Surrender

“I Do Not Need You” — A Love Letter

February 13, 2017 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

My dearest beloved

I wanted to tell you

On this day of love

That I do not need you

I do not need you

To make me happy

So you will never have the pressure

Of my contentment on your shoulders

I do not need you

To provide for my financial needs

So pursue any dream you want

Without worrying about supporting me

I do not need you

To boost my self-esteem

So if my butt really does look big in these jeans

You can say and we can laugh

I do not need you

To always act cheerful

So if you feel like being grouchy

Express it in all its glory

I do not need you

To always be a ‘man’

So when you need to be vulnerable

Do so without feeling ashamed

I do not need you

To always keep me company

So when you need time by yourself

Go without feeling guilty

I do not need you

To always wipe away my tears

So if you too are finding the world too much

You can relax, knowing I am still supported by friends

I do not need you

To always be by my side

So if you want to hang out with the lads

Go and have that beer

I do not need you

To be someone who you are not

Be whoever you want to be

And I will support you all the way

I do not need you

To make me feel complete

Because we are not two who have become one

But two who have become three

I do not need you

So I can set you free

Because I love you

And you are always dear to me

Happy Valentine’s Day

Don’t Let ‘Self-Improvement’ Drag You Away From Self-Acceptance

February 7, 2017 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

If, like me, you’re the type of person who reads a lot of self-help literature, inevitably you will come across a lot of articles that tell you how to be your ‘better’ self. Now, if you have used some of the techniques bouncing around and find yourself a happier person — great! I sincerely mean that. However, there are a few thoughts I’ve had about the self-improvement movement that I would like to share:

1) Self-improvement can move away from self-acceptance

The term ‘improvement’ suggests that how we are in this moment is not good enough. I know that for some people, myself included, this kind of thinking can be the fire that motivates them to take action. The only issue is I highly doubt that this beat-yourself-up approach has a long-term positive effect on your emotional wellbeing. After all, you are being driven because you cannot accept yourself. I feel like that is moving away from self-love and peace. Yes, you may have a string of achievements to show at the end of it, but at what cost to your heart?

2) A linear kind of life may not be for all

Be consistent. Be obsessive. Be hungry. These are the overall themes I started to see reading autobiographies of so-called successful people. I also noticed though that a large majority of the people insisting on this kind of attitude were mostly men. In the last few months I have come to slowly accept and even embrace the fact that my inner nature is inherently chaotic. Everything from my moods, to my physical energy levels, to my cognitive functioning seems to be both cyclical and difficult to predict.

Our current patriarchal society still perceives these kinds of traits negatively, valuing instead calm, consistent linear living (A woman’s mood swings = “She’s crazy!”). However, a lot of ancient Eastern philosophies acknowledge and revere this beautifully chaotic aspect of human nature, labeling it as the ‘feminine’ side of existence. It is inherent in all of us regardless of gender, but as a woman I feel this aspect is magnified.

I see chaos a bit like a typhoon. It can come forth violently and destroy everything in its path, but from this destruction can also come brilliant creation. Although chaos may be impossible to mentally grasp, it also has magnificent depth. This is not to devalue linear living in the slightest — it has its own splendor and beauty. But it would be a shame to stamp out this other side of human existence through only valuing one side of human existence, a side that I often see the self-improvement movement championing as the only life worth living.

3) Self-improvement can be at the detriment of your inner voice

I’ve heard several people say that the key to self-improvement is to relentlessly stick at something, even if your whole being is resisting against it. This is one way to live your life, and I’m sure you will improve wonderfully at any skill you desire to cultivate. My personal conclusion regarding this kind of living is this: sure, you will externally achieve something, but it’s at the cost of ignoring your inner being. The physical sensation I get when I am in this kind of mode is a very heavy head and exhausted body. My attention, instead of feeling expansive, starts to feel very narrow. My head doesn’t seem to stop working and often I get insomnia. It’s only when I distance myself from whatever I’m doing, like in the form of a holiday, that suddenly I feel how detrimental this kind of living is for me personally.

If I’ve not snapped out of this through a break then usually my tumultuous moods will halt my productivity to a stop anyways. The painful thing about this is that despite my inner-self telling me that work isn’t possible, I start to berate myself for not being consistent. This is a negative spiral that doesn’t help. Recognising and accepting that my inner being actually is cyclical has changed things for the better. I may not be super consistent, I may often stop and start things, but I feel much more aligned with who I am. This in turns brings a sense of peace, one that I don’t feel if I’m forcing myself to do things repetitively.

4) You don’t create who you are, you unfold into who you are

I think that often we first try to craft the person we think we want to be. Only to find out that this is a vacuous endeavor that slowly drains our souls. No matter how much we mold our lives in ways that we think will bring us happiness there will be something missing. This can also lead to us clinging desperately to our achievements because we feel they’re the only things that make us “someone”.

But what if one day you lose everything? Your money, your academic degrees, your medals or even your memory. Who are you then? We then realise that actually we don’t need to create who we are, because we are “there” already. All we need is to gently unfold into it by surrendering and letting go. Listen to that inner voice. Relax and float on top of the waves of life instead of swimming against them. Be still and make space inside yourself so the song of your heart can soar through.

Dear 20 Year Old Me

September 27, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

Saying goodbye to my 20s with a Roaring 20s Great Gatsby Party!

I have turned 30. Entering a new chapter of my life has made me reflect on how I have grown in the last decade. This then made me wonder – if I were to write a letter to my 20 year old self, what would I say to her?

Actually, if I were given the choice to send a letter back into the past, I wouldn’t. I would want 20 year old Marie to plunge into her new decade with the same ignorance I did. Why? Because my hardships and struggles have made me the woman I am today.

But if I had to pick six pieces of advice to say to her, perhaps I would say something like this.

(I also have a recommended reading list at the end of the entry based on what I’ve written, so please check out below if interested.)

1. Be your authentic self

In your twenties you believed that life is a performance. Every action, every conversation needs to be manipulated to bring about the ‘perfect’ outcome. That is, to have other people like you.

The problem with this is that because it’s an act brought about by fear – that is, the fear of not being liked – you spend all your energy trying to avoid this outcome as much as possible. To do so, you constantly suppress what you think and feel. This is nothing short of violence towards your self.

In fact, in not being honest you are not only hurting yourself, but you are doing all the people around you a disservice.

Life is too short to be anyone but yourself.

Remember these three things:

Be honest with your emotions

We may be taught that ‘emotional control’ is a sign of maturity. This may be so, but this is different from emotional suppression. If you deny and push down how you are feeling inside, it doesn’t miraculously go away – it gets stuck inside you. The result is that you become a volcano of emotions, waiting to explode. Often also, this leads to depression. It is possible to openly accept all the human emotions we feel – from happiness to anger to sadness. It is only through truly embracing them that you can let them go.

Be honest with your words

There is something to be said about radical honesty. You may feel like you are preventing people from getting hurt by choosing words carefully, but in actuality you are doing them a disservice by not telling them the truth. This doesn’t mean however, that you tell the person you hate that they are an asshole. This is not helpful. I very much recommend nonviolent communication as a means of getting across what you are thinking and feeling.

Be honest with your body

If your body tells you to stop, stop. Don’t push it beyond what it wants. You will find that to do otherwise will eventually hurt your body. You don’t have to push your body to the limits to achieve something. Yoga is a prime example – you work closely with your body, listening carefully to it and soon flexibility + strength follows.

2. Constantly let go

In Japanese there is a saying, ‘dan-sha-ri’. It means refusal, disposal and separation. Derived in part from yoga, it refers to the cleaning and throwing away of unwanted items.

The importance of this is perfectly demonstrated in the parable with the keen zen pracitioner and the enlightened master. ‘Teach me everything you know!’ the young practitioner said to the master. The master simply told him to pour him a cup of tea until he said stop. Even when the cup was overflowing the master said nothing, ‘The cup is flooding!’ the zen practioner exclaimed. ‘Yes’ said the master, ‘that cup is like your mind, how can I teach you anything if it’s full already?’.

If you don’t throw away things in your house, it clogs up. Mess builds. Life is the same. If you don’t constantly let go of things – may it be thoughts or emotions – they accumulate and you’ll simply have no space to let in the new. When you feel like you’ve hit a life block, then don’t do anything more. Instead, let go.

Oh, and on a side note, remember that your inner state and outer state are closely connected. If your room is messy, that’s probably a good sign that you need to do some cleaning on the inside. Conversely, an effective way to start your inner cleanse is through scrubbing the house and throwing away all unwanted items!

3. Remember that you can be the observer

In your early twenties you lived your life swayed by emotions and thoughts. It was like you were on a boat rocked constantly by a storm.

It doesn’t have to be this way, because one thing you must realise is that you are not your thoughts. You are not your emotions either.

You are, in fact, the observer of all of these things. You are the listener. You are the feeler. As such, you can choose not to react to what emerges from you. That is not to say you should suppress your thoughts and emotions (see ‘1) Be Your Authentic Self’). It just means you are fully present with your thoughts and emotions, while making the conscious choice not to respond to them.

Meditation is key to sharpening this technique.

4. Remember that all actions come out of love or ignorance

All actions come from love or ignorance. Even fear and anger come from ultimately not understanding what you are dealing with properly. Each and every single decision in life we have a choice as to whether or not we make it from these two states. And there are absolutely no excuses – ‘but that person was being horrible, I had no choice’, ‘I had to respond immediately’. No. We always have a choice, so long as you are totally present in the moment.

On a similar vein, remember there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ decisions. There are only decisions that either come or not come from the heart.

But surely there are ‘right’ decisions! You may say. For example, what if you invest in something and it is a huge success? Wouldn’t that be a correct decision? Well, what if after your successful investment, you become so well-known among your business peers that brings about jealously? What if someone backstabs you and steals all your money, leading you to suffer terrible poverty? Your ‘right’ decision may not seem so ‘right’ anymore.

My point is, you never know the complete consequences of what each decision brings. Some may be pleasant, but they can quickly become unpleasant too. So the only thing we can do in these circumstances is to ensure that every decision we make at least comes from a place of total openness and honesty both to ourselves and others.

5. Live with humility

In your twenties you are still struggling to find your place in the world. You believe that there is such a thing such as a ladder of success, and it is your job to work hard to climb up on it. As such, people lie above or below you on this hierarchy, and you have a drive keep on top of it. You are also terrified of falling behind.

It is time to let this idea go.

First, if you define ‘success’ as ‘being skilled at something’, you must realise that there will always be people better at everything single thing that you do. Even if you were an Olympic gold medal winning champion, one day your muscles won’t be what they used to be and someone else will take your spot.

Conversely though, there will also always be people who are less skilled at things than you. So just accept that there is this spectrum of people that will always surround you, no matter how good you become at something. Therefore it is pointless to get on the treadmill of being ‘at the top’.

More importantly though, remember that this whole idea of placing people and things on a scale is a mentally constructed one, so it can be abandoned. For example, let’s say you start sewing. If you break it down just to what it is, all you are doing is threading a needle in and out. And the experience can just end there. But if you come out of the present moment of performing this action and start comparing yourself with others, then suddenly you are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than other people at it. You could have just stayed in the moment enjoying your sewing.

Humility is being in a state where you do not see the world anymore on a scale. Everything just is. There is no ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Things just are. Seeing and experiencing the world in this state will bring about a massive feeling of liberation.

6. If you want to live life to the fullest, play with it.

One of the biggest errors you made in your twenties was thinking success and suffering were synonymous. They really aren’t. Success may take lots of effort, yes, but it doesn’t have to involve suffering. Suffering is simply a mindset.

If you are the type of person who approaches life ‘seriously’ you may find yourself facing a lot of blocks in life. Why? Because this type of consciousness and attitude is actually very limiting, not to mention painful and boring.

Instead, think of life as a game. To play is to be creative, to be exploratory and to have fun. Approaching life as a big playroom helps you to more effortlessly navigate what it throws at you, no matter how hard it is. Even for things that may not seem like a playful event, such as a break-up, stressful exams or illness, try bending your attitude a little and see it within the context of a playroom anyways. This doesn’t mean you are not taking what has happened seriously. In fact, it’s the polar opposite. Because you want to approach all of these hardships in the most effective way possible, this is what you are doing. Less suffering from you means that you can be there and help out others during these hard times.

If you want to take life seriously, stop taking it seriously.

Dominoes

August 23, 2016 by lyra777 Leave a Comment

Life can seem disorientating sometimes. Random individual pieces of events, placed side-by-side.

dominoes-1

Much like dominoes.

Each piece gets stacked neatly next to each other.

The reason why one piece is stacked here and another stacked there may not really make sense when seen up close.

The dominoes just seem to go on and on.

dominoes-2

Because of this, at times it’s easy to lose hope. What is the point? When will it end?

But have faith, because all the parts are there, piece-by-piece creating a masterpiece that you just can’t see yet.

Waiting for the day that the first one drops, starting a cascade of insights and realisations as to why the dominoes were there in the first place.

dominoes-3

When the last one drops you can step back…

…and see the awe-inspiring art piece that life has created for you.

dominoes-4

Have faith in the process.

The Man Who Was Afraid of His Shadow

August 9, 2016 by lyra777 1 Comment

Once upon a time, there was a man who was afraid of his own shadow.

He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that there was a dark, scary monster that would sometimes be behind him, and he was terrified.

He tried everything he could to get rid of it.

He ignored it

He yelled at it

He despaired at it.

But he was so scared, that the one thing he never did was to turn around and look at it.

The shadow would sometimes come out when he was with his friends, and all he could do was apologise for the black monster that followed him.

But the shadow didn’t go away. He ran and ran, but not matter how far he went, the shadow was right behind him.

He ran and ran, until he could run no more.

Now out of options, he decided to do something different.

Something he had never done his whole life.

He was going to stop, turn around and look at the shadow for what it was.

Slowly he approached it.

He stared at the very shadow he was afraid of straight in the face.

Suddenly, he came to a life-changing realisation.

The shadow came from him.

The shadow was him.

He didn’t want to accept it. That big black monster that followed him all his life, was an extension of him?

But as time went past, he decided to look more closely at the shadow. He started to get to know it better.

And as he did, he started to realise it wasn’t so scary after all. It may be black and gloomy but it couldn’t actually hurt him.

It was only a shadow after all.

He realised that what was hurting him was his fear of the shadow. The way he had spent his whole life running had drained him for years.

After finally seeing the shadow for what it truly was, he decided to try something new.

Why not love, instead of fear the shadow?

Instead of running from it, why not embrace it?

The man decided to shine the bright light of his attention to the shadow, enveloping it with love and warmth.

It was a part of him after all.

And then the unexpected happened.

The shadow disappeared.

Because to transmute darkness, all you need is light.

This was the lesson that he learnt from the shadow.

To this day, sometimes when the sun sets, the shadow reappears behind the man.

But the man no longer runs. He is no longer scared.

He simply turns around, smiles and lovingly shines his light on it.

Afterword

Probably the first thing people may think when reading this story is that the shadow represents something like depression. But actually, your shadow is any side of you that you don’t like. Like anger, jealousy, arrogance, anxiety, grief or longing.

We often feel that those emotions are there, but we don’t like them. So we push them away instead of fully embracing them.

In fact, we often reject them as part of our identity completely. If we get angry at someone we may later say, “Sorry, I wasn’t myself”, or if we’re depressed we may think, “I want to be myself again”.

This, on a certain level, is true – you are not ‘yourself’. But only because you are rejecting something that is fundamentally a part of you.

Remember, these shadows aren’t separate from you. They are a projection of you. In pushing them a way, you are actually making yourself feel worse.

We are raised by society to believe that we must be happy all the time. Being positive should be our baseline, and if it’s not, there is something wrong with us. We must ‘fix’ ourselves, and ‘fix’ our lives.

But there is nothing to fix. You are perfect just the way you are, emotions galore.

We are here on this Earth to experience. We subjectively add labels such as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ to the emotions that we feel. But at the end of the day all emotions are just another way in which we experience being a human.

It’s just that some emotions are just harder to accept within ourselves than others.

The first step towards healing your shadow is to acknowledge that it is a part of you. Take responsibility for your shadows. This is not saying if you get angry/sad/depressed/[insert emotion] it’s your fault. I’m saying simply acknowledge that it is an emotion that is part of your experiential being.

The next step is to lovingly accept it. When you relax and fully accept the emotion that you are feeling in the present, it is actually released. The light that you shine on it will conversely make the shadow dissipate. This is because you are allowing yourself to be who you are. You let the emotion run it’s natural course, rather than pushing it deeper and deeper inside yourself.

“But I do acknowledge my tough emotions but they don’t go away!’, you may be thinking.

Perhaps ask yourself, are you just feeling the surface of the emotion? Are you like the man who knew his shadow was there but didn’t look at it? Are you wishing that you weren’t feeling the emotion that you are now? Do you want to get rid of that emotion?

If you are, consider instead saying to yourself:

“I am feeling angry/sad/etc. and I love and accept myself just the way I am”

That very emotion you’re feeling is wanting to be a part of you too.

When you finally embrace the emotions that you have fully, you will soon discover that the very thing you fear inside yourself the most is actually your best friend and greatest teacher.