Thoughts of the heart

Letting go

Someone once asked me how do we balance between honouring and letting go. I replied that honouring for me is an act outwards, letting go is an inward thing. Maybe it is different for other people, but from my perspective my relationship with life changes with my inner work, before I go outwards.

We cannot let go of the past until we change the way we’re responding to the past. For me it is always the inner work (a process, never a result) of accepting the life for what is, recognising how much pain my ego’s wishing ‘the life or people should have been different to me’ can cause.

Letting go happens through deeply accepting my past, letting the feelings of hurt, despair, sadness, rejection arise, then forgiving others and myself for what happened in the past and transcending it. Letting go is to take responsibility and lovingly surrender my self-limited perceptions to much bigger powers of the universe through conscious participation in life as it unfolds. Letting go is to embrace the person I have become because of my past. Transforming and transcending is my ever lasting process of letting go. Only then I can engage in the act of honouring, myself or my community

Stillness

Nature and the universe are in a constant movement, in a continuous change, in an ever-lasting transition from one state to another, from one point of space or time into the next. When you look deeply, you can see all living beings always evolving from birth to death, water is always changing between the states of being liquid, ice, or gas. Even the rocks and mountains – the icons of what I could call ‘stillness’ – are quaking and erupting. There is no such thing in our world as stillness. Neither stillness is an innate state of nature.

Stillness for me is a human gift of being, the capacity of human consciousness to experience awareness. It is our ability to put our thoughts, moods, desires out of the way, so that we can become the awareness and the listening. In the outer world of current turmoil, (mis)information flood, aggression, natural disasters, wars, polarisation we have to live inside with our fears, frustration, discomfort, rage and most importantly with our selves. I know that the best thing I can do in these moments is to cultivate compassion in my heart and live my life with kindness. It is often heard. In the moments of inner and outer chaos (every day) it is a struggle for me to put aside my judgement, my beliefs, my conditioned mind and my spiralling thinking patterns that create even more inner chaos. I am surprised how difficult it is to allow my ego to deflate, to silence that inner noise and just listen to being. Only in this state of inner stillness I can connect to my true self that can produce creative work for my better living in the outer world. Stillness for me is a deflation of ego, lowering of consciousness, so that I can stay aware of my own being. And this is a daily practice.