The one thing you can always count on!

Dear Future Self,

Please remember, you can always count on love, no matter what is going on.

We can always count on love

I’ve just been listening to an interview with Sharon Salzberg on the Sounds True podcast (listen here). Actually, I’ve just pressed pause in the middle of it, to write this.

In the interview, Sharon Salzberg talks about her latest book Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World, which was just published with Sounds True.

She had finished the book before the pandemic in 2020 and now had to write a preface for it, to put it into the new context of the circumstances the pandemic has created and which she couldn’t foresee when she originally wrote the book.

Reflecting on what to write, she said this: “If we are going to look for something intact in this world, that is not broken by all these changing circumstances, it will be something about love and our ability to love. It’s a potential we have in any situation.”

And I find this so incredibly true and beautiful.

We are in such uncertain times, many of us experiencing stress and despair related to it and we invest so much into stabilizing ourselves with external factors.

What if this was the beginning, at which we started to realize that if we really want stability, we need to invest in ourselves, not the things around us?

Love is a potential we have in ANY situation. No matter where we are or who we are. We can always count on love to be there, for us to give and receive.

What else do we need, really?

We can always count on love. Isn’t it worth more than anything, to invest in our ability to give and receive love without holding back?

It is why I work as a coach now. If you’d like to work with me, to develop a deeper sense of self-love, message me.

It is, and always has been, my dream to find ways to live together, that respect our resources and are supportive, including finding beauty and richness in our differences, valuing and protecting vulnerability and thereby allowing each other to live freely.

In the last two years of the pandemic, we learned to live with so much less.

Fewer activities, fewer opportunities, viewer distractions. Which is why it is and has been so hard for so many people, me included, at times.

I suppose 99% percent of the time that we, as adults, who are not yet fully conscious, are awake, we distract ourselves from ourselves.

With chores, meeting people, what we need to buy, gardening, sports, driving, talking, picking things up, keeping up to date, imagining who or how we’d like to be, taking care of others and so on.

I remember this quote that said: “If you can’t find the time to meditate for ten minutes, meditate for an hour.”

Hearing it for the first time, at a time, when I found it extremely difficult to allow myself to meditate for ten minutes, I honestly just wanted to know how.

But that is precisely the point. At that time, I found it hard to allow myself to meditate.

I knew it was good for me, but I felt bad to allow myself something good – because, subconsciously – I didn’t think I deserved it. Because I did not fulfil any number of criteria, of how I thought I needed to be. I’d rather invest in looking good, than to actually clean up inside and invest in myself.

I feel extremely grateful that I opted out of that life – and moved to the countryside last year, to be in a house by myself (with my two lovely dogs), in a place where I do not know anyone, with all my friends and family a pretty big distance away.

At times, I struggled to be by myself, but I struggled through it and let everything that needed to surface, surface.

There was a lot of crying, a lot of facing demons, but also so much new joy and an entirely new sense of freedom and power after releasing the demons and allowing for a new kind of self-love and acceptance.

Now I know, I can always count on love.

Freeing myself from outside expectations, and accepting myself fully, were probably the most profound changes in my life yet.

Taking away all the opportunities I had previously that would distract me whenever there was a chance to work something out and find my inner peace, meant that I actually had to work through all my sh***.

Which makes me feel more free than ever.

So often we think of freedom, as the ability to have or to be able to do everything we want.

To have access to friends, to shops, to other facilities, to travel, to new impressions. But what if the real freedom lies in the way we react to any situation?

I’ve written about freedom before, I have interviewed around 30 people to ask what freedom meant to them (listen to podcast here), and studied all concepts of freedom in philosophy and in different religions, which I could find.

But the only definition that really makes sense to me, comes from Buddhism.

It is to find freedom it that moment between when something happens and our reaction. At that moment, we are completely free to decide how our lives and the world are about to continue, and in that moment there is ALWAYS THE POTENTIAL TO REACT WITH LOVE.

So, when we look for things to hold us, something that we can always count on to be there for us, with us, this is what we have: Love and the freedom to choose it.

Thank you, Sharon and Tami, for this wonderful reminder, that we can always count on love, especially in challenging times.

May we all put it to good use. ❤️

Nothing has greater value than we ourselves.

PS: Join the I AM CREATOR School, to explore how you can be more loving and kind and free.