Thursday 1 December 2011

WASTING TIME?!



“Don’t count every hour in the day, make every hour in the day count.”


It can be short, it can be long. It can rush or it can even seem to stand still.
Time…feels different to everyone and although science tried to measure it and describes it with formulas, not ever was it possible to make it dogmatically visible and to explain how and why it is different to everyone.
It is one on those mysterious things we can’t really grab and one of those things, we have to realise and accept that time is what it is – IT JUST IS!

Time has become something very valuable in our lives. Something like a currency which we try to gather, collect, work around and which rules our emotions constantly.
If we have little time, we feel poorly. Having a lot of spare time, we might feel rich…but then again, what IS little time or a lot of time?
And how do we rate it?
I never thought much about time itself until the day I nearly died.
I had an accident, but until then I lived my life and planning my things towards my future which I thought was proposed fulfilling.
I worked and lived towards my dreams that I one day was planning on making them come true.
After the accident my relation to time had changed, and so had my whole relation towards life. What I had found was not to have much time to be important to me, but what I made of it in order to not wasting it. I didn’t realise it at first, but I really started to rush things. A weight of pressure was guiding me like a ticking bomb. It was clinging above my head like a big ticking cloud, raining all those minutes down on me that I felt I had wasted with ordinary things.
I felt, I could see all that time I had and I saw it all being wasted on trivial things. I even felt sleeping being a waste and it bothered me a lot when I had to lie down to rest.
Wasting my time became a fear, and it did, what every fear does, once it has entered our minds – it poisoned me.
You must know, fear is a dark cloud and it affects everything. It is like a disease, spreading out all over the other parts of our life, starting with the simple things.
And what else it does is clouding our eyes and our mind for the essential.
The pressure grew. What to do with time and days off work I spent suffering at home, not knowing what to do. I did have spare time but I didn’t want to waste it on anything unimportant, so I ended up doing nothing, in fear having wasted my spare time.
TIME IS WHAT IT IS – IT JUST IS, but our mind and ego are so desperate to make a proper sense of it.
Trying to understand it leads to totally wrong perceptions which guide our day-to-day life. Time is always there, there is no start and there is no ending, even if we died! The clock goes on, its just us gone.
The Shaolin for example, say that time is not even time and doing things slower we will end up being more productive and happier and meet the right obstacles and challenges at the right time for us. Not paying attention to time itself in general is supposed to make us free and successful at the same time but that didn’t seem logic to me at all, because that was not how everyone else does, and what everyone else did must’ve been right, otherwise they wouldn’t do it, right?

So my pressure about time rooted furthermore in my perception about dying and the fact that I thought I know how much time I had.
Years? Decades? Hours? Minutes?
The fact is: NO ONE KNOWS!
Dying is another great fear of our society that has inflicted my mind, closely connected to time, because we cannot know when it happens or how we have to leave this world.
Throughout our lives we are confronted with the fact that we will never know. I found out, when I lost someone who was really close to me very unexpectedly.
We moan about the loss and we might pity the bereaved and ourselves, but no one can ever say that in these very moments, he has not been thinking and reflecting on their own lives.
Because, what scares us the most at those times is rather the fact that it could have happened to us, than the fact that someone else has lost someone.
WHAT IF IT HAD HAPPENED TO ME?
It could have! Death doesn’t differ between good people or bad people, between rich and poor, or old and young! Death can visit every one of us unexpectedly.
It might now frighten you, but to me this revelation was a relief to all the pressure and restlessness I had been guided by.
Time itself is just a word, to make something permanent. To give our brain an idea what we are talking about. But time itself is nothing but moments to me now!
Moments are something I can grab and my life now only exists in moments, not in hours or minutes, days or months.
And I found now, that my awareness is on the moment itself, my life is filled by moments that move my heart and about chances, rather than what to do next week or when to make my dreams come true.
I am trying to make every moment a good memory and to go slow and see the signs on the side of the road. I feel free now and I don’t try to spend moments suffering for a brighter future.
Every moment I live I try to create to move my heart and if they don’t, I do something about them…and you know what?
I FEEL I GOT ALL TIME IN THE WORLD!

Saturday 12 March 2011

THOUGHTS ARE WAVES


Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.       (Bruce Lee)

 The sea today is like my mind.
A strong current is dragging me from one wave to another same as my thoughts tend to stray through my whole mind creating pure chaos.
There is no consistent swell today. Only messy stuff over here, some cluttered waves over there and big walls of white water. White water – nothing firm I can paddle through productively because it is just like floating on a cloud. But while working to get through I make no movement forwards. It keeps me in the same place, or even flushes me backwards.
In order to get a good surf I usually hope there is not much white water to fight through and maybe there is even a channel or even better: a break.
It is a pause between the sets of waves, which enables me to paddle straight through.
But there is no channel at this break, and there is no proper swell but it definitely fits because my mind is like the surf today: jerky, in chaos and bulldozing one blurry thought after another.
This is why surfing is my ZEN, I reckon – because thoughts are like waves.
Waves hit me one after another when I start entering the water (likewise I usually get blasted by thoughts once I am entering a proper meditation).
The thoughts are there, hitting me like the white water hits my body while I am paddling out in order to get into the line-up.
The line-up; that’s where I need to be, so I am heading up, whacked by one broken wave after another.
When doing nothing about this liquid bombardment I get pushed backwards again and I have to start paddling all over a new.
Soon, I realize that I have to find a way to leave the white water section behind me – I need to let thoughts, meanings and ideas pass by.
I need to let it all go – and dive through!
So that’s how I do it. I duck-dive through the fluid obstacles one after another, pulling forward and only concentrating on my body.
I can feel every muscle, every working joint inside of me. I can picture what they look like and the complex movements of my diving.
I make my way through the chaotic sea and at the same time through my chaotic mind with all those messed up thoughts and ideas.
Once in the line-up I have time to rest.
I sit down on my board and I feel exhausted.
My breath goes heavily and my body aches for a while.
Out here there is no liquid bombs attacking me. There is just the open choppy sea and myself, so I close my eyes and try to relax. The choppy sea rocks me on my board like a rocking chair and the aerosol fills my lungs with salty air.
Looking at the wide-open sea I cannot come around to compare this infinite horizon with the true infinite nothingness of my mind.
Out here I feel less random thoughts bulldozing me, and the waves I left behind don’t mean a thing anymore.
They feel long gone and I now realize they have had only ONE purpose: to challenge me in letting them go.
"EVERYTHING IS IMPERMANENT” the Buddhism teaches me and I find now that it is true.
Then a set of waves starts coming in.
I can feel the tension of the sea in the air, on the surface of the water, which is starting to bend farther out.
I lie down on my board and start paddling for it.
Like a thought coming up from the very back of my own mind this wave is coming for me.
A plain power is moving towards me, which I know I need to get hold of. I will have to grab it in order to understand.
I paddle for it, there it is right behind me!
I can feel it lifting my back up and pushing me along, and when I feel that power of the sea, I feel the true power of my inner self – the power of my heart.
Here it gets important for one should know that the heart and the mind are not the same. While the mind is what thinks and forms ideas about all kind of things, the heart is what simply is.
This mere energy I feel outside pushes me further along, I gain speed and then I get up on the board.
That very moment, the moment of the drop-in decides everything.
It will decide whether I am able to use that wave, that thought, or whether I will fail.
So if the drop-in goes wrong, I get washed and I have to paddle the whole way back out there.
It is like trying to grab a useful, powerful thought from the heart that shatters on the ground and loses its truthful knowledge.
But this drop-in gets mastered, and when it is mastered I am in the flow.
Everything is in the flow.
I ride this wave, that powerful energy likewise riding a thought.
When riding a thought, I might find time to look at it closely but in the end I discover that it doesn’t matter WHAT they are made of.
The only thing that matters in that very moment is the fact of its mere existence and not what the thought actually contains.
Sometimes I tried to bother them.
I tried to bother the wave, same as I bothered the thoughts about their containments, but it distracted me from being in the flow.
My one-pointed concentration, which comes pretty naturally when I surf, got instable and I failed riding that wave. I had to realize, that this very failed wave, same as my very thought, crashed against the beach break and then faded away into nothingness – it was annihilated.
Frustration, that was the only effect it had on me when I tried bothering its containments.
So today I am paying no attention to its inhibition but merely to its existence itself and it guides me on a fine ride. I feel like I am in a different world with a sense of ease and solitude.
A ride in the flow of a natural powerful energy where I am able to be just me, instead of being attached to something impermanent.
By NOT bothering the thoughts themselves I am able to ride them down and then to let them fade away without fearing that some part of me will fade away, too.
Sometimes, when being out here my mind goes so blank that by the time I come back in, several hours have passed.
I reckon that is why surfing is important for me.
Surfing is my ZEN.
It is a task without a beginning and without an end and the only thing that matters is the absolute passion one puts into a performance and into mere awareness.
This is, where when I come back out of the water I find my mind being clear, clean and at ease.
I finally know what is important for me, what matters to me really instead of what I had been taught. I feel I am not at the mercy of my moody, misguided ideas and thoughts, which spring only from external influences.
I am internal – I just AM.








Saturday 26 February 2011

CANINE VIRTUES

Sometimes I wish I could be a little bit more like my dog.

My dog doesn´t take life too serious, not even himself.
My dog doesn´t know much of deserving and not deserving, but he trusts me filling his food bowl regularly and giving him enough water in order to provide him a good physical health.

He likes joining me everywhere, feeling quite save and knowing nothing bad will happen to him. In contrast to us humans, it is not even in his consideration. For him there only exists THAT one possibility - everything will go the right way!
It doesn´t occur to him there could be happening anything bad to us at all. Neither the fact, that he might not get fed. "Why not? I love her!"
My dog obviously feels alright the way he is every second of the day.
When making a mistake or he makes me angry, he feels sorry and apologizing himself to me and the issue is forgotten straight away - vanished from his head and doesn´t affect any following second of his life.

My dog can have fun running after a plastic bag that is waving all over the beach, losing himself with full devotion in this game only to find in the end, that he´s lost the chase.
But my dog doesn´t care. To him, it was about the chase itself, not about the final resolution - and he doesn´t feel like a loser at all.

My dog is a happily and highly representative of NOT-OWNING!
He doesn´t feel he needs to own anything, which is pretty practical.
He wouldn´t try to dominate another dog by claiming their toys, neither does he care if anyone took the flyball i bought for him. (Whose one was it again?!)
Things are just mere objects to him and they only exist to supply a good time of play and happiness. He needs them to have only fun, not to proclaim and certify his personality.
I want to be like him, sharing everything with everyone and deattaching myself from any object in order to make me feel free.

Furthermore he is equally up for an adventure in the field, a game in the yard or a snooze in the house.
No matter the circumstances he is in, no matter where the flow of life takes him, he tries to make the best out of it - and succeeds! Following his only bliss: HAPPINESS.
He can find happiness in a 3 hour sunbathing snooze on the balcony, same as in a 2 hour game on the beach with the most unsocial dogs in the world.
He can have fun with a bunch of leaves as much as enjoying sitting somewhere watching people passing by, shouting at each other (in Spain a lot of people use a high volume to chat with each other) or having beer on the beach. (My dog doesn´t like beer, by the way, but he really likes peers).
He loves me, no matter if it was even ME behaving wrongly towards him.
With me apologizing (i never tried not to do so!) he is always amiable and everything between us is like it was before. 
His trust in me is deep and he is sure of any love for him.
Don´t you assume now that he is sticking to me like a piece of butter to a frying pan all day long. He doen´t seek for attention, neither do i have to adore him 24 hours a day.
He is likely to spend half a day on the beach but adopting the attitude to spend those hours in  3mtrs distance from me. And when at home I often need to find him somewhere snoozing quietly seperated from me in another room or corner.

The most adorable thing about my dog, though, is his unquestioned self confidence!
I wished i could imbibe this, too.
Every dog we meet he sees a possible play mate in him! 
Some dogs are not likely that easy at playing and socialising.
Being told off harshly then by another dog that was suggested to become the best friend of his life ("Oh yeah! We could be friends forever!!") he is trotting away without any feelings of shame or rejection.
His body says: "Ah yeah! My hole! Just going here then and getting that hole dug deeper!"
And on some days I think I can see a speech bubble rising above his head saying: "I am sooo amazing in digging this hole,though!" 
Forgotten about the rejection he had suffered before and I am not even sure, if he even feels rejection at all.
He just doesn´t take anything personal! Nothing in this world can touch his very identity, can shatter his meaning structure of being him and that is what makes him happy, adorable, confident and most of all - FREE!

Sunday 30 January 2011

CHANGES


Changes                                                                                   

A new year has started and again, on New Years Eve thousands of voices sounded loud about what they wanted to change throughout the year that’s lying ahead of us.
I always found changes are good.
I found, changes are necessary in order to grow and become a better human.
But…changes cause a lot of pain and trouble, too and although they have to happen, we are scared to do so.
Changes happen everyday. In Nature, without changes nothing would spring from a little sprout. A desert would be lifeless if animals and plants hadn’t found a way to change in order to survive there.
Changes happen everyday, although it is not always visible for our eyes.
They happen, whether we want to or not, and the ability to control this is beyond our possibilities.
Changes have to happen, for when nothing is changing, that state would be called DEATH.
Living in death is hell,
But, changing feels like hell, too.; just a different hell.
So why is it so hard for us to change? Why do we rather refrain from changing and accept the suffering we feel when everything passes by, than deciding to let things go?
First we find ourselves in a set up world.
We are with people who fit, do a job that seems to make fun and go out with a person we think it could be THE ONE.
But things change. Like in nature nothing remains the same and so we don’t either.
And then, out of a sudden, something inside of us changes.
No idea the trigger, but it does.
First we ignore it, try to pretend and get the old personality back.
But it doesn’t work that well, so problems start arising.
And there we find ourselves, finding the job we are doing isn’t the right one anymore for it doesn’t fit to our ideals and our new found abilities.
Neither do the friends, for the common things disappeared.
And what about the ONE!?
Suddenly we act different, find things important we didn’t before and fights become normal. So do doubts, mistakes and misunderstanding…
We find ourselves at the end of a certain period and most of the things we believed in, and the things we had set up for our life don’t matter anymore. The importance shifted, so we know we have to let go.
We need to let the friends go, for there is no need to meet the ones who don’t share what’s now become important to us.
We quit the job, maybe decide to go into a new direction and study again in order to become, what we find important now and what fits to our new ideals.
We let THE ONE go, too. For we changed into a different direction and THE ONE cannot be a part of our new path.
It cannot join us, for it would slow us down or would even block us.
When found new friends and a new job, so finally we find a new ONE.
And change does happen again!
When changes happen, they might make us stronger, but…. Giving up again, and again what we were fighting for is sooooo hard!
Some say, not the goal is important, it’s the way itself that matters the most.
But I was wondering if there was a way that things could change with us…?
Why do we have to leave the ONE we love for example? Or find new friends, which is sooo hard?
Right now I am standing at that point again, and I get the feeling, that it is rather the letting go of an idea or belief that makes changes so frightening, than the changes we cause in the outer world.
From my whole life on I had to go through so many changes and I feel so tired of it.
My heart doesn’t want to attach to anything anymore, for it knows that loosing it would cause a lot of pain. And what to find after the change would end up in pain again.
Some say, we shouldn’t attach but how the hell should we fight for something without finding something worthy? To find something worthy does mean it is important to us and as soon as something is important to us we are attached to it.
I have to let go and give in to the changes that happened inside of myself and around me.
And here comes the fear and I meanwhile think, that is simply fear that keeps us from changing and growing.
While the change is in progress we might not realise it, but as soon as the changing progress is finished we find ourselves in a state of destruction.
It is a process of elimination, which leaves us in uncertainty.
Uncertainty, for a lot of things we believed in doesn’t make sense anymore. Inner world (the world of our ideas about things) and Outer world don’t fit; they don’t match.
We feel lost with this uncertainty, which creates a big amount of fear.
We found out that the world as it is does not respond to our belief of the world anymore. So what we find out is, that we cannot control anything.
It is important to accept that certain kind of uncertainty.
It starts when we are born. We are no longer confined within secure limits, and instead a limitless world stretches around us. This uncertainty is frightening, but it is also necessary.
We cannot feel ourselves unless we adapt and start to acquaint ourselves a new, and through our lives we cannot change anything about ourselves unless we go through a period of uncertainty.
Overcoming the fear of uncertainty and embracing it as a necessary issue in order to become a human seems to be a more important goal, rather than having a car, a child and a house set up and guarding it from every kind of movement.
“Fear about something arises from ones idea about it, which is mostly not necessarily the truth. The idea itself is more of a dimensional magic, rather than of the truth!” (Dorothy Rowe)
So let us check our idea about changes itself and confront us with the fear of uncertainty!
Let us accept it as a part of us that will always be there, as it is inside of every human being and step forward into the exciting adventures life has to offer us J

HAPPY NEW YEAR