Whatever predicament you might find yourself in – a weight issue, sudden unemployment, a broken relationship, a serious illness, or death in your family – you need to take a stand to deal with it so you can benefit from the way you handle it, gaining experience in finding that inner strength within yourself. It can be a hard, long, tear-you-up, scary, blood-sweat-and-tears journey, and you’re the only one who can conquer the traps of old patterns, mountains, and valleys you must cross to arrive down the road at this calm, sunny place you can call home, which lies within you.
There are not necessarily road signs along this path that tell you where to go or how long until you reach your destination. You might not know where you’re going, but any road will take you there. When you stand at a crossroad, you need to believe in your gut feeling and choose from that – which direction to take and when you arrive at your destination, you just know that you are there. Your journey has been planned by the cosmos from the beginning of time. Continue your journey in your life with a new approach, a new consciousness, a new mindset, and trust and belief in yourself. Expect nothing, be prepared for anything. You don’t have to rid yourself of fear; just train yourself to respond differently. Stress happens when you resist. The excellence of life depends not on what you do…but on how you do it. The only real failure is the failure to try.
Most things don’t work out quite as we expected – sometimes what happens instead is the good stuff. The only measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.
Everything will be all right in the end and if it’s not – it’s not the end yet.
It’s not about dedicating your life to training but dedicating your training to life.
I used to be – and still fall into this old pattern of mine from time to time – a triple C person – cool, calm and collected. Others’ image of me and my image of myself were that I could handle any obstacle, and nothing could throw me off. I was good, strong and felt powerful. I was a warrior, wanting to conquer and defeat anything in my path – and only to prove my worth to myself and others because that was what I felt they expected of me and hence what I expected of myself! My choice of sports supports this pattern: Competitive swimming, marathons, Ironman races, bicycle races (Randonneurs in France and the USA – 1200 K), a 100K run, adventure races – me alone, against the clock, aiming for faster, higher, stronger, better, longer. And when I succeeded, the next goal was already there: Faster, higher, stronger, better, longer. On and on for years.
That changed and I realised how much energy I spent keeping up appearances. I cold-turkeyed competition and became a lazy person for a year. I dove into an evaluation of my life up until then and decided to find out who I was and who and what I wanted to be for the next half of my life. This was back in 2013, at the age of 52. Because truth be told, I was just one of many who struggled inside with the same issues most other people also do. I read this at some point:
Thoughts become words
Words become actions
Actions become habits
Habits become character
Character becomes destiny
And decided I needed a new letter abbreviation for myself, not CCC, the triple C’s. If opportunity doesn’t come knocking, build a door. Create your own next step. I had help. In my search, I stumbled onto a concept called ‘F**k It’. At the time, it was based in Italy and run by John C. Parkin and Gaia Pollini as a weeklong retreat where the main purpose was to find your own way of saying no to things you either couldn’t control or have any influence on anyway or simply letting go, accepting things as they were, and not getting agitated about it. Or decide that you should not be part of that anymore because your passion for it had evaporated over time.
Over the following years, I attended 4 or 5 retreats, each with a different theme, and attended a warrior workshop led by Karl Grunick in Austria and a left-right workshop in Berlin, also with Karl. A dear friend of mine, Lars Kjeldsen, a fellow Dane, is a psychotherapist, and he has developed his own seminars, Et Skridt af Gangen, (One Step at a Time) where each participant comes with his or her own challenge in life, personal and/or professional, and through dialogue with Lars and the other participants creating and finding tools to conquer the issues – and all that away from home, in Italy on the ancient Camino of Francis of Assisi, from Rome to Assisi, hiking 15-30 K every day while working internally and externally with your own issue(s). His masterclass takes place in Nepal around the Annapurna massive in the Himalaya Mountain range.
My journey into myself through these different seminars and workshops has landed me where I am now: Happy about who I am and really feeling safe and secure in being me with all my imperfections, edges, loving and empathic, yet direct and at times ironic approaches to life in general and my own in particular. And I have found my calling by educating myself through courses and teachings to become a body therapist, having my own business treating and helping people with ailments and finding their way on their journey using massage, acupuncture, coaching, and sharing my own story with them as I’m sharing it with you now. With 62 years of life experience so far, a lot of wrong turns and failures, successes, and insights, I’m still on my journey and continue until I pass into the next world by staying curious. Letting go and letting life loose control and stop competing and thinking of myself: I’m good and I’m enough.
Love yourself so you can love others.
Oh, my triple letters. In this society of ours where we all seem to have to fit into a box and all have to have a letter abbreviation as a diagnosis, the alphabet population; I don’t have an official label, but I’ve labeled myself with this mantra for me: My triple L’s – Love, Laughter, Life.
Love yourself so you can love others.
Laugh with and at yourself and laugh with (not at) others.
Live life – Thrive, don’t just survive.
The way to start issue solving is: (The triple A’s)
- Acknowledge the issue.
- Accept that there is an issue.
- Act to solve the issue.
As Lars told me one time, a quote he’d read or heard:
Yesterday I stood at the abyss – today I’ve taken another step
My name is Bo. My parents went on a vacation years ago and bought a key-ring with my name on it from a tourist shop, I think. It has my name on it. According to this my name means:
The permanent resident.
I found my home in me, and I intend to stay here because this is where I belong.
Where do you belong?
Main – Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
