I gave a little workshop in the holistic shop of a friend of a guy who contacted me through CouchSurfing. My participants spoke only Spanish and my CouchSurfing friend translated for me. A lady who just walked into the shop randomly was sent upstairs by the owner and all of a sudden found herself in my meditation workshop. She told me she had been dreaming of doing something with meditation for years and now it just happened. She shared with the group that it felt as a very important moment in her life. Another participant told me that she finally understood what meditation is about and realizes that it is valuable and beneficial for her too. I love to see those pennies drop. It totally makes my day.
A few words of advice to a Psycho Bitch from Holland
The more I love myself with all my flaws and weaknesses, the more I am able to love the other. Judgment, arrogance and bravado are just ways to mask insecurity and inferiority. There are masking mechanisms in many shapes and sizes and they are at work in everybody all the time. So instead of waiting for the mechanisms to go away or to wait for somebody who is free from flaws it I feel it is better to see them in myself and understand them. Then I can see it is not personal. It makes things so much softer when I don’t take the patterns of others as an invention just to hurt me. People are not busy hurting others; they are busy protecting themselves. We only need protection because we feel wounded.
I like the idea of not taking the self (ourselves) so fucking seriously. So we make mistakes, so what? In the case of my reader, she told me she has a hard time with boundaries. Well, that sucks but it is not the end of the world.
Learning how and why to choose what brings us to life
Man, my life is strange. My life is boring: I only sit behind my laptop. My life is stressful: things don’t go as I would like them to go. My life is humbling: I did not have a bed the last two nights. My life depends on others: I don’t know yet where to sleep for a good part of my NYC trip. My life is exciting: I have magical encounters with gorgeous women. My life is appreciated: I receive beautiful compliments and touching support. My life causes resistance: I receive abuse and harsh judgment on the internet.
I sometimes wonder if I will be able to keep this up for the rest of my life. It seems that my website has become a relatively save space but in other parts of cyber space there are a lot of people (or just enough) who like to make me feel ‘wrong’ before I have finished my sentence.
12 hours to bounce back
Yesterday I was talking to a tall blonde woman from the US during an ‘asado’ that my friend Pim got invited to. Asado is Argentinian for BBQ. The vibe was amazing: 30-40 young people having fun on a Sunday night while drinking wine and eating grilled meat and salad on a roof terrace in Buenos Aires. A beautiful celebration of life and friendship it was.
My conversation partner was interested in my work and my journey. After a couple of stories it probably dawned on her that my life is a long chain of incredible success stories and that plenty of painful or difficult things happen and have happened to me. She asked me if she could ask me a possibly inappropriate or unkind question. I said yes.
She asked me if I ever felt like a fraud.
The 12 Commandments For Being A Real Man
If you look at the search words that lead people to my website you would get the impression that I am a specialist in ‘being manly’. I owe my authority primarily to my most successful post “12 things every guy should know to become a real man”. Today I will review that post and see if I still agree with what I wrote 2 years ago.
What I didn’t say in the original post was that I owe pretty much all the insights to my awakening experience of March 2004, at 32 years old. That day something broke, my old ‘I” died: I shed a skin. When my old skin, my identity, fell on the floor, shattered in a million pieces, I realized that the ‘I’ I had believed to be true was in fact artificial and – more importantly in the context of today – quite immature. The moment it happened I instantly felt I become a whole and complete man.