Chapter 1
Lithuanian Dream (2006)
I lived in Kaunas, Lithuania from the time I was born until I was 29. All that time, I believed that Lithuania was the most beautiful country in the world. I was convinced that Lithuanian was the oldest and richest language, and that our nation offered the most developed education system and the best opportunities for young people. I was equally sure that I had most the loving family and caring partners anyone could wish for. This was especially true of my father, who seemed the hero of all heroes to me—always supportive, open, and understanding. I was so proud of it all, and I had never considered putting any of my assumptions to the test. I travelled a little to other places like: Germany, Poland, USA, Egypt, Turkey and Hungary—and met different people, but even still, I was never really open to explore. I was thoroughly convinced I had the best at home.
Upon these illusions, I built my life. But just as no one can build a house on a dune of sand, I couldn’t create a fulfilling life on a foundation of hallucination. Naturally, it was breaking down. I made repairs, but it would break down, again and again, which slowly but surely brought me to a place of doubt. I was no longer so strongly certain about my convictions.
I called this chapter Lithuanian Dream because as I write this text now in 2018, some twelve years after the start of my awakening, I can see that I had been asleep. During intense experiences in 2007 in Guatemala, I was given a wake up call. It took me by surprise, but in hindsight, I can see that I had been preparing for it. I am happy that I have awoken, and I feel relieved to have left those illusions behind me. I no longer view Lithuania as the world’s most beautiful country. I can admit its language is not the oldest, that the education is poor, that it offers no bright future to its youth, and that I did not have loving family or supportive father. Reality turned out to be quite contrary to all that I had believed; it was simply a story I had told myself in order to survive.
Chapter 2
Call of Guatemala (written 2007)
The Mayans, a South American people, anticipated the end of time in 2012, which would initiate three days of darkness and a reversal of the earth’s rotation. Following the three days, we would emerge from darkness and once again enjoy the light. According to this prophecy, it would be a time when male and female energy were to become equal on our planet again. The Mayan prophecy said that sixty people would gather to support the shamans in the rituals that would awaken the female energy of earth and move humanity to a higher consciousness.
With support of Drunvalo Melkisedek, sixty individuals from around the world (e.g., Canada, USA, China, Africa, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Australia) gathered in late autumn of 2007, and by accident (or not) I appeared among them. With very little knowledge or expectations about what I would experience, I found myself, along with a friend, surrounded by strangers gathered for a shared aim. When I learned why we were there, I was shocked. I can even admit that it scared me. Over the next three weeks, we would support the performance of three rituals across Guatemala.
The first took place near Atitlan, one of Guatemala’s largest lakes. It was here that I witnessed for the first time how ritual fire was prepared, where seeds, candles, stones, and incense are placed, that all cardinal points are given respect to, and how Mayans worship the elements of nature. We stood around the sacred fire as Don Alejandro, the leader of the Mayan people, led the ceremony. With the help of a translator, we learned that we had been living in the darkness and the time was coming in which we would rise up and return to the light. Don Alejandro spoke about Mother Earth, Father Sky, and all the beings on the planet.
During the ritual, eagles appeared in the sky. In those moments, I understood how far removed we all are from real life. We see only ourselves, our work, our daily lives, our routines. I remembered what a miracle the world is, and I marvelled at its strength. During the ceremony, each of us were given a few seeds, and at the end of the ritual, we were invited to throw them into the fire and to make a wish. I made mine.
The second ritual was in the jungle of Tikal, which met us with lots of beings, colourful plants, and strange sounds. It was beautiful, humid, and alive. There, the Mayan shamans prepared a sacred fire again. The sixty of us from around the world stood around it to support the ceremony with our presence. The ritual proceeded as it had at Lake Atitlan, expressing gratitude and appreciation for east, south, west, north, mother earth, father sky, plants and animals spirits, and inviting female energy to return to the earth. We stayed in Tikal park for the day and finished it with group meditation.
The third and last ritual was held in a cave into which outsiders were, for the first time in history, permitted to enter. This impressive cave is believed to be one of the power places on Earth and serves as an important Mayan temple. Here, Don Alejandro invited everyone to join, despite race, language, and age, so that we might feel that we are one. It was a day I will always remember. It was December 5, 2007, my 28th birthday.
Following the third ritual, our mission was complete. We travelled to Antigua to have a rest and a nice dinner. That night, Antigua’s volcano, became active again. It was a sign that the energy was moving.
The group with which I shared these experiences included many interesting and strong individuals. I met Mike, a twenty-four-year old Chinese poker player who writes books on the art of living; a NASA professor who investigates the brain and the effect of meditation; Miguel, a Mexican who can bend metal using psychic power (he bent a teaspoon in my hand without touching it); and Russian physical therapists who encourage emotional healing through physical exercise. The people I met brought change to my view of life, widening my horizon. This was especially true for one of them: a teacher and mediator named Chris, who founded ISHTAR, the International School for Healing, Transcendence, Ascension & Resonance. For over a year, I would study under this teacher, which would change my life even further. I became more free, more alive, a bit more conscious, and wiser. Out of this new state, Dakini LT (my teaching company), an exhibition of my paintings, and further journeys were born.
The journey to Guatemala was a point from which everything began. Strong, colourful, unbelievable, miraculous. Life can be so interesting, unexpectedly, nourishing, and rich, though we need courage and open eyes to see it.
Chapter 3
Nepalese Flow (November, 2008)
A year after my experience in Guatemala, another journey brought me to Nepal. I anticipated something really spectacular, but the reality surpassed all expectations. The mixture of its nature, people, colours, rhythms, smells, and sounds uplifted all of us, a group of seven. Three of us came from Lithuania: Inga, Elf, and I. Others were from Switzerland and Germany. We all met in Kathmandu where we were welcomed by Chris, our teacher, our leader, the heart and soul of our journey.
We spent the first few days in Kathmandu, where we enjoyed watching its rhythm of life. We ate at local restaurants, wandered the streets of Thamel, and visited temples. My first intense impression was of the early morning near Bodnath Stupa where locals start each day with prayer by spinning prayer wheels with the most beautiful greetings, letting the wind carry them to all the countries of the world. The power in that place was stronger than almost anything I have ever experienced. I could feel patience, vitality, presence, and power in the air.
The first part of the journey was a seminar, which began a week after we had arrived. We went to a retreat centre in Nagarkot at the entry to Himalayas. We spent five days there listening to Chris and exchanging our experiences and thoughts on the themes of the seminar—topics that covered the relationship between women and men and parents and children, sexuality, how to avoid getting caught up in games, and how to truly see things. I didn’t find many answers, but clear questions were revealed to me. My understanding and curiosity were increasing exponentially.
This always happens when I spend time with Chris. Exchanging with him always pushes me toward boundaries that I think I can not overstep, but when I do, the boundary stretches even further. This allows me to grow and change, even if these changes sometimes scare me. There are moments when I can’t find anything to hold onto to prove my identity, where it seems I don’t know who I am. All my behavioural strategies disappear, and I feel vulnerable with only my fears and insecurities. In such moments, I just want to feel safe. But I also understand that such moments are opportunities for growth and getting closer to becoming real. These are the moments when I must break through the fences that border my comfort zone and explore the unfamiliar parts of my being. And these are most precious moments of my life and the only real treasures of this world.
Chapter 4
What I Have to Say Today Fits on One Sheet of Paper (Written in April 2009)
Following my return from Nepal and back to my daily life in Lithuania—my office, my projects, and my circle of friends—I have been thinking a lot. I’ve tried to uncover what motivates people to act, to move desperately forward, to create goals and plans feverishly. I’d never questioned it before, because it seemed that there was no other way.
But I find myself in a very strange period of my life. Everything seems to have stopped: me, affairs at my firm, relating with others, decisions, and ideas about where to step next. Sometimes it even seems like it’s hard to breathe. I feel like I’m surrounded by glue, and it reaches around my neck or around me like a vortex because sometimes I can‘t even feel the wind on my face. So now, when everything has stopped, I ask myself why I think I need a goal in order to carry on. Why must I busy myself with the need to go somewhere for a reason? The answer: Because this is what I learned, and because it gives me comfort as well as security. I have only ever known how to live this way: idea, purpose, pursuit, a new purpose, and so on. If I don‘t have a goal and if I am not busy, it’s like I don‘t exist, like I’m dying. And If I don’t have a purpose or some measurable result, I am overtaken by a sense of absurdity, like I’m nothing but emptiness. Go from goal A to goal B, then from B to C and so on. This is the only way I’ve known how to prove to myself that I am.
This is where my purpose-driven existence took me: In the beginning, it was very traditional: Lithuanian school, university, boyfriend, well-paid job, good apartment, good car, wedding. Going through this algorithm, I expected to feel fulfilled at the end, not to suffer from a sense of emptiness and absurdity. I was so sure that it would work, but it didn’t. So I had to create new goals and pursue them, and believe, again, that when I reached them, I would feel fulfilled and satisfied at last.
The new trajectory was: divorce, my own business, financial success, a perfectly trained body, a luxurious apartment, a brand new car, membership in business leadership clubs, and so on. It took surprisingly little time to accomplish all this, and at reaching the final goal, I was confused. It should have suited me. Life gave me everything just as I wanted it. Like attentive lover, life did and gave everything I wished for. I should have experienced a sense of plenitude and satisfaction, but all I could hear was humming silence.
Then I decided that I needed intimacy for happiness—a person with whom I could share my soul and body. We would cry together in times of misery and laugh together in times of joy. This wish was also granted. When that person appeared in my life, I began a new cycle. I found a new purpose beyond being a successful woman: to grow together with a man I really liked this time. And what do you think happened next? I ended up at the same conclusion: this doesn’t feel right. It was really strange. Wherever I ran, whatever goal I chose, I always hit the same wall of emptiness. And every time I hit it, I thought that maybe the algorithm was wrong, that it wasn’t my way of happiness, and so I started the search again.
Recently I met a guy. During our meeting, he was bombing me with his knowledge about politics, religion, meditation and teachings. The date was a real flop, but in looking at him in all his insecurity, I could see myself. I was at my breaking point. I could clearly recognise the strategies I had used to escape feeling by keeping myself busy and focused on a goal. In the same way that he uses knowledge, I have busied myself with running around like crazy, taking on projects that didn’t truly inspire me, meeting people I had no real interest in, going to parties without a single drop of desire to be there, having hundreds of thousands thoughts about how, where, and how much, and on and on.
I could also see that others were trying to escape feeling—to avoid being vulnerable and real—by keeping themselves busy with work, love affairs, material wealth, friends, sports, shopping, anything at all. I could see that some even focused on their role as mother or father in order to avoid deeper thoughts or feelings about their existence, life, world, or the path they had chosen.
And I finally could recognise the motivations of my actions: to avoid. Through focus on artificial goals, I’ve been avoiding anything that would make me doubt myself, my path, my parents and friends, or my opinions and judgments. Any doubt was a direct threat to my existence. I put all my energy into feeding a false identity, because that was who I thought I was. I was not free. I was not the master of my life. This may be why I led myself to frustration and emptiness again and again.
After I drawing aside this curtain of avoiding, I’ve found that I’m actually hanging in the air. I’m hanging in obscurity together with my boundless emptiness. For probably the first time in my life, I managed to open my eyes. And what I saw was really scary. I looked at myself and the people around me. I looked, and I could see. My heart was touched. What I saw was so beautiful, so human, so sad, and so helpless at the same time.
I know now that I don‘t need to keep trying to escape feeling or to constantly look for my identify or proof that I really am, because I am. I don’t need to reach for a goal or run from point to point, because I am. I don’t need a new goal to rush toward anymore, because I am. I don’t have to hurry anymore, because I am. I am, and at the moment, I am hanging in the air. I’m hanging, and I don‘t know where to step next. But it isn’t so important anymore, because I am. I also know that this clarity can leave me at anytime, but I will find a way back to it. I know that, with the time I’ll learn to live with it and that this might take many years.
Chapter 5
Journey to India-Thailand-Laos-Cambodia-India (Written in February, 2010)
I decided that last winter would be my last in Lithuania. My business partner and I closed everything up and went out to the world without the intention of ever coming back. We left at the end of November, first going to Switzerland and then to Goa. It was nice to enjoy the sunny beaches of Arambol, Candolim, and Calangut. They were beautiful, soft, and open. It was also challenging to have so much time to myself, but I am going to write more on that later. Now back on the track. After two months, we went to Thailand and participated in a seminar called “Meetings with Your Remarkable Self.”
The seminar was organised by Chris, who I had met in Guatemala, and his wife Barbara. The first part of the seminar took place in a villa Nirvana on the island Ko Samui. The second part was a scuba diving course in Ko Tao, through which all twelve participants, except me, earned their open water and advanced diver certification. Even now, after some time, it’s still difficult for me to put into words exactly what happened with me. Generally, however, the ideas that come to mind are deeply connected to my emotional body, distorted aspects of it, hara (in Japanese martial arts traditions, the word hara is used as a technical term for a specific area (physical/anatomical) or energy field (physiological/energetic) of the body), codependency, self-sabotage, being together. It sounds like several different things, but in reality, it’s just one.
Once more I became aware of a feeling of lacking in my life. It is like a hole in my system where my air constantly seeps out. It’s lack of love, attention, peace, money, recognition. I often take steps in my life based entirely on serving these needs. Living like this, I think, leads to an even stronger sense of deficiency. I have heard many times that only we can change our reality, only we can be responsible for the way we feel. At first look, this seems, theoretically, simple enough, but how to implement it into day-to-day life, I have no clue. What’s it like to enjoy living without being dependent on specific conditions? We always have them. At least I do: I would feel happy if I could travel; I’ll feel happy when I meet the right boyfriend; or I could be happy if I get this or that. All of these are external conditions are constantly in flux. I can’t seem to control or choose them. So how do I get rid of this constant sense of wanting?
During the seminar and afterwards, I experienced a change in my emotional state which gave some answer to my question. Within a few minutes, I could move my emotions from complete happiness to total disappointment and sadness and back to happiness again. It’s not easy to explain, but I found out that, in the face of the very same circumstances, I can experience completely opposite emotions. To me, this highlights the fact that I can actually invite one emotional state or another without even changing my external circumstances. In the past, I have often tried to identify who was responsible for how I felt. Who or what was making me feel good or bad? I always needed to find out who was to blame: my lover, my job, a hobby, the country I was in, my parents, the government, the economy, even fate. But no matter who or what, it was someone or something other than me. But this time, I could see that it was I who felt good or bad, exited or frustrated, and only I who was responsible for it. And so it can only be I who chooses to feel a sense of lacking or a sense of fulfilment.
I am grateful to Chris for this and many other experiences and insights. He has an amazing gift for creating situations in which participants can move within their real emotions to become aware of what is really happening and, importantly, to become aware that they can be in charge of themselves. Chris organised this seminar and journey and showed us that we are not helpless in the ocean of emotion. He pointed to the fact that we can navigate it like a captain steers a ship. Sometimes there’s a storm, other times an uplifting wind, and sometimes doldrums. It is completely up to us to guide our boat of emotions along the course we want.
I want to implement everything I learned at that seminar into my day-to-day life. I want to find my way to fulfilment. To do so, I should not forget the power of my will. Only that can strengthen my awareness, because the temptation to escape and blame others can be very strong.
Thank you, Chris and Barbara. Thank you to all the group for these invaluable shared experiences. My journey continues on to Cambodia now, then Laos, and back to India. This time, I’ll explore the north.
Chapter 6
The Key (April, 2010)
During my stay in North India, I spent many days pondering my existence. What is it fulfilment from the inside? How do I discover it? How can I free myself from the opinions of others and the influence of my circumstances? One night, while I was sleeping in my small room at the Dragon Inn guest house in Manali, Lord Shiva came to me and answered my question:
The key is love and fearlessness. Only fear makes us miserable. Fear urges us to seek fulfilment from outside of ourselves. And all the fears we experience are different forms of one root fear: Death. Whenever we accept that the body and mind are mortal and stop resisting this truth, we become fearless. As for the other part of the key, love, it is source of immortality. Love of the spiritual heart is a direct connection between us and existence. Through this love, we can discover and remember our godly nature and feel at home again.
I could relate to this advice, and I was curious to test it. But achieving love and fearlessness seemed like quite a challenge. Can I do it on my own? Where do I start? And then I remembered that I didn’t have to look far. I knew from my friend Chris that existence supports us in every moment. This support can have many faces: it can look like success, like a beautiful piece of art, like a person we meet, like disaster, or a challenge. The only thing I should take care about is not to be too much an obstacle.
Chapter 7
India, A Moment of Space without Distraction to Experience the Self (Written in May, 2010)
I am still in India. I’ve spent a lot of my time on this trip thinking, “What am I doing here?” I don’t mean here in India or the Himalayas. I mean here, the planet earth. My friend Chris says that this is the planet of experiencing an emotional body. We choose to be here to participate in an experiment and to heal our emotional bodies. Chris says many things, but as I see it now, I can realise and understand very little of it. Understanding means action, and me, I stand still.
This journey has been very hard for me, not physically or financially, but emotionally. It’s primarily been an inner journey for me. Whenever I have this much time to myself with so little distraction, I go deeper and deeper and deeper inside. And what do I find? Just more pain, more fear, more aggression, more hate, even thoughts of suicide. And all these strong feelings pump up here in India, where I have been traveling for five months. Can somebody feel like this, even while she or he is living their dreams? A journey like this has always been a dream of mine. I wanted just to go off and leave behind all the worries of day-to-day life, like earning money, managing an office, taking care of a house, dealing with traffic, going shopping, keeping up social connections, etc. I wanted to be free, free from everything that ties me to my personality, my ideas about life, my past, my parameters, my conditions. And this dream became a reality. I wanted to know who I really am, and this dream gave me a load of time to “experience” myself. And I cannot believe what I have discovered, that I have so much pain and anger. I feel like I don’t deserve to live.
I know very well that this is just one of my realities. This is a trap I create for myself. Self-sabotage. I put myself down; I look at myself without any respect during moments of feeling ugly and small. I push myself down, down, and at the same time, I look for justification for my actions to excuse what I do to myself. It’s like being closed in a cycle, a circle of being my own victim and being a tyrant to myself. And while I’m here in this circle, I eliminate the possibility of experiencing reality, enjoying life, breathing, and feeling real.
Today I was in the Himalayan mountains. I was just sitting in silence. I finally got a clear picture, the next step that I must make. I must realise that whenever I start to feel unloved, rejected, unappreciated, I start to fall into the trap, and I fall so deep that I drastically change my reality. When I don’t want to live or to breathe, I feel unworthy of existence. So today I decided that I must drop it. It is not me, and it is not real. It’s just leftovers from whatever I experienced in my past. I don’t want to continue to push myself into this shit.
This thought and understanding was so clear in my mind until I connected to the internet and called Chris on Skype.
Chapter 8
Is this really love? (Written in India, 2010)
I called my beloved friend Chris. As usual, he pushed my buttons. I didn’t get the praise and adoration I expected from him. He knows how to do that. I know that he does this, but knowing doesn’t help. I get pissed anyway. Again I start to feel unwelcome, unloved, unappreciated. I began to think that if I were to die, nobody would miss me; the world would just be getting rid of a load of rubbish. But then I think again: If I didn’t love Chris so much, I wouldn’t be suffering like this. I wouldn’t be hurt this way. And at that particular moment, I said to myself, “STOP! This cannot be love. Love cannot bring suffering and pain, and love doesn’t mean fulfilling the expectations of others.” And so I now doubt what I have always called love. I love so much, but I don’t get love in return (e.g. my expectations are not fulfilled; I don’t get what I need). When I suffer from this, I don’t want to live. So… What I am feeling, it cannot be love. Love has nothing to do with pain or suffering. That’s why what I feel must be something totally different.
So I go on contemplating: I love Chris with all my heart; I can see what an amazing being he is, how much love and compassion he has; I am aware of the gifts and support I receive from him; I’ve learnt so much and there is still so much to learn in the future. But I don’t get it: how can love make me feel rejected and unloved? How is that “being so in love” always brings me frustration? Somehow in my understanding of what it is, love has to do something with suffering. I used to perceive love and suffering as one. And the suffering gave the love even more value. Kind of like, the more I suffer, the more in love I am. (Mega bullshit.) But because of that value, I didn’t want let go of the suffering. And I am afraid to let go of it, because how then will I know what love is? If I remove suffering from love, maybe there is no love anymore. Maybe this sounds like madness, but this is my reality right now.
I wish to discover love without suffering, love that provides space and compassion. I want to discover this love in my heart and share it with the world.
Is this really enjoying? (Written in India, May 2010)
Here I am on the local bus from Manali to Rishikesh. Bumpy road. Small seat. My belly hurts. I feel like vomiting. The flea bites on my legs are itching. There’s still at least ten hours left to go, but I feel happy. How come? It doesn’t fit within my understanding of happiness. To be happy used to mean lying on the beach somewhere, on a sun bed, drinking a nice piña colada. But this moment is the opposite of that. God or the universe, however we want to call it, has an amazing sense of humour and finds the most creative ways to guide us in our process of finding out more and more.
Some days ago, I had a feeling of doubt about what I call love, and doubt has come again. Now I’m questioning the meaning of happiness. I’m discovering that I have certain ideas about this word and its meaning. And for first time in my life, I’m questioning it. Now I feel like I can understand a little bit better what my teacher said: “To have a happy and fulfilled life, enjoy your life.” I always use to think, “I would enjoy live if I could do this or that. I would enjoy live if I were to get this and that. I would enjoy life if I could achieve this or that.” But now I understand that when my teacher said enjoy, he meant something different to what I mean by it. And when my teacher said happy, he probably meant something different to my idea of happiness. When he says love, he does not mean an emotional disaster or drama as it is in my reality; that means something different too.
I still don’t know the real meaning of these words. This, I still have to discover. But now I’m sure that they’re not what I thought they were. And now that I’ve discovered that there are actually different meanings in words like love, happiness, and enjoyment, I ask: what about the rest of my reality?
Chapter 9
The Frequencies (India, 2010)
Lately, I’ve experienced myself moving in different frequencies. I can rise or fall. I mean, it hasn’t just started; I’ve always done this. I just wasn’t aware of it. A few months ago, it was revealed to me. Now I perceive my being, and that of others, as moving up and down or staying in one place. Not all have the same ability to move. Some can move very little, some can rise up and go down very deeply. These frequencies are like the slices of a cake, and everybody has a different place.
Whenever I rise, I can relate to the world with a unique quality. The food has a nicer taste; the music sounds deeper and touches me more. The beauty of nature and life in general gets richer. My approach to myself and changes. I can share myself more easily. When I can, I melt into life.
After every rise, I experience a hard fall, and the world doesn’t look like a playground anymore. I can’t share, and living doesn’t bring me joy anymore.
Chapter 10
Indonesian Crystallisation (Written in Bali, 2012)
I want to write down for myself where I am and what my thoughts are during this moment, where once again all my world is turning upside down after only a short break. I finished my journey in Asia in the summer of 2010 and returned to Switzerland, where my trip had begun. In these last two years, I reconnected with friends, got married, started to work at a retreat centre, and began to paint with more dedication. Upon return, the idea was to start a smooth and quiet life in a new country together with some friends and my husband, to be a part of team at a growing retreat and meditation centre, to take care of guests and meet many people, to treat clients with my own massage techniques for relaxation of the body, mind, and emotions (Relax 5). I started to paint a lot and sink deeper into myself. Though hardly anything else has worked out, the latter has. Life has again made adjustments to my plans and imagination.
And now I am on the road again. It’s my first week in Bali. After almost a year of constantly trying to move my life in a particular direction, all of my bodies are tired. I go to sleep early, wake up, eat breakfast, and then I go back to sleep until lunch. I don’t feel like visiting temples or going out a lot. I just want to have peace and rest. It doesn’t even feel like I’m on holiday. For me, it’s just life in a different place.
This gives me time and distance to take another look at the life I have been creating. From here, it doesn’t look smooth at all: my marriage is far from romantic and work at the retreat centre has been mostly about cleaning rather than giving massages. The centre hasn’t been doing well; fewer and fewer guests come, and the friends who committed themselves to it almost never show up. Upon reflection, I can see that some part of my disappointment can be attributed to my imagination and expectations, and some part is because of the unfulfilled promises of others.
Again, experience has taught me quite a lot. I find that actually doing things rather than just engaging in blind reflection is the only way to learn. In my recent experiences, I have observed and therefore learned about expectations and agreements. Simply: I wish to have a coffee with you, and you want to have a coffee with me; we agree to meet this afternoon in a café, and our agreement is manifested the moment we meet there. Healthy agreements are based on true intentions. But I find that agreements are often misused as a tool to make us feel good about ourselves. If one man says to another, “If you ever need me, I will be there for you,” it makes him feel good about himself. The other believes it, which also makes him feel good about himself. But secretly, both parties hope that this moment of need never comes, the moment in which one has to ask the other for the support that was promised, because, otherwise, they can both carry on with the illusion of caring and being cared for.
I get the impression that people like to think of themselves in a certain way. My friends from Zürich, for example, enjoy making commitments, because it gives them a feeling of being open and integral, trustworthy and high-spirited. But when the moment to act comes, they get cold feet.
This goes on not only in agreements and commitments between people but also in the promises people make to themselves. For example, some people say they want to organise their lives to allow for more free time for sport, to play more music, to enjoy their kids, to read, or to meditate. They talk about furthering their education when the time is right. But in so few cases does anyone actually seek out more time or opportunities and take action. People rarely test desires, but when it does come to that, the desires tend to disappear because they were just wishes for the sake of having a wish, and the intention behind them is just to make themselves look good.
I wish for honesty, truth, respect, and to be able to trust in my life. Instead I feel puzzled, disappointed, and hurt after my experience in Switzerland. And at the same time though, I feel that I can see more and more, even if I would really like reality to be different. And I can also see that I cannot change others; the only person I can change is myself. So I better do so.