I had a tough morning today and started joking with my partner that I have quite a tight schedule today. 9-9.45 Self pity 9.45-12 Contemplating my existence 12-12.45 Lunch 12.45-15 Ruminate over past mistakes 15-15.15 Fika 15.15-23 Doom scrolling Afterwards I felt much better. Sometimes humor is the best medicine.
“Be happy in the moment, that's enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.” - Mother Teresa
I got a mindfulness trick from my theatre teacher yesterday. Count colors! Look around the room and see how many red/blue/yellow things you can find. It will shift your attention from rumination to the present moment. This is a helpful way to recharge and then you can come back to the problem at hand with a bit more spaciousness.
Warmly welcome to the extra meditation today as part of the World Mental Health Day. By practicing being fully present and aware in the moment we nurture a calm and relaxed inner world, a great antidote for stress and anxiety!
Let the breath expand you from inside and release tensions and contractions
Your attention is a beautiful thing! It creates your whole world. Try this out. Look around the room and look at five things you find beautiful, really see them and take them in. Feel how it impacts your mood, your thoughts and your body. Then look at five things that you find ugly or annoying and really take that in. What is the impact on your mood, your thoughts and your body? Our whole life is shaped by what we pay attention to, so learning how to choose what you pay attention to is a great i...
All of our “negative” emotion carry gold when explored properly In fear there is strength and personal will In anger there is personal power and true nature In sadness and grief there is love and compassion In guilt and shame there is integrity and true value In loneliness there is unity and connection
I've been reflecting on boundaries lately. Boundaries, as I see them, are the personal guidelines we set to determine what we allow into our lives. This includes what we eat, the media we consume, the people we surround ourselves with, and how we permit others to treat us. These are what I would call outer boundaries—they protect us from external influences, helping us manage the flow of energy and information coming from the outside world. But there's another important type of boundary, which I...
When you look at a baby, it is obvious that they are enough as they are. They are already worthy of love and belonging. And all they do is sleep, eat and poop. As this baby grows, this never changes, it is still worthy of love and belonging. Even though this baby is now all grown up and is doing its best to navigate being an adult. That baby is you and me and everyone else. You are still worthy of love and belonging.
The mind and the body are deeply interconnected and mirror each other in their functioning. When the mind is stressed the body will tense up. When the body is tense it will lead to stressful thoughts. This creates a feedback loop where stress and fear will circle around between body and mind until the cycle is broken in some way. This is quite an uncomfortable state to be in, both mentally and physically and our default way to deal with discomfort is to fix it by thinking our way out of it. Howe...
I saw a YouTube short the other day that I thought was really beautiful and a bit eye opening. Imagine that right before you were born you were given a human, And you were told that for the rest of your life you need to take care of this human, My human is called Anton and it’s my responsibility to take care of him Your responsibility is to take care of… insert your human’s name here Your human has thoughts, emotions and the body And they are important because your human is important But they ar...
Our mind is a wonderful thing. It can plan for the future, set goals and plan how to reach them. It can create abstractions and read the weave of correlations. It makes us aware of risk and danger and much much more. However, when it comes to our mental health, we tend to rely too much on our mind. We seem to believe that we can think us out of any emotional difficulty. “If I only find the true reason why I feel this way I can fix it and feel good again.” What we don’t see is that the mind will ...
Stop Just stop Let it be And let whatever is, wash over You are not going anywhere You are already here
Here is a lovely poem by Jeff Foster on the principle of embracing what is here. At the heart of every addiction is the attempt to run away from ourselves. To flee our sorrow, self-doubt, anxiety, shame, fear, guilt, loneliness. To be somewhere other than where we are. To be out of the Now. Meditation, true meditation, courageously dismantles the core addiction, the addiction to 'somewhere else', to 'another Now', to 'not here'. In true meditation, we are... HERE. NOW. We allow ourselves to be e...
I’m back again after vacation so today there will be Tuesday meditation as usual. I’m looking forward to seeing you 🙏
Recently I’ve listened a lot to Sam Harris, the author of Waking Up and the creator of the Waking Up meditation app - which I really recommend btw. I enjoy his precise pointing and his uncompromising perspective on what the actual benefits of understanding your consciousness are. Let me paraphrase him. Saying that you should meditate to deal with stress and lower your cortisol levels is like saying that you should learn to read for the same reason. Sure, reading can have that side effect but the...
Hello dear 🌼 Imagine you are Super Mario. You live in the Mushroom Kingdom, you spend your days trying to rescuing princess Peach from Bowser and hang around with your tall and skinny brother. One day, Toad, your little mushroom friend, who’s taken an interest in the nature of reality comes to you and says, “Hey Mario, this is just a game and all of this is taken place on a TV screen.” Mario is like, “Mamma Mia, are tripping my friend?” (Or something like that my Italian slang is not that good)...
you are already here there is nowhere to go wherever you look there you are
Today we dive into the emptiness and silence of awareness!
You carry images of who you think you should be in your mind. We all do. You are aware of some of them, others are held in the shadows. Some of the images you agree with, others will shock you when you become aware of them. You are constantly trying to live up to those images by pushing yourself, trying to satisfy the critical voice in your head by doing the right thing, according to the images. If you are like most people, you seldom stop to take inventory of what image it is you are trying to ...
The inner voice of the critic, the pusher and the perfectionist are not there to make us happy. That is not their job. They are there to keep us protected from some imagined disaster. So if we follow these voices it will not lead to the happiness that we imagine, it will lead to stress and effort. A better way is to ask, what do I enjoy in life? And let that be your guide.
For you, this group can be - A break during the busy workday - A chance to reset the mind and body - A space to slow down - A way to gain more clarity around ongoing questions and challenges - A chance to try out different forms of meditation
There is no audience to perform for, there is no approval, no admiration to attain, there is no role worth playing, there is no one to convince. Let it go.
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.” - Confucius
What lies in front of you are potential pasts. Which one will you actualize? Man’s search for meaning - Viktor Frankl I love this picture of having all my potential pasts in front of me. It helps me see how many possibilities there actually are and quite often it highlights that the path I’m about to take is not what I want to look back on. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist that survived Auschwitz. In his book “Man’s search for meaning” he speaks about finding meaning in facing once suffer...
Today I want to share a micro practise with you. A micro practise is an exercise you can do in a matter of seconds that helps you reconnect with the present moment. Last week I invited you to take three slow and deep breaths. Great micro practise! This week I invite you too look around the room and name five things that you enjoy looking at.
Stop. Take three slow and deep breath. It takes around 30-50 seconds. Do it now. It’s quite nice, isn’t it?
You are an inconceivably tiny fraction of the great cosmos. Your life here is a mere blink in the timeline of reality. To put if frankly, you do not matter. As such, there is nothing you are supposed to do. You are not bound to any contract to fulfil some destiny or some way to be. You are not amounting to anything. You are heading the same way all of us are heading, and what happens after that we don’t know. “My life is not important.” It means you can do anything you like, it doesn’t matter an...
We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. - Alan Watts You are part of this world You belong here You are infinitely interconnected with everything
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to m...
