Do you drink coffee?

I know many people are really coffee lovers. I should say some of them are experts at coffee. I also remember one of my colleague is really addicted to coffee so he always has a cup of coffee to start the day. It becomes his moodbooster for the day. I don’t drink coffee much, only occasionally and it would be a decaf one.

Very recently I met someone who never drinks coffee nor tea in her life. Not even once! She said that when she was small, her parents used to say that coffee and tea were not for children and when she grew up she chose not even to have a try. She gave me a very interesting reason and I really like it. She said that she decided not to have a try because she didn’t want to develop it as a habit. She doesn’t want to create a mental attachment to a particular drink or food. For this, I would agree. When something has become a habit, it is not easy to break it. The mind is craving.

If you have the habit of having a particular drink, definitely you put your heart into it because you enjoy it. You invest your heart in it. And what happens if for some reasons you don’t have one or you can’t have one? My colleague once said to me that he would get a headache without having a cup of coffee in the morning. When we were on a trip together, I saw him restless. He couldn’t concentrate.

A clutter-free mind

Very recently I got my tiny house renovated. It took about a few weeks to finish. Before the renovation started, I had to empty the house. In that point I realised after about 15 years I had accumulated stuff so much in the house. To empty the house was a big and hard job especially because I have to let go most of my stuff – including furnitures, books, clothes and many other stuff. To be honest I didn’t do it myself. I got a family member to do it. I trusted her on this. You might know the reason. If I did it myself, I would have to deal with my emotional attachment to those stuff and it would not be easy and also time consuming.

When I entered the house after the renovation, there was a feeling of a huge relief in me. There were only 3 furniture left, a medium size wooden bed, a shelf for storage and a hanging kitchen set. That’s it! It is so funny that I have lost so much but the feeling of relief is so obvious. It was like I was about to start a new life.

You create burden by owning a lot of stuff. What clutters your home, clutters your mind. If you want to have clutter-free mind, start owning less stuff. When I shared this to a friend, she quickly agreed with me.

Working on Ego

A friend of mine texted me “congratulations on working on your ego” , after reading one of my posts in this blog. I was not so sure what he said congratulation for. I realised that most of my posts are of my own reflection. Sometimes I write something embarrassing such as a stupid mistake I made or when I am dealing with my ego.

When you start dealing with your own ego, you are actually working on the hurts, the ugly sides of yourself. Sometimes it creates a feeling of bossiness or arrogance. Sometimes it also creates feeling of fear, having no value, no importance, etc. Then we feel so embarrassed. It is really an uncomfortable feeling. This is why some people say it is too scary to see the self, because of having too many hurts and scars and being too ugly.

Then my friend said “It is so reflective. It has become your writing style.”

Collecting Pictures

What do people collect from a trip? Experience or memories basically. Nowadays wherever people are going since they always carry smartphones with them, so they always take pictures. People collect pictures a lot in their smart phones while traveling and on their day to day life also. Everyone loves taking pictures and collecting pictures.

I was in a trip very recently. We were on a boat to Mt. Rigi in Switzerland. I was sitting next to a couple from Hongkong. We were sitting inside the boat on the first floor. As soon as everyone entered the boat, I noticed that everyone started taking pictures using each one’s smart phone, including the lady sitting next to me and including me. I reminded myself to enjoy the trip by enjoying the scenery and the atmosphere not busily taking pictures and missing the moments. So I did’t take many pictures.

When the lady was settling down next to me, she started scrolling the screen of her camera. She showed me pictures of their trip in several places in France. Beautiful pictures! Keeping photos is a good way to store the beautiful memories. And nowadays it is very easy. It doesn’t need ‘a space’ to keep. It only needs a space in your computer or gadget. I asked her “For how long will you keep the pictures with you?” She said “May be a life time”.

Don’t take sorrow

You might have heard many times an advice from people not to give sorrow to anyone. To give sorrow means to do things that makes other unhappy. But you might never have heard an advice not to take sorrow. Are we taking sorrow? How do we take sorrow?

If someone gives a negative comment on what you have been doing and you listen to it and you start being influenced by it and you become unhappy, then you might consider yourself to stop doing it because of this negative comment. It is then that you are taking sorrow. You let other people control you (your feelings). They are not responsible for your feelings.

Whatever you do, reactive people will always have negative comment on it. This kind of people are around us (in our contacts). They become unhappy seeing you moving forward. Don’t listen to it and don’t take it personally. Just keep doing what is good for you. Remember whatever you are doing is for yourself.

Everything is perfect

You might think something happened the way it should not have to happen. Something is not fair. Something is not perfect. There is nothing perfect in life. You might have created an idealisation about something in your mind and when it doesn’t happen the way you think it should be, you then say ‘It is not perfect.’ Whether something is perfect or not is just according to the way you think in your mind. You create a standard in your mind for things to happen.

It is said that everything that happens in life is what is meant to happen. Nothing is coincidental in life. Everything is predestined. There is no mistake in this. Everything is just perfect the way it is. Nothing is wrong in life. You might need to learn to accept now. By allowing your heart to accept, you learn to be happy.

Connecting the Dots

When you look back to your life, to what you have gone through in life, you might find some events happened in your life which was not favorable for you. You don’t want that events happened to you, because you didn’t enjoy it, but it happened. It became like a black dot to your life story. You now have passed it. If you could, you might have skipped it from your life story. But you couldn’t skip it. It has become your story. You can never erase or take it out from yours.

I remember a speech by the late Steve Jobs on connecting the dots. What he meant by the dots in his life story was all his failures and unsuccessful stories…..the fact of his own birth from an unwed woman, his drop out from college, the story when he was fired from the company he built, his dealing with his sickness. All was unfavorable events, full of hurts and struggles. In his speech he said that we can connect those dots by looking backward. It is completely nothing wrong with having that dots.

Very recently I conducted a workshop on healing the self. I shared some practical steps for the healing. Journaling is one of the step to this healing. One of the participant shared that she wrote the situation and the feelings, but after a while she read it again and felt embarrassed of having gone through a trivial situation and yet it made her so disturbed left hurt inside. Then she tore the paper of her journal.

Everyone of us has our own dots to connect in our life. You don’t need to skip any of the dots from your life. You don’t need to erase it either. Just keep connecting it. You can’t become a perfect you now without that dot.

Healing vs. Cure

Healing and cure are different concept. Someone may not get cured but she can still be healed. Cure is for any physical pain and healing has to do with emotional or mental pain. You might need to see physician for your physical pain to get some medication treatment and also some medicine. It is all physical. Healing is another journey. It is more inward journey, the journey to your heart. Because it is your heart that experiences the pain in the form of disappointment, worry, anxiety, anger, confusion, rejection, fear and many other negative feelings. Again it is not your physical heart. It is non-physical, it is in fact yourself. You are the spiritual being living in a physical body.

Two years ago a very good friend of mine left her body because of cancer. I remember how she dealt with the pain and the hurt. She had a very clear line between the body and the soul. The cancer cell is in the body. And the soul is a separated entity. She could maintain detachment between the two. When she was about to die, she was prepared herself. She was healed but not cured. The soul was happy leaving her body.

In remembrance of my dear friend Helen Quirin.

How do you deal with disappointment?

In our daily life, we sometimes have to deal with people or events that are not according to what we expect. We might have made a plan or agenda but for some reason, it does not happen the way we expected. And then we become disappointed.

I was having a five days trip last week. The hotel where I stayed is relatively near to the local airport. What a coincidence a friend was going to make his way back from his business trip and having a transit at the airport. He is in fact my old friend and we haven’t seen each other for almost 30 years. So we planned to have a short meeting during his transit, He said that his arrival time would be at 9 pm. I thought it was still a reasonable time for a meeting. I was so excited thinking of the meeting, because it was going to be a coincidental meeting for us. We had been texting each other about the timing and the meeting point since the morning. But in the evening he texted me and told that he had wrongly seen his flight schedule. The arrival time was actually 11 pm instead of 9 pm. He was apologetic. I decided to cancel the meeting, because it would be too late for me. Did I feel any disappointment because of this change? Yes, I noticed there was a slight disappointment. Because I had blocked the evening for the meeting, and it had to be canceled.

A colleague promised to take me to the airport the next day. We planned to stop by the nearest beach on our way to the airport. I haven’t been to this beach before. I heard from people that it is a very beautiful one. I already pictured the beautiful beach in my mind and imagined how much I would enjoy it. The next morning, my colleague texted me that he had to go to a funeral of his relative and apologised for being unable to take me to the airport. This incident left me with another disappointment.

How do you deal with disappointments? People or events might become the reason behind your disappointment. But the real cause for any disappointment is an expectation. You are the one who create this expectation at the first place, not the people nor the events. As soon as you are aware of being the creator of this, you will easily take the responsibility of your feeling and you won’t blame anyone nor the situaton for the disappointment. You can accept it easily. When you accept it, you can end or change the negative feeling very quickly.

She didn’t die, She just left her body

Last week I got a sad news about a friend who had been hospitalized for a couple of weeks. She got brain tumor since last year. The tumor has spreaded to another organ of her body. And last week she left her body. You might also believe that we are spiritual beings living in physical bodies. When the spirit leaves the body, then it is called death. The spirit doesn’t die, it never dies. It just leaves the body, it goes somewhere. The spirit is eternal. Death never comes to spirits.

I remember last year when I knew about her having tumor, I reflected it on myself. I then wrote several journals on death for myself. How I would prepare my own death, how I challenged myself when the death came, how I would feel when I had to leave all the possession that I had been calling as ‘mine’. I felt so scared. Silently I asked myself: ‘What would you do then?’ I replied: ‘I accept it’. It was just my personal reflection yet I experienced so much acceptance. The feeling was very powerful until a few days later.

Another friend told me that the journal was shared to her last year. She read it and she felt empowered.

Good bye and go on your journey, Eka!