Spiralling Life

My first sense of who I am was: I am Lebensfreude! And very closely following: I am Saudade. Lebensfreude (joy for life) and saudade (longing) opened a field that I identified with, as it seemed able to encompass the core of my being. This field reverberated in all fractals of these feelings, both as mental formations – thoughts, doubts, philosophical questions – and as sensations. I frequently experienced a large variety of physical sensations, that were never named by the people around me, and if I mentioned them, they were mainly joked about. So I got into the habit of closetting them. Until I learned, to my relief, that they were actually testimony of my Lebendigkeit, my vitality. To my relief and my shock, because by then I had lived more than three decades by robbing them of significance. So I began the journey of paying attention, of valuing and embracing my bodily sensations, which are not necessarily comfortable, but very informative.

Meanwhile, I had developed a way of living which was both dedicated to learning and fruitful practices, such as meditation, movement arts and creativity; and which was also driven by ways of functioning which did not necessarily serve my health and happiness. Habits such as adapting to my environment by putting others’ ideas and needs first, loosing a sense of my own values and priorities, overworking, perfectionism and fear of failure. All in all, I put fitting in first, because of my saudade, my longing for belonging. But what happened to my Lebensfreude, my joy for life? It got buried underneath all the ideas of what I should do, who I should be and how I should behave. Ideas that were not mine.

Luckily the bodily sensations that I did pay attention to showed me that this was not the right way for me, not my right livelihood, not my buen vivir (good life). Through a long path and hard work on myself, through softening into mildness with myself and learning to look at myself with loving eyes, I started turning things around. Thanks to Nature and thanks to many simple, powerful teachings, I discovered how to energize myself out of states of downtroddenness, frustration and exhaustion. And into states of joy, curiosity, excitement and peace. This is the most valuable thing I learned in my life. And my body had always been capable of it, I just didn’t know. Now I am passionate about sharing this insight, this capacity, this practice. And about inspiring to turn one’s life around in the direction that is right livelihood.