It is 8:24 in the morning. An hour and twenty minutes ago me and my buddie Mike landed at Schiphol, our national airport. His girlfriend picked us up and dropped me off at my favorite bakery Hartog’s, about 80 meters from my house. I started the my first day in Holland like I often do, with a koffie verkeerd (a latte) and a fried egg with old Gouda cheese on a bun with sunflower seeds.
I just put on the heating and am still wearing the warm clothes I’ve been carrying around in my back pack for a month so they could serve me at this moment. It is about 26º C colder in Holland than in Bali. Still, it feels good to be home.
I feel I have changed. This journey has been healing for me and writing down my experiences has helped me tremendousley. I think I want to figure out a way how to permanently integrate this in my life. Oh, I see. It is not hard at all. It’s merely a matter of just doing it instead of creating an internal barrier around writing from Amsterdam (too difficult) as opposed to writing from Bali (very rewarding).
Isn’t it funny to see how quickly we create blocks and barriers, keeping us from doing things that we love and being real. I think it is amazing. Some examples that I’ve recently felt myself or heard other people say: not telling you love somebody even though you do, being less wild in bed when you are with your own girlfriend, not quitting your job even when it makes you unhappy, assuming the recipient is angry when s/he doesn’t reply to your email immediately, not taking care of your body because you believe you don’t have enough discipline to follow through, hiding behind a facade at work because you feel the true you won’t be accepted by the corporate culture.
Maybe the biggest thing I’ve learned is that opening up to myself and to the world on an (almost) daily basis has a huge impact on my personal well being and even on the lifes of others (although unmeasurable for me). In the past a moment of sadness would have been stuffed with a couple of beers and a few funny but more or less covertly degrading remarks about women in general followed by a night of chasing kicks and thrills, forgetting about what wanted to surface. Even 40 minutes of meditation can do that trick. By allowing the sadness in and reflecting upon it I could also experience the beauty of it. More and more I learn to truly appreciate the feelings that I once believed to be ‘negative’. It makes my heart softer and spacier.
Another important lesson is that the heart has a life of it’s own and so does the body. When I sat down to write the post that turned out to be the story about my little brother, I truly didn’t have a clue that I was about to experience an enormous emotional release. Allowing the words out was very emotional, letting my brother read it was terryifying and seeing him receiving it was beautiful, emotional, humbling and provoked yet another flood of tears. All that would not have happened if I didn’t sit down to check in and write down what came up. Writing from the heart gave me back my brother. And that’s a huge gift for me. Huge.
Everybody can make any holiday into a healing journey. More so, we can make every day into a day of healing. By tuning in to our hearts, letting come up what wants to come up and then act accordingly we heal all our wounds. 26 days in Bali changed my life, so if just one billion of us start doing this today we can change the future of our planet in three months. I totally believe that. Think about it.
I feel blessed for the journey we made. By making this journey to Bali I realize again that life is a journey. It’s not just my journey. We are here together, all of us on this planet. And we are all making our own journey simultaneously with all the others. Let’s just reflect on the possibilities we have how to make this journey awesome for everybody.
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