by Vienda | 16 Apr 2015 | Travel + Freedom
Have you found what you are looking for? For that one thing that will make life finally feel enough? Maybe it’s time to stop looking.
Every now and then during a philosophical mull-in with friends, a notion arises — that is “I am looking for something that is other than what I have.”
Examples would be …… “I haven’t figured out what I want to do with my life / my career / my love …..” – “I am looking for a sense of fulfilment outside of myself, and I don’t know how to reach it.” “So and so aren’t making me happy / my job isn’t fulfilling me / my life just isn’t quite right ….. yet.”
Let the searching end here.
I’ve been there myself, many times, trust me – I have galavanted across oceans in every direction in chase of adventure, to taste the potent elixir of life, or to escape from situations that I didn’t know how to stand in.
I hope, no, I am certain that by now, I have learnt my lesson. I have been the princess of chasing lost dreams that were actually never lost……. though not anymore. This is what I know for sure:
When you stop looking it comes to you.
Whatever that piece you feel is missing, it’s not, but by the fact that you are searching it out, that you believe you don’t have it, this elusive “thing” disappears and is suddenly invisible to the eye. That illusion of fulfilment, the idea of something lacking in your life is created by not attuning yourself to what IS already in your experience. By not allowing what is to be, and thinking that it is other than what you should have.
We always get exactly what we need; what we ask for.
Sometimes we are blind to the things that are in front of us purely due to the fact that we have forgotten to appreciate them for what they are. We judge them as good or bad instead of just as an experience, a possible opportunity to grow and learn.
When you hold in your consciousness how you want to feel, what you want experience, the type of people you want in your life, when you stay with it …… you find it.
Or rather .. it finds you. I know now that things always work the best when we allow them to arrive rather than pushing and striving to achieve them.
Let the searching end here.
What you are looking for is not missing. It’s not lost. It’s right in front of you… and you will see it soon enough. As soon as you let go.
by Vienda | 12 Jun 2012 | Psychology + Soul
Our capacity of experiencing such an enormous range of human emotions is certainly beguiling. With great charm and finesse we move through roller coaster rides from the highs to the lows, round loop-de-loops and back again of feeling emotions in response to thoughts and experiences.
But what are your emotions really telling you?
It’s quite simple. Emotions are our inner guidance system telling us whether we are heading in the right direction. They are the compass of our inner world, with which we sail the seas of life. Instead of reacting to our emotions with more emotions, imagine the clarity and self understanding you would become acquainted with if you were to feel your feelings and allowed yourself to learn what they meant.
Understanding and accepting our emotions allows us to learn the wisdom that they bring and let them go. The pain often associated with feeling emotions is not the emotion so much as the resistance against or attachment to the emotional response. Emotional awareness is a transformational step in the direction of self realisation. And self realisation rocks!
We often believe that our emotional response is a direct result of a superficial situation we have encountered, whereas in truth, our emotional reactions tend to run much deeper. They are actually an indication of your beliefs around a certain situation. And you have the absolute power to change that.
There are only two basic emotions that we all experience: love and fear.
As Oprah so wisely said “I believe every single event in life is an opportunity to choose love over fear.” Every single moment we get to choose whether we go for the feeling of love, or for feeling fear.
That’s the compass. The fear feeling means that the direction you’re facing is not quite right, not in line with who your are. That it’s time to change your thinking around whatever it is that perturbs you.
Sometimes you have to feel the fear, face towards love and move forward.
The love feeling is a great big emphasised YES! This is how you know you’re on the right track.
Feel the feelings. Allow them to guide you. They are your compass.
by Vienda | 4 May 2012 | Psychology + Soul
Life is much like a dance.
You learn the steps, you take one at a time, follow the rhythm of the music and allow yourself to be guided through.
And sometimes you’re just spinning, spinning, spinning.
⥤◈⥢
I’m at the spinning bit at the moment. Life is taking me for a little twirl and causing me to change, to grow, to transform yet again ~ and coming to a whole new level. This is what’s been happening recently:
Less than a month ago I was sitting in one of my favourite cafe’s in Bondi with the lovely Connie from A Life of Perfect Days chatting about life and love and how lovely Bondi is, what a great community it has full of all sorts of people from the ego-centric to the pseudo-spiritual, the yogic and the inane, and how fun and and wonderful it would be to live here.
Less than a week later my landlady decided to increase my rent on my gorgeous albeit tiny studio apartment by $50 a week. It was clearly a sign that it was time to move on. As much as I loved my one-girl-home I don’t love people taking the piss and asking for crazy amounts for rent. I mean, really, the rental prices in Sydney are high enough! So, within hours of receiving the notification in the mail I began looking for a room and home to share. I decided I was ready to live with someone else again. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted and asked the universe for the following:
Near the beach
with one really lovely and supportive housemate
who is likeminded;
a spacious, light filled room in a clean and tidy house
full of nurturing and peaceful energy.
Clearly, that is exactly what I found. After a couple of hours of looking online on a flatmate search site I found the perfect place. I just knew it from the moment I encountered it and made an appointment for a viewing for the coming weekend.
As soon as I met the girl who was looking to share the flat and had a look at the place I felt at home and was already a little bit in love. Within half an hour we agreed that we wanted to love together and the next day I gave 2 weeks notice on my studio and started packing.
Such unexpected changes in life tend to signify tremendous changes in myself as well. As without so within. It’s the world telling me that I’m ready for new things. That I’ve reached a new playing ground.
When I first moved into my studio apartment, it was the first time that I had ever lived alone, it was a space for escape and for healing at the end of a tumultuous, emotionally manipulative relationship, which also signified the end and resolution of a lot of unrequited behaviour patterns that I had carried with me from childhood. As challenging as it was, I had to go through this relationship with full awareness in order to recognise the old habits and patters, resolve them and restore harmony in my life.
In saying this, that relationship also gave me many wonderful things; it was a warm and cosy, loving, comfortable place to be in when things were good.
So, living on my own for the first time signified a massive commitment to myself and the need to be selfish for some time, to give myself the space and time that I needed without the interference or consent of others.
Time passed and I grew stronger, happier, more confident. I released the past and learnt from the experiences and became at ease with myself again, something that I felt I had lost somehow along the way.
A year and a half later, life decided that I was clearly ready to leave my introverted nest and spread my wings again. And it’s true, I really was ready! So here I am, living with a lovely new friend, by the beach in Bondi, a renewed person with a whole new host of gifts, skills and experiences to share with you.
I love change. I embrace it. I allow it to spin me around and give myself the time to catch my breath and find my balance again. Right now I’m waiting for the spinning to stop and to find my sweet spot again.
In the meantime, I am going to share with you how I accelerated my inner change through a 10 Day Master Cleanse in the two weeks prior to my move (post will be coming soon) and my current domestic goddess phase with lots of delicious and nutritious food ideas. After all taking care of your health is one of the best ways to nurture and take care of yourself. It is an optimum example of self love.
When I return with a new sense of equilibrium we will continue our journey into the deeper aspects of our soul’s psyche with thoughts and concepts on truth, love and self realisation.
Photography by Metin Demiralay.
by Vienda | 13 Apr 2012 | Love + Relationships
Men are continuously being conflicted to bury their true natures of being strong, individual, unique and masculine in order to become more streamlined, more sensitive, more fashion forward, consumer giants, more effeminate and different to how you are. Basically, you are being told that “you’re not good enough”.
All of these concepts fill your thoughts, your minds, you dreams and eventually you begin to lose touch with who you are as you busily endeavour to be who you think you should be in an effort to gain the acceptance, recognition and most importantly love that you crave and innately deserve. And then, one day, you look around yourself, surrounded by crap and gadgets and clothes you don’t wear, and discover that the one thing which makes you distinct as a human being and more importantly as a man, has been lost.
All the products and material possessions that you have been beguiled to purchase with your hard-earned cash in order to become a better man, the man the you “should” be are worthless in the face of a life and manhood frittered away. In frustration you shout out “How could this be?! I’ve done everything right. I’ve done it all like I’ve been told to. I work hard, I provide for my family, I exercise, I spend time with loved ones, I have bought the car/the house/the boat, I go out with my mates and show them how to have a good time, I’ve wooed women and treated them right and showed them what stuff I’m made of. Why does it all now feel so empty? Why do I feel unfulfilled and no longer truly alive?”
What happens now? Perhaps you go out, get drunk, firmly position your head in the sand and buy something expensive which will captivate and distract you from those questions. This will work, for a while, at least. At this point men begin to question themselves; sometimes this questioning take place as a mid-life crisis, sometimes as a journey of self-discovery. The path is yours to choose.
What if you were to delve a little deeper? What would happen if you were to face yourself, in the mirror, with all your honesty and fears and love and flaws and all that makes you, you and ask yourself “Who am I?”. Actually truly, who am I? Without the the labels, the social conditioning, the job, the family position, the “woe is me” story, the history, the education, the heartbreaks, successes and losses. Who am I?
Knowing who you are is the greatest wisdom any man can possess. Self-awareness is what sets us apart from all others in the animal kingdom. Get to know yourself. Simply by making the choice that you are willing to and want to get to know yourself is all it takes to start the ball rolling. Take time for self reflection. Consider the way in which and what decisions have been made throughout your life and realign them with your beliefs and values on a daily basis. Are you living out your true, authentic self? If not say so, take stand and make some changes. Choose to live your life the way that YOU would like to. Choose to be happy. Choose to be positive. Your life is reflected in the thoughts and beliefs you have about yourself. And no matter what messages you are receiving from the world outside of yourself, know this: You are good enough. You are safe. You are provided for. You are loved. Just the way you are. Because you deserve it.
Image source: Unknown.
by Vienda | 17 Jan 2012 | Love + Relationships
As mentioned recently, I attended many interesting workshops and discussions at Confest over the holiday break, one of which was entitled Understanding Men, run by a scientist by the name of Thomas Starke. I think the idea of understanding men is wildly fascinating, and as it turned out so did many men, since two thirds of the people attending were male. It appears that men also want to understand themselves.
Although I actually missed the first half of the workshop, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Tom was actually articulating how important it is for men to become empowered. I understand this to mean another way of expressing the journey to self-realisation. Empowered in the sense of becoming self-actualised as Maslow would call it. :: a powerful individual within their own right. Tom also expressed how important it is for women to become empowered. For a better world. For a happier life. And for healthy relationships.
Some of the golden nuggets that I pick up on from Tom’s discussion on understanding men were:
- Most men stop developing beyond the age of 14 unless they consciously make a choice towards self-awareness. This appears to be a more recent predicament because in our human history tribes and societies traditionally had some form of rite of passage in which elders shared their knowledge and wisdom with younger ones and boys became men. Nowadays these opportunities rarely exist in our western culture and men have to figure all these things out on their own.
- We currently live in a very masculine society in which even women have learnt to take on masculine behaviours, are more aggressive, have become hunters and generally have taken on the roles of men ~ leaving men quite perturbed on where they stand and what their roles as men are. As you may well know by my articles on gender roles here and here and here this is a fascinating topic for me. Tom emphasised how important it is for women to become empowered within their feminine realms. “You can be strong and very feminine at the same time.” He argues that women need to be women and men need to be men. Or basically that we have to be who we are, rather than try to be different. An example Tom gave was that women have to learn to be comfortable with receiving again, without feeling obligated to reciprocate. “It’s a woman’s right to receive.”
- Tom reiterated that everyone’s journey to empowerment is different ~ and that we all need to figure out what works for us and what doesn’t to reach that sense of empowerment.
- He also outlined that when you are empowered you don’t need to be with someone to feel fulfilled. Relationships then simply bring more male and female balance into your life.
- A point that I personally really resonated with was “staying in the space of allowing emotions”. Tom illustrated that an empowered man has the inner strength to stay with both his own and his partners emotions. Allowing them the space to just be…and then to pass. Without judgement or reaction. It’s about providing a space of safety and comfort despite emotional ups and downs with the knowledge and realisations that these upheavals are not meaningful and will pass.
- It was also emphasised how important it is for both men and women not to give their power away. Own it, relish it, stay in your power. At the same time remain aware, flexible and gentle. Constantly moving with the winds of change.
- Finally, a very interesting perspective that one of the men in the worksop brought up was how he, and many other men felt about the expectations from women. The example he gave was that women expect men to be everything all rolled into one…”Brad Pitt, Bill Gates, Tarzan and so on….” I personally had no idea that men felt under so much pressure from women to live up to certain standards and expectations. I do see his point in the way that I often see women enter into relationships with the intention to change the man in order to create their “ideal image”. Which is totally wrong. And ridiculous. For one, you can’t change people and for two, if you don’t like who they are in the first place, why on earth would you be with them?!! For their potential?! No!
Tell me, what are you views? If you feel brave, please leave a comment in the comment section below. Share your ideas and thoughts. I am fascinated!
Image source.
