Life is a Present, but Only if You are Present

Being mindful allows you to track down what appear to be subconscious processes, disentangle them and bring them out in the open. Say you lie in bed, your partner is fast asleep but since you are lying next to each other, you can feel a touch on your body. You feel sexual energy rising in you, you feel relaxed because it is Saturday and you have a long weekend coming up, you are touching yourself, you picture your favorite sexual act and you effectively begin to masturbate.

When you think about it, there are actually many things going on in this scene. A lot happens between the moment you wake up and the time you masturbate. Waking up is obviously out of your control, as is the experience of the touch of your partner and the fact that sexual energy is rising in you. You may be a person who always feels sexual energy most intensely when you are relaxed. Knowing the mood you are in helps you understand how you are likely to react. Once you are mindful of what is going on inside, you suddenly realize that you have a choice in touching yourself and a choice in creating exciting sexual mental images. Before you were just on an autopilot that led to masturbation even though many of the processes weren't subconscious at all, be mindful gives you a choice in what experience and lets you experience everything more intensely.

Try to be present when something is happening inside you, say sexual energy surge in you like in in our example. How do you react to this energy surge? How is your mood when you experience it? Are you angry or pleased, anxious or relaxed, are you in a good or in a bad mood? Try to be present when these processes run, or otherwise you will be just dragged around by these emotions and energy and will end up acing like a slave. Are you a master of your emotions and actions or are you controlled totally by the robot inside?

To become a master of your emotions and your actions can be learned. Try to be present when these energies surge in you, feel how different emotions work on your body, and try to understand why you have these reactions. With your total attention and total presence, with the gaze of your love, these emotions calm down like a purring cat. Please practice this by yourself, you basically can see the transition of your emotions in action. You can experience how pain is transformed into love and joy; anxiety into peace; anger into forgiveness.

Please don’t suppress your emotions. Accept them as they are. Try not to judge them and label them as good or bad. Take them all and in experience them as they are. The problems for most of people is that they are controlled and dragged around by their emotions. The emotional, mental and physical dominos are falling and afterwards the outcome gets labeled as good or bad. When something is labeled as good, you are happy to experience what is going on and you want them to stay with it as long as possible. On the contrary, when the emotions are labeled as bad, you don’t want them, you try to get rid of them and you afterwards beat yourself or someone else up over them.

If you really watch these emotions and observe them carefully, you will find that, as a matter of fact, these emotions come and go by themselves. But if you resist them, suppress them, or try to control them, they will stay longer. Just be present with them, you will be able to transcendent these emotions, understand them and yourself, and experience life

With your presence, the intensity of every emotion will become strong and you will also gain back the feeling of liveliness. Do you recall how you experienced life as a child? Can you feel the breeze when you walk in nature? Can you see the flowers blooming all over the places? Can you taste the flavor of food? Have you ever experienced talking to your loved one and feel the love flowing back and forth between you two? Have you ever experienced the pain when someone you really care is walking out of your life? Yes, these situations trigger our emotions and sensations. If you are present in these happenings, you will connect with the lively energy of these things. You cannot help feeling that life is wonderful and exciting because you are lively there participating every thing.

Dear friends, please get out of your mind and your auto-pilot and join life instead. Leave the roller-coaster of emotions, just experience the first push, the psychological trigger and experience how the stimulus is fading naturally when you just observe. Life is a present and a blessing, but only when you are present will you be able to get it. You have lived in the illusionary world full of worry and fear long enough. Join the real world and be ready to receive your present.

By Christian and Su Zhen

Good Vibrations

How you do feel right now? How is your mood changing when you face different situations? All your different mental states and feelings are in fact changing energy dynamics. It is a bit hard to realize this initially, but you can observe them and even influence them for yourself.

You must have noticed that after a good night's sleep, you tend to feel good about yourself and everything that comes your way. Similarly, after a long work day or when you experience confrontations with people, your energy gets drained. But then, if you run into people you care about, you relax and your mood becomes lighter. So dependent on what situation you are in and what people you hang out with, your system and energy vibrations adjust accordingly. How do you feel when you walk into a mall on a busy Saturday afternoon? How do you feel when you take a walk in a forest or sit quietly at an empty beach?

We are all made of energy, and experience this energy at different frequencies dependent on the circumstances, our mind set and the people we hang out with. Different people radiate different vibrations so your energy system will respond to that as well. This might sound like fancy New Age talk to you, but in fact, you can experience this phenomenon for yourself. We are all connected on an energy level; try to experience this for yourself.

When you are in deep sleep, mediate, take a nature walk, read books on spirituality on the one hand, or experience a stressful work day, worry about loved ones or yourself, or play violent video games on the other, your energy resonates very differently. In the uplifting situations you will experience peace, will feel exuberant and connected, while in the other cases you will feel tired, exhausted, restless, or anxious.

The advantage of a spiritual path traveler is to recognize the fluid nature of all these phenomena. You also realize that you have a choice at hand. Stress at work, the endless worries about all kind of things that never really materialize, at least not in the way you expect them anyway, and the artificial ways of getting a high are things that you can drop. The more you manage to stay away from the energy draining situations and the more you are drawn to yoga, meditation and contemplation, the more you realize that this state of serenity is always yours to choose. Also, the longer you spend in these positive states, the more pronounced will be your distaste for all kind of interferences.

Of course, when you have a low energy frequency, it will be difficult for you to realize all that. You will instead blame your misery on events, bad karma, other people or your lacking will-power. Try to experiment with our concept as much as you can. Cut impurities out of your life, at least temporarily, and see how your energy system reacts to it. Seek out the people, activities and events that give you positive energy and that put you in a state of serenity. Find the way that works for you to reconnect with your Soul. For Christian it is contemplation and writing, for Su Zhen it is meditation and writing and we both are in awe of nature. Find your unique way of connecting with your Self and take this energy vibration as your base line and let the Tao teach you how you can manifest the same bliss in all areas of your life. Try it and experiment with our concept for yourself and see if what we say is true or not! Enjoy your good vibrations!

By Christian and Su Zhen

In Search of the Martial Artist

Have you ever been present when someone just lost it? Parents who are stretched to their limits and who end up hitting their children. Colleagues who take abuse until one time it all comes out on the wrong person and in the wrong situation. You have probably been there as well -  in one way or another, we all have. The only difference between the one who remains calm under pressure and the one who loses it, is self-control. That's what martial arts can teach you. The calm one experiences exactly the same emotion but manages to not do anything about it, while the hot-headed person just lets off steam immediately.

I think the bar is getting raised all the time. Loosing it may have been tolerated a couple of decades ago. Today,  if you hit your children in public, by-standers would likely interfere. It was ok to verbally abuse a colleague if you had the power at your company; today we are a step closer to zero tolerance for all forms of violence even, or perhaps especially, when someone in power loses his cool.

Perhaps you should sign up for that martial arts or that yoga class because the standards of human interactions are steadily rising. The most demanding professions today ask you to override your natural instincts. You have to overcome your fear of public speaking,  have to interact socially even if you are shy, or have to push your case through even though the authorities on your subject disagree with you. The bar is being raised just because humanity is evolving at an incredible speed. Life forces you to be a heroine these days. It is not always about doing what feels right; sometimes it is about creating your destiny despite yourself. So don't be intimidated when the bar is being upped in front of your eyes just as you had your successful high jump. You are doing this to yourself, so please accept your personal challenge to excel.