After experiencing 6 days of continuous daylight in the Northern part of Norway, I felt in a more organic manner the moments of the day. As we were a group, we really took advantage of the free time after the conference which, in our case, was quite extensive. 🙂 We were going to sleep at around 3 am. On one of the days, we went for a hike at 9 pm, reached the top at midnight and experienced the “sunrise” on the way back, reaching the hotel at 2:30 am.

All was peaceful and quiet until the “sunset” (except for mosquitos which were highly active, but this is a topic for another time). An extreme quiet and stillness emerged at the lowest point that the sun reached in the sky (“sunset”) – like everything stopped. It was the pause of the ending and the beginning: a cycle finished, a new one was about to begin. Complete stillness. Neutrality. Nothingness.

Then… the sun started to rise. Wind, coldness, icy air. The pulse of beginnings. The chaos of creation. And, once the impulse was imprinted, the quietude of steady building.

Having the opportunity of experiencing the sun’s path in the sky in a continuous, visible manner, brought a deeper understanding of the saying “The dark night of the soul”.

We experience what we create.

Northern Norway midnight sun

More, faster, next.
Do more, arrive faster, move to the next task / experience.
But what about the breathing spaces in between? The empty space that actually allows us to take in the experience we are going through?

Think of yesterday’s lunch, for example. When you bring it up in your memory, what exactly do you retrieve? How rich and detailed is the experience of your yesterday’s lunch? In the end… the richness of our experiences is what our life is composed of, not their quantity.

I think that, until you don’t have a reference point, is hard to notice the difference. I’ve had the privilege of having multiple reference points related to this topic:

Walking the Camino de Santiago, day by day, with the backpack on my bag and then taking the bus back from Muxia to Santiago de Compostella. The same 100 km was done in a 5-day walking experience and then in a 3h bus sitting. While I was watching out of the window, retrieving from my memory that walking path, very fine details rushed back to me. I could zoom in on the experience at a very high level. Then I realized the poverty of the trip back compared to the walking one.

I love traveling by motorized means, so the topic is the attention put into the experience itself, rather than on the destination: Muxia was the destination, but the experience was the walking.

My first long trip abroad was at 12, when our French teacher took us on a Europe trip by coach which lasted one month. We slept in the coach, ate in the parkings and washed at gas stations. It was amazing! After that, I repeated it 3 more times. So… I really love traveling by motorized means. :)) The destination in this case was France, but the experience was the whole 1-month trip. Most of the memories from that period are related to the time spent on the bus and the experiences I’ve had together with my colleagues – not the destination itself.

I have recently visited Norway (one of the places very dear to my heart) for a conference and, together with my colleagues, decided to go to a famous viewpoint on top of a mountain. The plan was to go by cable car, but things got arranged in such a way that we ended up on the walking trail instead. As we were of different physical conditions and were “city” equipped, it wasn’t an easy journey, but now everybody remembers the experience in high detail. It left a mark on our hearts. All of us agreed that going by cable car wouldn’t have been the same, as the most important part was our journey together, not the destination itself. But we didn’t know this before leaving the hotel. 🙂

The list could go on, but this is the point: look back, find a reference point of an event that brought warmth to your heart and go as deep as you can into that experience, like you are in a room and are trying to observe as many details as possible of that room. Now, look at the “destination” of that experience. How do you feel the richness of details?

As soon as you remember your reference point, life becomes a journey, not a destination. Living your life is the most important thing you can do for yourself and others.

Namaste

Nobody’s life is perfect, but we are perfect beings right from the very beginning. We tend to confuse the two, or to make them the same:

• A failed relationship becomes proof that we are unworthy.
• A disappointment becomes evidence that we are inadequate.
• A wound becomes our identity.

This confusion is one of the deepest sources of our suffering.

Once this is understood, we start to percieve the imperfection of life as the supreme gift, as it pushes into revealing to us our original feelings and to humble discover them, like a precious diamond brought to its inner brightness through Earth’s pressure: it doesn’t become brilliant despite the pressure of the Earth; its brilliance is revealed through it.

Likewise, life applies pressure to our certainties, our identities, our illusions and our fears. What is false gradually cracks. What is essential remains.

Perhaps this is why suffering can become a teacher.

The moment we stop identifying with the wound, a new question emerges:
Who am I beneath the story?

The answer cannot be given by another person, borrowed from a book or inherited from a philosophy. It must be discovered, patiently and humbly, within the living experience of our own lives.
And perhaps that discovery is what we have been seeking all along.

We tend to forget what being a child means. We take it in a pejorative way but, if we really look, we are missing the point.

Being a child is about being present. In your own body, mind, emotions, environment. As a child, everything happens “here and now”. There is no “yesterday” or “tomorrow”.

Being a child is about feeling everything, fully. There are no social biases, preconceptions or misconceptions.

Being a child is about being open to the people around us. Everything is felt and expressed, sometimes in a very dramatic way 🙂 – they feel your energy is soothing, they smile at you and / or want to embrace you; they feel your energy is disturbing to them, they stay in a corner, move away from you or cry (sometimes with desperation).

Being a child is about real connection to other beings. They integrate and are part of everything.

Food for thought: why don’t wild animals attack babies? But, on the contrary, they protect them.

We hear this quite often nowadays. But what does it really mean?…

Imagine you are a kid, you fell and you have bruised your arm. As soon as you get up, you hear your mom in your head: “Don’t go there! You’re going to hurt yourself!” And, of course, you did exactly that. And you.ve hurt yourself. Now… you have to make a choice: go to your mom, show the wound and get all the “I told you so” and feel ashamed, put down, hurt or hide your wound and pretend that it does not exist. (I am taking only these 2 scenarios because they represent our way of dealing with something that hurts us emotionally: we hide it from the world or we show it and face the exact feelings that we do not want to face).

If you choose to show the wound, you face the emotional waterfall that comes with this decision and, in time, your emotional body becomes stronger and lighter / more clear.

If you choose to hide it, you become more and more fearful that it might be discovered. So you hide it deeper and deeper; and put more fierce protection around it (not taking your shirt off, trying to heal it without others seeing you, etc.). In time, even after it apparently heals, you still have the fear inside you of being discovered. And this could lead to quite twisted strategies of protection.

Now, imagine that this wound is not physical. It’s not from this lifetime. Is not from your conscious memory. Nonetheless, you feel all the symptoms of an unhealed wound, without being able to pinpoint it: fear, anxiety, agressivity, etc. How do you heal something that you don’t know is wounded?

In essential oil therapy, there are 3 levels of using an oil:

1. You love the smell of it – you have an imbalance, and you are ready to deal with it.
2. It is neutral (you neither like it nor dislike it) – you are balanced in that area.
3. You do not like the smell – there is your greatest imbalance, but you are not ready to deal with it.

The same in Bach flower therapy: what you “talk to” is what the person in front of you recognizes as wounds / imbalances. As a therapeut, even if you see the underlying / primary wound, you cannot address it until the person is able to see it on his / her own.

With astrology, it’s a little bit easier, from my perspective. The “primary” wound shows up in your birth chart. So you can sit with it, like a living meditation, and let it sink in, until you are able to let go of the rejection towards it. And that is when healing begins; in your own way. That is what “Chiron: the wound and its healing” reveals.