Living Alive

Many of us are living, but are not really alive. We do not truly live our experiences, but perceive them only through the veil of past impressions, thoughts and concepts. We are more at home in our constantly analysing and evaluating thinking processes than in our direct sensations. And by so doing, we disconnect from the beauty and magnificence that life has in store for us. Joy, happiness, love, peace are all vibrations of our hearts, that want to be felt and experienced at each moment of our lives. But only rarely do we allow ourselves to be really happy and fulfilled. To us, life has become an almost exclusively mental experience:

We do not feel our feelings directly, but label and categorise them and are afraid of them; afraid of the negative ones as we believe they make us suffer and afraid of the positive ones as we believe that they will not stay with us.

We do not directly experience other people, only as construcsts of pre-conceived judgments and opinions. We have very fixed ideas about the people we know, and for those we meet for the first time, well-developed habits of immediately putting labels and categories on them.

The same with ourselves: we experience ourselves much more through the filter of judgments and ideas that we have built around us than through our living presence.

Most of these judgments and ideas are not even ours. We have taken them on from others, first from the authority figures of our childhood, and kept them running unconsciously. Or rather: We have taken on what we believed other people´s judgments about ourselves were. Often, however, these were only the unresolved emotional conflicts of our parents or other people of influence and authority that we then made about us. A chronically angry and bad-tempered father, for instance, may well have caused us to believe that we were in some way wrong or insufficient. believe that we are insufficient or wrong in some way. Myriads of such incidents have become building blocks of our self-image now controlling and directing our lives from our unconscious minds.

Ourselves, other people, our own feelings, thoughts and experiences – all of that can also be directly experienced.

Our capacity to abstract thinking is a powerfull tool if we use it correctly, which is, however, rarely the case. We do not use this ability as a tool, rather do we let ourselves be used by it. Each and every moment comes with a choice: We can fully receive it out of the fullness of our being and welcome it from the depth of our heart. Or we can experience it chopped up and separated, through the veil of past hurts and traumata, as just another way to confirm our ever-present state of unfulfillment.

Much more often than we would consciously notice, we opt for separation and suffering. Why? Why do we have such a hard time to let our hearts shine in all of their beautiful shapes and colours? Why are we so attached to what makes us feel constricted, sad and unhappy? Why does suffering seem so alluring and attractive that we incessantly allow it to take so much space in our lives?

In my view, mostly because of three reasons:

First, the ignorance of our true Self and Being. We constantly try to identify with the parts of ourselves that can be named, reduced and defined: mental concepts, ideas, our bodies, our emotions, sensations etc. But who or what we truly are is completely beyond all of these things: it is the infinite awareness perceiving and experiencing all of these things, without being defined or described by them. As long as we identify ourselves with ideas and representations, we never fully feel free and alive; we experience ourselves as fragments, as something that is limited and perishable, instead of the infinite expansion we truly are.

Secondly, our way of seeing the world as a result of this ignorance, based on fear. We believe in a reality existing outside of ourselves which is potentially threatening, stronger and more powerful than we are and thus something we have to submit to. We generally dismiss the fact that we ourselves are the creators of our experiences and that we create them anew at each moment. At each moment, we can open up to the moment´s living presence or be consumed by it half-alive – either way we are setting the course for our future experiences.

And thirdly, a lack of knowledge about how to be present in the moment without perceiving it only through the veil of unprocessed pain and conflicts.

It is this final point that when truly answered and applied, carries the secret. The key to be liberated from past conflicts is expressed in the first two points, but simply knowing them will not suffice. Today, many people are aware of being more than just the sum of our past experiences and of not being the victim, but rather the creator of their experiences. Many of us have cognitively understood these concepts, but are still only half-alive and disconnected from joy and bliss for most of the moments of our lives. Still the majority of our experiences is dominated by worries, fear and discontentment.

Again, why? Why do we apparently prefer gripes, irritation and frustration to joy and happiness ? Why do we have a much easier time to see what is supposedly deficient and wrong with us and other people than to see what is truly inspiring, blissful and beautiful about us?

Because of fear. Being fully alive is one of the most frightening things we could ever do, as it makes us feel naked, open and vulnerable. We leave our allegedly safe havens to sail out into the ocean. There is a scent of great freedom to that, but fear will be inevitably present as well: where will you end up? How will your life be and look like, what is going to happen? The part of us that belives itself to be limited, small and imperfect clings itself to everything that seems safe and familiar, it does not want anything new and fears everything intensely alive that is

not controllable and limited. It is the part of us wanting to protect us, and in so doing, cuts us off from being fully alive.

What does this part of you need in order to feel safe and to allow you to fully surrender to life? Ask it, its answer will always be the same:

It needs to feel allowed to be there and to be respected in the midst of its fears, doubts and insecurities.

It needs to feel that the responsibility for your life does not lay on its weak shoulders, but that another, much greater force leads and guides you: the light you truly are deep inside, which is pure love and pure peace .

It needs to feel your courage and your readiness to fully radiate in your light, to no longer be held back by your fear, shame and guilt but to fully say Yes to your source divine power and aliveness. You thus allow it to shift and transform and you create the space for all the pain within you to dissolve and to no longer restrict and constrict you.

Each moment in which you do not feel fully alive and fulfilled is a moment in which you give more power to illusions than to your inner truth. It is a moment in which pain and fear are seemingly stronger than the light of your being. But that is never true.

Whenever you are fully present in the moment, fully feel your pain while being completely aware that it does not give evidence to anything about you or about the situation in which you are, that you do not have to fight it, but simply allow it to dissolve into nothing, then aliveness can fully flow through you again.

This is not easy as we are masters in suppressing and accumulating painful emotions.

How? By attributing more meaning to them than pure emotional energy that wants to flow through us and transform itself. The only reason why we are still haunted by feelings of anger and hatred that orginated 40 or 50 years ago, is that we have made these energies part of our identity and stories of suffering. In truth, these energies need nothing else than to be felt and acknowledged in order to dissolve. For this part of us that has become identified with the pain, however, letting go is equivalent to self-denial.

And indeed, I have to give up my need to be right. I have to renounce to my victim identity. Feeling “entitled” to suffer because of all the bad things others have done to me, is the victim´s discourse. It is the discourse that governs most of our actions, conscious or unconscious, and that keeps us from living fully alive.

To be free of pain does not mean to suppress or deny the pain within you. On the contrary, it means to fully welcome and receive it. It is in this state of openness that pain dissolves, as you become aware that you are not the identity that gave rise to your pain. You are not the person defined by this pain. You are the living presence beyond all of your experiences, positive or negative. Pain can only accumulate within us if we take it for real, if we give it the power to define and program us. And as long as we are defined and programed by pain, we are only half-alive.

Living alive means living full of courage: The courage to allow for the joy and the light within you and to fully put each moment in the service of your inner truth. If you are courageous enough to shine your light instead of running away from it, not only will your life become more enlightened and more alive, you will also become a wayshower and inspiration for others. The world is waiting for you to say Yes to yourself and to all of the magnificence within you!