The adventure of everyday life
We all constantly yearn for adventure, romance and passion. But how is that supposed to happen after 10 or 20 years of marriage? OK, after reading 200 pages or so of this book maybe you are beginning to think that a new lover won’t offer much chance of fulfilment either. Maybe you have already been through a divorce and are lapsing into the sobering feeling of familiar gloom. Maybe the last chapter has motivated you to say to yourself: ‘Exactly! I am ready for honesty… Well, some…’
If you really start to live with honesty and courage, you have no idea how exciting your everyday life can be! We normally adapt to circumstances, we smile nicely, we strive to be exemplary carers, we struggle for recognition and present our jobs and home life as monumentally important. At the same time we dream of strange lands, of freedom, excitement and adventure. The more structured our everyday life, the heavier the chains of our habits, the stronger our desire to escape. We might push it aside and focus on becoming even more exemplary, more dutiful, more consumerist and moving smoothly on up the social ladder – until one day fate catches up with us in the form of a bankruptcy, an illness, a loss, a separation, the discovery of an affair. And all of a sudden floods sweep away everything that was dear to us, everything that was habitual and frozen, everything that followed our rules. They sweep away our reputation, our trust, our feeling of safety, our life of lies, leaving us high and dry. Our life has become more exciting at last, but also more frightening, threatening and unpredictable.
Instead of waiting for this to happen, you could create a few adventures yourself! Stop dreaming your life away. I suggest that you live it fully. Stop running away from everything. Accept what is happening inside yourself. Listen to yourself, check yourself out – and then express yourself. Does this sound like anarchy and chaos to you? It isn’t really… If your only means of expression is shouting when you are angry and hurting your partner with your tantrums, you are only damaging yourself. Arguments like that hardly ever have any useful results and they do destroy relationships. However, nothing is more important than finally recognizing your own anger – and fully experiencing it. That is not about simply shouting very loudly, but about being aware of the explosive charge inside you. Let me emphasize that it is not about holding back the anger. It is about sensing it accurately and accepting it. That way it can be transformed and used as a driving force to take your life forward.
After the first few sessions, clients often ask me whether what they are saying is OK. They feel as if they have completely lost control. Once a person seeks contact with themselves after a long time of inner paralysis, tears will begin to flow where none have flowed before. Surprisingly strong fits of anger will erupt into an otherwise very orderly life. In the beginning this is very good. Very often those feelings have been dammed up for a long time and have to be discharged so that space can be made for a new authenticity. For many people, keeping tight, often unconscious, control over their feelings for years and then releasing them is similar to not doing any exercise for years and then suddenly starting. As long as we don’t move much, we don’t realize how stiff our muscles are. But after the first training session our whole body feels rusty and stiff. We get out of breath straightaway and our muscles ache for days afterwards.
Once our feelings break out of hiding and into our life, we often develop all sorts of defensive thoughts. As we slowly regain contact with our emotional being we might have to reckon with fear, insecurity and emotional hangovers. But in the same way that our body rewards us with more vitality, agility and beauty after regular training sessions, so our vivacity, our original authenticity and our peace of mind return to us as soon as we give more space to our inner feelings. They are our life energy, our emotional drive. Once we pay attention to them, don’t censor them as much, regard them as non-judgementally as possible – basically, if we take them as they come – then we will become whole again. We shouldn’t worry when initially feelings flood us like the biblical Deluge. Just imagine a dam breaking – at some point the floods subside and the original river nurtures and fertilizes the parched land again. Your emotions, too, will calm back down to a healthy level.
Together with your feelings, adventure will return to your life – as long as you have the courage to really accept it and to try to understand any seemingly negative messages your emotions may be giving you. Tears are healthy… Anger can liberate… In any case, they are your tears, your anger, and that is why they are just fine, even if other people dismiss them. Sharing feelings with others is different from aiming them at people. If you simply allow your feelings to resurface, you won’t direct them at others. Instead, you will take responsibility for them. You will appear emotional without seeking scapegoats or apportioning blame.
I know a man who is a master of being in touch with his feelings. He loves working with a large audience. But once on the podium he never gives speeches – he lives his words. Sometimes he is so touched by what he is saying that tears roll down his cheeks. The next moment he might be laughing heartily, and the whole audience will laugh with him. His words always match exactly what he’s feeling. He constantly challenges himself to do exactly what he is telling his audience so passionately to do: to dedicate themselves wholly, to give themselves to life.
I once saw him with his children. He had been parachuting with them, even though he has a terrible fear of heights. He had actually fought this because his children had desperately wanted to try out the parachuting. Of course, they could have done it without him, but he knew enough about the dynamics of families to lead the way as the head of the family. Children have a kind of inner brake system for growth. On a deep level they don’t allow themselves to develop further than their parents. That way they keep the order and the closeness within their families. Later, when they want to grow beyond their parents, they very often feel hindered, unconsciously boycott their success or taint their achievements with guilt. This man had decided to grow with his children – and this attitude had brought him an adventure.
Once we find the courage to transcend ourselves and to give ourselves wholly, our life can become exciting, our day-today existence can turn into an adventure and our relationships can become fresh and fulfilling again. Giving ourselves wholly means that we are truly expressing ourselves. We are exactly the way we are feeling at any given moment. We are living out our innermost selves, we are ourselves, we are authentic.
Most of all, we are telling each other everything we have kept silent about for years, everything we have repressed or anxiously held back. The only way towards true healing is communication. Separation or divorce means cutting off communication. Most people who separate are unable to talk to each other any more. Either they are afraid of being judged by the other person because of what they might say, or they block all conversations with resentment and bitterness, thereby using the lack of communication as an instrument of power.
But according to statistics, even quite normal couples don’t talk to each other for more than ten minutes a day. In contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, according to trend analysts, it is no longer regarded as the ‘done thing’ to discuss relationships at length. We are living in times of the txt msg. SMS and secret mailboxes preside over marriages and divorces. A short beep can cause a major adrenaline rush – for people in love. It can also cause a panic attack – for suspicious partners. But open and honest discussion that two people not only take part in rationally but actually undertake with all their heart…?
Many couples over the years engage in a communication pattern in which one talks constantly and the other doesn’t listen at all. That is as if a river is flowing towards a dam. The emotions are dammed up and build up … and up … and at some point the people involved are either numb or they escape the relationship in one way or the other so that their river can flow freely again.
Don’t you know what to talk about? All those everyday details which can seem banal are actually very important. Your wife doesn’t even know the name of your most important business partner. Your husband doesn’t know that last night you had a nightmare about him. Talk about it. Include all the feelings that matter for you. The most important question in everyday communication is: ‘How do I want my partner to treat me?’ The reason this is so important is because it tells you exactly how you should treat your partner. Most of all, the answer shows you the next step towards healing and re-establishing communication.
You have no idea how exciting your life will be once you truly stand up for yourself, either again or for the first time. What do you think would happen if you finally let it all out? If you stopped being friendly and well-adapted and finally said what you really thought? If you stopped smiling as if your lips were being forced apart? If you stopped pleasing everybody by telling all those little white lies? If at the next dinner party you didn’t make small talk about the weather with the person next to you? If you plucked up all your courage and told your partner what you didn’t like when making love? If you stopped trying to get things right for your partner just to keep the peace? Your life would turn into an adventure… It would be like waking up. Some fears might arise from the darkness of your unconscious, some emotions might wash over you and your loved ones and rip them from their familiar routines – but you would feel alive.
The biggest adventures in everyday life happen in quiet times. Right now you probably work from dawn till dusk. You strive and struggle and you have lots of hobbies, but there is no time for true leisure. How much excitement do you think would enter your life if you were to grant yourself some peace and solitude? If you were to begin to focus on sensuality, depth, silence and joy?
At first you might feel like an addict in withdrawal – forced to fall back on yourself without any distractions. This encounter with yourself can be quite unsettling. You might become aware for the first time that nothing but your own inner restlessness has made your life so driven and stressful. You might be overpowered by your fears of being abandoned, or of not earning or achieving enough. If you manage to stay with yourself in such a moment, to search for this stillness and to tolerate it, something inside you will slowly stabilize. When you are next in a critical situation, you will feel much less stressed and defensive. You will realize you don’t have to be constantly striving for things and you don’t always have to be the best.
This process is primarily about sharing our feelings with ourselves and others and just being ourselves. If we are sad, well then, we are sad. And if we are happy, we are happy. Feelings don’t last. They are changing all the time. We can’t cling on to them and we don’t have to repress them either. Our goal is to be in contact with ourselves all the time, to know and to express what is going on for us, without shame and without judgement. It is equally important to keep the same kind of contact with life itself and to accept whatever it presents us with. Even when it is painful to search for the meaning in it.
Life is always about the present moment. If you truthfully admit to yourself that things are not as you’d like them to be, and, furthermore, if you are willing to accept these imperfections, together with all the unwanted feelings, and to let go of resentment and to forgive old hurts, then something very strange will happen: you will arrive – in the middle of your life, in this very moment – at yourself. And in that place there aren’t any problems. There is peace.
Nothing I have written in this book is more challenging than this. In order to arrive at this point we have to leave behind our analytical mind. It’s not easy to understand that now, at this very moment, everything is OK, even when we have been betrayed, rejected and hurt. We can only be reminded of this deep truth – re-minded in a sense. You can only experience this inside yourself. You cannot make it happen. You can only open yourself to it.
There are two areas in our everyday life where we are able to experience this truth: while playing with our children and making love. We all want to be good parents and good lovers. If we are really honest we will know that these are two of the most difficult things to do. Interestingly enough, it is because making love and playing with our children are not about achievement, they are about being. Whenever we try to ‘achieve’ pleasure we will not get it. How often do we feel helpless and inhibited with our children when they simply want a rough and tumble with us? How often are we haunted by shame and inhibition when we try to be good lovers?
Lust and play have no goals. But nowhere can you find more pleasure, fun, depth and closeness. I once involuntarily said to a client, ‘If you want to know what kind of a lover you are in a stable and close relationship then look at the way you play with your children.’ If we want to be the kind parents we dream of being, and if we really want to experience lust and fulfilment, then we have to learn to live in the moment.
We are always seeking something. Something is always missing. Maybe you think I’m exaggerating and that you really are quite content. But somehow, everything is about progress, development, achievement. ‘That is part of the plan,’ you might say… Yes, I agree. Development and evolution are the dynamics of humankind. The problem is the desire to achieve. It leads us away from the moment, from everyday life with its countless adventure playgrounds. Who really wants to take life easy? Who accepts that they have just been deceived or have just lost their job? Who will search for the goodness, the opportunity for further development, that life has hidden in this apparent crisis? Who is prepared to be carried away by the river? We are all doggy-paddling – either because we aren’t happy with the course of the river or the speed of its flow.
Today I know that absolutely every problem and every obstacle in my life has been a blessing. I also know how long it took me to understand this. I know how much energy it took me to go against the flow of life or to demand something different from what it was presenting to me. If we are not happy with something, we immediately want something different. We feel this inner pull of fear or need and immediately start hunting for success, physical pleasure and approval. And we constantly hope and plead that something will give us happiness or will take away our feelings of fear and need. But whatever we try, our satisfaction is always short-lived. We always want more. Most of the time we are taking part in a race against ourselves that can never be won. ‘If only I do this or that or change this or that, then…’ But hardly have we reached the ‘then’ than we tell ourselves, ‘Now, if only I do this or change that, then…’
In our mind we are constantly in the future, never in the present. But the possibility of happiness only exists in the now, in the present moment. Only now can I decide to be exactly the way I am – and to accept it with all my heart. Only now can I let go of everything and feel all the goodness in me, no matter what is happening in my life right now.
Our mind constantly suggests to us that we cannot have happiness in the here and now. That it can only be found in an imaginary future. That something has to happen first. That it will take time because we have to understand, learn, clarify, complete, find or solve something or we have to be or have something in order to finally be happy, content and fulfilled. The truth is that none of these brings us closer to happiness. But the feeling is already inside us right now, in the present moment. All that keeps us from it is our ideas about how things ought to be.
For that reason we should practise, day in, day out, tracking down all our judgements, expectations and imaginings like a detective. Once we learn to uncover them, there is still the problem of how to let go of them or at least be at ease with them. The most important principle is: everything might not be the way it should be – but it makes sense! I have shown in this book that not everything in my life has been the way I thought it should be. But in hindsight, as I said before, things have always made sense – a higher sense.
Day in, day out, we go round like a hamster in a wheel. We want something, and we want it now. With very important or difficult things we tend to be particularly driven. Then we lose our sense of self and the larger context of which we are a part. Instead of allowing ourselves to be carried onwards, we go on and on, round and round, until one day we can’t go on any more. Only then are we forced to confront the heart of the matter. Only then do we have to be still and become aware of ourselves.
Once we have faith in this process, we often learn to simply leap the tracks and stop struggling in order to create some space for a solution. As long as we are struggling, we cannot be aware of what’s really happening. But in order to really receive some help, we have to open up. Only then can life take charge again and revert to its natural order.
The next difficult task is already waiting for us: awareness. The question is no longer what you do but what your attitude towards it is. We do most things in life in a kind of inner absence. We read the papers while having breakfast. In the car we think of work. During work we smoke or eat. We are not really present.
And how can we feel good when we are not really present? How can we know what we really need? Once trust is part of our life again, self-awareness and intuition can take their rightful place too. We sense what our body needs and supply it. When working we follow our vocation. We ask ourselves, ‘Do I enjoy it? Is it meaningful? Does it help me and others to grow?’ We become increasingly aware and present and follow our path, even if it sometimes resembles a rollercoaster, in the firm belief that everything makes sense. Because God is not a person, God is an attitude. A life in faith is a life that allows a situation to change because we are changing. Even if it is a miracle.
When people slowly open up to living in the moment and are ready to hold on to their faith even in difficult situations, they neither live in chaos nor spend their time daydreaming. They are not egomaniacs either. They have clear goals without claiming to know every step of the way. While they have the growing courage to express themselves more and more truthfully, they also become more generous towards others. It is a simple principle: if you give yourself wholly, you can take others the way they are too. You don’t necessarily get more from others, but you receive more because you are open to it.
With faith, your life will become calmer without you having to make any external changes. It is your attitude that will change. In time, there won’t be much that is more important to you than your relationship – but not because you are expecting fulfilment from someone else. Once you are on this path, your relationship will become more and more important because it is the most exciting area in which you can experiment and discover yourself, and because in it you can reveal yourself completely to another human being. The more honesty you have courage for, the more you trust that your partner is the best adventure there is, the more you will sense your own love. And it is some of our rather extravagantly strange partners that offer us the best invitations to deepen our love.
Once we learn to love that way, our life gains a completely new quality. We know that people and relationships are changing all the time. We can truly enjoy the variety that our life and the people around us have to offer. When we live like that, we live from the heart and we give from the heart. To live wholly from the heart means to live fully from the heart. But how can our heart be full when it is no longer filled by the world and everything in it, all the people and all our partners? Because our true source of love is not somewhere out there but is our inner, inexhaustible, divine core.
Can you do the splits? Probably not. If you can, then you are probably challenging your body every day. Most likely you don’t have a clue how far your body can be stretched. And my guess is that you probably don’t have the faintest idea how far your heart can be opened up. My marriage today has nothing to do with my marriage 10 years ago. But I am certain that as yet I don’t have more than a glimpse of what is possible between my husband and me if we stay on this path.
I once met a successful man. He came in, sat down and asked me, ‘Why don’t my wife, three children and successful career make me happy? What’s wrong with me?’ He told me that he was woken each night by terrible dreams and had lost all appetite for life. He only had one thought – of running away, of escape. A short time after this confession he was in court, and his fortune and the reputation of his company were at stake. We never found a satisfactory answer to his question and he left my office haunted by thoughts of revenge and by panic attacks. I later heard that he had lost all his money.
Nearly a year later he was back. His body looked rounder, his features softer. As abruptly as before he declared, ‘I’ve sussed it out now. I’ve always been afraid of life. Last year I learned that life was not out to get me. It loves me. It loves us all, just as we are. It gives us the lessons we need – no matter how difficult they may be. Life is really much wiser than we ever imagine. Once we start to understand life, we discover that it only ever wants one thing from us: for us to grow and find real peace.’
When he told me this, he had lost nearly everything that he had achieved in his life and he didn’t know what he was going to do next. But he was closer to his family now than he could ever have imagined.