permeability. Your love-being is the ultimate dedication of your unquestionable death, a testimony to its lifelong, instinctively intimate closeness.

*artwork by Rogier Roeters

Merry giftedness

Oh, how would I have loved a communal initiative to tell each other remarkable stories, co-create eclectic and joyful dances, feast on beautified dishes, try out artistic endeavours, gather around a warming fire, and let go of our worries about our shared, perpetuating past and uncertain future. My imagination runs wild with games to play, conversations to have and deep emotional preparation for a new year, even anchoring the tendency to withdraw into good old wintering in the soothing sentiment of Christmas songs. You know, juvenile hopefulness, promises of laughing love and careless, communally nourished gratefulness.

And maybe, I am sure, for some this is reality. And, surely, some of this abundance will be part of this year’s personal passage to more hours of sunlight. And maybe, I feel, me and my loved ones will birth precious gatherings in the future, winter times or otherwise.

But, for now, I am not going to focus on any kind of fulfilment. This year, my biggest practice lies in the sense of not needing to do anything, in being present wherever we decided to be these days, to gently tune into everybody’s momentary wellbeing, and to allow myself to be with whatever there is - or isn’t. No need to take care, no need to mediate, no need to cater, no need to make more fun than presently in tune with my inner world.

These days, I grant myself the gift of not needing to gift anything to the world. Merry giftedness to all !

A demon nourished into daimonness

Self-rejection has been one of my closest companions since puberty. Oftentimes, when I felt hurt, wronged or in any way conflicted by friends or family, I retreated into the safe haven of looping self-denial. Experience had taught me that my deepest feelings and safety were at crucial times not of keen interest to care takers, so (close emotional) intimacy was a threat to my self-preservation. I surely was nourished by other love languages, but the impact of our family’s (and, in a broader sense, community’s) disrupted cohesion was evident.

Of course, I crave intimacy like anybody else and of course, when I went out into the world to explore and create a new sense of belonging, that came with challenging situations – living together is complex. And thus, I said sorry repeatedly (and, yes, again) out of a fear of abandonment and projected an image of perfection frustrating relational freedom, often suppressing the actual simplicity of a feeling and the downright reality of reciprocity in social connections, particularly those near and dear. I ended up moving from avoidance to clinging, not finding much rest in the ongoing ambivalences. I knew better, but I was afraid. There was a learning process going on, my brittle inner value system was a whispering guide, but it felt painstakingly slow at times.

Behaviorally, from adolescence onward, I perfected the art of self-rejection through a form of rigid control born out of emotionally shattering experiences and educational frustration. Minimizing my calorie intake and pressuring myself to work out intensively was a way to preserve what was left of a sense of self after too much disintegration, too soon. Once I got over that thirteen-year long struggle with eating disorders, the demons kept popping up, more subtly and covertly sabotaging intimacy, selfcare and creative opportunities potentially leading to a frightening visibility beyond the illusion of my grip on reality’s unfolding.

During this whole period, I also learned to be a keen observer of my own behavior, thoughts, feelings, and tendencies.

Self-awareness goes a long way but can equally be a shapeshifting disguise for a learned protection to keep the overview and to keep people at a controlled emotional distance.

With a growing sense of ease, I can appreciate the increasingly smooth self-awareness at the center of my intrinsic directive drives. What a conflictuous ride has it been.

And how insightful. Fragilities, I learned, are frustrated forces seeking passage through cracks of the dominant system.

Now….. I release emotional residues and, word by word, complicated, masking stories. Now, I am a witness more than an observer. A witness of a submission of the safety-seeking-self, giving to a lively fragility, stumbling in between my mind’s habituation to certain stories and my body’s growing, unveiled sensitivity. Identification with self-rejection is disintegrating, or so it appears now. Because, I laugh with a taste of softening irony, who am I to judge myself so harshly? This transformation, a release, comes with a welcome freeing of mental space to practice discernment instead of rejection. I long and practice truer kinds of intimacy nowadays thanks to guidance one can only find in reciprocal relationships and those beautiful, existentially rooted friends and mentors.

The force of self-directed judgment of course slipped through the cracks of the rather strong inhibition and oftentimes has made it hard for some of my loved ones to…rest in a form of commitment they surely deserve. I am learning to be straightforward when something feels off in a connection and practicing working it out together. The whole process has been going on for years, is rocky and ups and down are inevitably part of it.

The eating disorder that I once called a “monster”, which for so long had an imprisoning grip on my life through internalized anger, is now perceived as an object of my consciousness. Nothing that characterizes me, and no-thing that deserves my whole embodied power – the illusion of power it provided is released as such, making it possible for me to recognize it’s shadowy residues in subtle relational tendencies. Memories of the mental fixation are a reminder of our shared human vulnerability, bringing me closer to a sharp awareness of our psyche’s deep focus on survival. Something that teaches me, however strange this may sound, that underneath that demon is also a thirst for authenticity, a ‘daimon’ (term inspired by the Daimon Institute) waiting to be spirited with attunement, openness, and honesty.

Tenderness is the name of the game. Embracing complexity doesn’t stop on the surface my skin, I can project these perspectives inwards and let it ripple out in the reflections of non-judgmental, embodied awareness. Throughout all those years I surely see loads of manifestations of the person I am also today, and in different ways have always been. Caring, energetic, humorous, sensitive. And even those qualities, claimed as such, aren’t that important anymore – or at least loose localized emotional weight, becoming an orchestra of interconnection rather than something to proof in response to demanding uncertainties. Being lovable or loving enough isn’t the right motivation; love is being-here. I guess that, through the inner silence rising after the flood of emotional peaks, peace is entering the scene. Peace.

Wow, let me just sit with this for a moment. Peace. Before hasting towards an end goal, let me reverse the intensity of this feeling of gratefulness back into my body through conscious breathing. We will see what life brings, I feel responsive, but am not in charge, even if I definitely feel charged often enough...

Importantly, in here is a home for those demons enlightened to be the daimon they always feared they were. And, if they must roar to honor that life’s energy, let them, Lot. Inhabit, don’t inhibit your being.

The image I was born with

# me finding out life is full of meaning after all

A while ago, I had an intense experience of unconditional love. Flowing out of a period of overfocussing on something unreachable, because projected outside of myself, in response to grief because of suffering around the world, in interaction with my existential research into anger, and as part of a transformative relational crisis, my emotional world synchronized into a state of intense unconditional love during a trippy meditation.

Like other people’s descriptions of such experiences, in those moments I no longer practiced a contoured (and separated) self. Lacking precise descriptions, all I knew to be consciousness. And even though there were brief moments of resistance towards the all-encompassing reality of this consciousness and interconnectedness, whatever we might call ego could not resist for long. ‘I’ lost all ability to talk, imagine and …worry. What I ‘saw’, felt in every cell of my body, was that awakening is being with what is, unconditionally. It was quite an impactful process to be in.

Reality is just…reality. And, mind you, that is a lot. Every(no)thing! Everything that I normally rejected (and might still do, in the relative sense), including violence, felt part of the unity of consciousness sensable during the meditation.

Afterwards, I humanly struggled to – ha! – get a grip on that experience. It surely altered something inside of me. Or maybe it brought me back to something I had ‘known’ before. For a couple of weeks, I felt a swift entrance to what I might call a deep silence ‘inside of myself’ which had the same quality as the heightened state. It felt like the birthplace of a new quality of ‘interiority’. It catalyzed a fresh dive into literature about spirituality and existential development and it boosted my active acceptance of anger (and everything I associate with it) as part of our human experience.

The grasping for meaning that rose out of that intense experience also came with a couple of strong emotional responses. Projections got a hold on me again! It goes too far to share every one of them in this reflection, but the main characteristic was an internal fight against the depth and breadth (also known as ‘void’) of that sensed awareness in the peak moment. In response to a climax of fear popping up when I tried to consciously lean into the void (or silence), something inside of me started to fight reality. The irony, anger got a grip on me! Also, in interaction with our daughters’ intensities, namely her rightful exploration of embodied power, my body and mind were challenged to integrate the emotional intensity of anger. I had been taught to deny anger in my body, and now it was time to integrate that suppressed and often self-rejecting energy. In particular, it was time to own a fuller extent of my life’s energy instead of projecting or suppressing it . "Add" to that the discovered, now deepened need to take ownership of the impact of complex trauma.

This was testing, could my cherished connections, and should I add frightened ego and heroic superego?, ‘survive’ these outbursts? All the while I was questioning many of my learned assumptions and convictions, which took a toll on my mental and emotional energy level and was quite disorienting. Surely, that experience of unconditional love wasn’t easy to smoothly integrate throughout my whole system. Some old conditionings were fighting hard to be seen and recognized. Relational and personal emotional work is ongoingly part of the journey.

At this point in time, I feel I can look back on that journey a bit more. Retro – and prospection are becoming entangled in a deeper and broader sense of reality. Impressed by the panoramic and deeply sensitive peak experience, humbled by the inner conflicts that arose out of that sensed, freeing yet frightening abyss, I get a new feeling for what it is like to be me, how it could be, perhaps even communally rooted in “the image I was born with” (See this poem by David Whyte).

More on this later. For now, feel invited to dance with me !