Archives for August 2016

Dominoes

August 23, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

Life can seem disorientating sometimes. Random individual pieces of events, placed side-by-side.

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Much like dominoes.

Each piece gets stacked neatly next to each other.

The reason why one piece is stacked here and another stacked there may not really make sense when seen up close.

The dominoes just seem to go on and on.

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Because of this, at times it’s easy to lose hope. What is the point? When will it end?

But have faith, because all the parts are there, piece-by-piece creating a masterpiece that you just can’t see yet.

Waiting for the day that the first one drops, starting a cascade of insights and realisations as to why the dominoes were there in the first place.

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When the last one drops you can step back…

…and see the awe-inspiring art piece that life has created for you.

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Have faith in the process.

The Art of Humility

August 20, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

In Japan, we are taught that everyone lies on a hierarchy. People are above or beneath you. This is reflected in the language. You change your speech depending on how you perceive their status. To not use the correct form of language is seen as disrespectful and a massive faux pas.

When people meet each other in Japan, they quickly go through a process of trying to suss the other person out: How old is this person? What are their credentials? This is why business cards come out very quickly during interactions — so people can read their job titles. This way people can quickly work out where they lie in the spectrum of respect.

This was my reality until I was 21. Because we live in this box of being better or worse than other people, you need to consistently strive to be on top, so to speak.

And then I met a man who changed my world.

This person was a highly accomplished martial artist, with more than enough titles under his belt. Having won pretty much every fight that he has ever fought, this would mean he saw himself as being ‘above’ all other fighters right?

Far from it.

Let me put some context first. From experience, feeling like you are ‘above’ someone is a high. The embodied feeling is that you feel like you are looking down on others from a cliff. But like all highs, it’s not an expansive and peaceful sensation. It’s a drug. It’s a wall of energy that feels pleasurable but at the same time is hard and destructive. Physically you feel a fire throughout your body, tightness in the stomach with an overwhelming heaviness in your head (hence I presume the saying, “to be big-headed”).

Conversely, feeling ‘below’ someone can manifest as all sorts of emotions, depending on how you see the person ‘above’ you. If you respect the other person, then the emotional sensation can be quite tame. However, feeling ‘beneath’ other people can also make you feel sad, even depressed. And finally, if you feel low on the hierarchy and don’t agree with it, it can lead to feelings of anger and resentment.

It’s not just that you feel these sensations within yourself. You can intuitively pick up on what other people are feeling too – whether they are feeling ‘above’ or ‘below’ you. Over the years, a skill I’ve picked up having been brought up in Japan is to quickly pick up on these cues and to act accordingly. They think they’re above you? Ok, I’ll use my subservient language to please.

Having been very familiar with these sensations all my life, I was suddenly faced with a person who radiated neither of these energies. Here was a man who on paper had accomplished so much, yet he didn’t look down on others. At the same time, it didn’t feel like he felt like he saw himself as being beneath others either. He knew exactly what his skills were, and that was that. He just was.

Until then I used to think that to show humility was to downplay your achievements. It’s what the Japanese do masterfully. If someone compliments you, you immediately deny the comment, and proceed to put yourself down in some way. This I believed was what it meant to be humble. It was to secretly know how good you were, but to hide it on the surface.

However, this was not what I was feeling from this man. He wasn’t secretly hiding anything. As I mentioned, he just was. That was when I realised what humility was. It wasn’t to downplay your skills. Instead, it meant to not see yourself on a scale, whether it be better or worse, good or bad, high or low.

You just are.

Subjectively, his energy felt like nothing I had come across so far in my life. If you could put a sensation to transcending duality, it was that. You could call it an emptiness. You could call it a liberating sensation. It was the feeling of going beyond the box of hierarchies.Old habits die hard, and I am still trying to learn the art of humility. But as I do, I know it will bring me a freedom that I have never felt before. Freedom from the highs and lows that the illusion of hierarchy brings.

Two Becomes Three

August 15, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

In previous posts, I talked about the importance of being in charge of your own happiness in relationships, and the pain and suffering that can result from relying on someone else to satisfy your needs. This can be anyone from your partner, to your family, to your friends.

Often with regards to relationships, we hear phrases being used such as “two become one”, “my other half”, “he/she completes me”. The issue with these sorts of analogies is that they suggest that we are in some way incomplete unless we have these other people in our lives.

Yet, the truth is: we are complete already on our own. Your partner should not fill a gap in your life, but rather should add something new.

With this idea in mind, I suggest the following exercise:

1) Ask yourself: what are the gaps that someone close to you fills in your relationship? This could it be partner, parent or friend.

2) Write what you need to complete within yourself to fill that gap.

For example, I have a person dear to me who I feel is one of the few people who unconditionally accepts me for who I am. To me, my relationship with this person fills a gap – my craving for unconditional acceptance.

This clearly shows me that I need to work on unconditionally accepting myself more.

The list could go on, and could be anything. Does your partner make you feel protected? Make you feel happy? Make you feel loved?

Yes? Now figure out ways in which you can achieve that feeling within yourself.

Ultimately, these gaps are the things that are currently missing in the most important partnership of all: the relationship between you and yourself.

As you start to slowly re-discover how to access these elements again, your relationships with others will no longer be one where you are relying on them to fill in a void within you. It will be a relationship where two beings approach each other in their entireties. This allows for the highest form of creativity to occur.

When this happens, two doesn’t become one. Two becomes three.

The Man Who Was Afraid of His Shadow

August 9, 2016 by lyra777 1 Comment

Once upon a time, there was a man who was afraid of his own shadow.

He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that there was a dark, scary monster that would sometimes be behind him, and he was terrified.

He tried everything he could to get rid of it.

He ignored it

He yelled at it

He despaired at it.

But he was so scared, that the one thing he never did was to turn around and look at it.

The shadow would sometimes come out when he was with his friends, and all he could do was apologise for the black monster that followed him.

But the shadow didn’t go away. He ran and ran, but not matter how far he went, the shadow was right behind him.

He ran and ran, until he could run no more.

Now out of options, he decided to do something different.

Something he had never done his whole life.

He was going to stop, turn around and look at the shadow for what it was.

Slowly he approached it.

He stared at the very shadow he was afraid of straight in the face.

Suddenly, he came to a life-changing realisation.

The shadow came from him.

The shadow was him.

He didn’t want to accept it. That big black monster that followed him all his life, was an extension of him?

But as time went past, he decided to look more closely at the shadow. He started to get to know it better.

And as he did, he started to realise it wasn’t so scary after all. It may be black and gloomy but it couldn’t actually hurt him.

It was only a shadow after all.

He realised that what was hurting him was his fear of the shadow. The way he had spent his whole life running had drained him for years.

After finally seeing the shadow for what it truly was, he decided to try something new.

Why not love, instead of fear the shadow?

Instead of running from it, why not embrace it?

The man decided to shine the bright light of his attention to the shadow, enveloping it with love and warmth.

It was a part of him after all.

And then the unexpected happened.

The shadow disappeared.

Because to transmute darkness, all you need is light.

This was the lesson that he learnt from the shadow.

To this day, sometimes when the sun sets, the shadow reappears behind the man.

But the man no longer runs. He is no longer scared.

He simply turns around, smiles and lovingly shines his light on it.

Afterword

Probably the first thing people may think when reading this story is that the shadow represents something like depression. But actually, your shadow is any side of you that you don’t like. Like anger, jealousy, arrogance, anxiety, grief or longing.

We often feel that those emotions are there, but we don’t like them. So we push them away instead of fully embracing them.

In fact, we often reject them as part of our identity completely. If we get angry at someone we may later say, “Sorry, I wasn’t myself”, or if we’re depressed we may think, “I want to be myself again”.

This, on a certain level, is true – you are not ‘yourself’. But only because you are rejecting something that is fundamentally a part of you.

Remember, these shadows aren’t separate from you. They are a projection of you. In pushing them a way, you are actually making yourself feel worse.

We are raised by society to believe that we must be happy all the time. Being positive should be our baseline, and if it’s not, there is something wrong with us. We must ‘fix’ ourselves, and ‘fix’ our lives.

But there is nothing to fix. You are perfect just the way you are, emotions galore.

We are here on this Earth to experience. We subjectively add labels such as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ to the emotions that we feel. But at the end of the day all emotions are just another way in which we experience being a human.

It’s just that some emotions are just harder to accept within ourselves than others.

The first step towards healing your shadow is to acknowledge that it is a part of you. Take responsibility for your shadows. This is not saying if you get angry/sad/depressed/[insert emotion] it’s your fault. I’m saying simply acknowledge that it is an emotion that is part of your experiential being.

The next step is to lovingly accept it. When you relax and fully accept the emotion that you are feeling in the present, it is actually released. The light that you shine on it will conversely make the shadow dissipate. This is because you are allowing yourself to be who you are. You let the emotion run it’s natural course, rather than pushing it deeper and deeper inside yourself.

“But I do acknowledge my tough emotions but they don’t go away!’, you may be thinking.

Perhaps ask yourself, are you just feeling the surface of the emotion? Are you like the man who knew his shadow was there but didn’t look at it? Are you wishing that you weren’t feeling the emotion that you are now? Do you want to get rid of that emotion?

If you are, consider instead saying to yourself:

“I am feeling angry/sad/etc. and I love and accept myself just the way I am”

That very emotion you’re feeling is wanting to be a part of you too.

When you finally embrace the emotions that you have fully, you will soon discover that the very thing you fear inside yourself the most is actually your best friend and greatest teacher.

How Much Water Should You Take?

August 5, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

The other day I was having a chat with a survival expert.

“People ask me how much water they should take if they’re going on a serious hike. I then ask them – how much do you think? I never get the answer I’m looking for”, he said.

“What is your answer?”, I asked.

“Normally people say 2 litres? 3 litres? I tell them: no I would take 7-11 litres. 1 litre for every hour we are on the move. They’re very surprised at this response.”

“Wow, 11 litres? That’s a lot”, I replied

“I take enough for myself and for other people. What if we all run out of water? What if there are emergencies? What if you meet someone on the way who is in trouble? Everyone asks this question because they want to know the absolute minimum only they need to survive.”

—

I found this answer very enlightening and a great metaphor for loving ourselves and others.

You often hear the saying, ‘you need to love yourself in to order fully love other people’. In the past I used to think, ‘well, I may not love myself very much, but there are many people I love! I can still love!’.

But over the years I have realised the deep truth that underlies this statement. Any aspects that we can’t accept within ourselves, we have trouble accepting in others. In order to fully embrace – or love – the people around us, we truly have to start within ourselves.

We need to first learn to carry enough water for us, before we can start to generously share with others. What would you do if your friends and family are in need of love, but you are filled with self-hate? Would you be able to wholeheartedly support them during their time of need?

Instead, why not love yourself to the extent that you have enough to both nourish yourself and to enrich others. You would be able to freely give, without needing anything in return. Why not carry enough water for both yourself and others?

It is definitely something to strive for.