You know those turning points in life? Something happens and you just know that nothing will ever be the same again. They seem to come around once in a decade, or so. I have had a few and still remember every one of them as if they happened yesterday.

The latest major turning point: April 2014 - A sunny, cold spring week near Norrköping, Sweden. Primal Therapy: without a doubt the hardest thing I have ever done or been through in my whole life. Imagine giving birth seven days on a row - while running a marathon at the same time - and you start getting the picture. After having followed all sorts of personal development and spiritual courses and therapies for a decade, I thought I had a pretty good idea about the different patterns controlling my life. But there was so much more and it went so much deeper than I could have imagined. 

From both family lineages I have inherited a deep, deep fear and distrust of life. Patterns of dissociation, addictions and living a life of death. A need to suppress life, by controlling the self and others through judgment, victimhood or checking out. All these energies still present in MY body, like a sticky, black, sickening substance, infiltrating every organ and every cell.

Me, totally carrying on with the family heritage, not feeling safe in my body, tuning out, addicted to food and comfort, keeping my anger & life force down, believing that if I could just control events and people around me, I would some day feel safe enough to be here, to live. To my shame, this included trying to control my daughter, squashing her life force and spirit. Not because anyone is or was evil (it is not about blame), but because these patterns are so damn hard to break.

All events from the past, including starvation, abuse and wars, the voices of our parents, are still stored in our bodies. Almost all of us are stuck at the emotional level of a 3 year old our whole lives, and we do not even know it. We think we are free, but in reality, we just keep on repeating (or rebelling against) the way our mothers, fathers and ancestors lived. Generation after generation after generation…
 
One week of Primal Therapy and things feel different, lighter somehow (and I am not talking about the extra kilos I lost in the process). The unexpected discovery: all those voices, all that baggage – it is not me. It was never me! I want to be here! I WANT TO LIVE! I had no idea what this body and spirit were capable of, the force that lies inside. I am DONE with living a life of death. From now on I choose FREEDOM and LIFE! 

It is a truly transformative process. One of the most rewarding things that happened so far is to see the change in my daughter and our interaction. She feels so joyful, vibrant and alive and even though she still has her temper and moods, I can finally allow her to be who she is, without trying to control her so that I can feel safe. It is a true blessing. 

And this is only the beginning. Sure, there is a lot of work ahead, but at least now I feel that I have a real shot at actually becoming who I came to be. Feeling like a newborn baby, I have no clue what is coming, but I am ready to trust –knowing with absolute certainty that life will never be the same again. 

Want to know more? Check out:
What is Primal Therapy?
Primal Therapy with Puja
Ground Zero Primal

You can post your comments and questions in the Comments field below, on FaceBook or send me an e-mail and I will do my best to answer. 

Most people will do just about anything to avoid pain. 

If we get too close to a hot stove or an open fire, our body naturally recoils from the heat to protect itself. If we trip and fall on the street, or are about to crash our car, our bodies will brace for impact in an attempt to protect the body and avoid pain. It is a natural instinct, if something hurts, we want to get away from it.

The interesting thing is that most of us show this reaction not only to imminent physically threatening events, but also to imaginary (future or past) events.

Just a small experiment… Close your eyes and picture yourself standing on top of a flight of stairs. Let’s make it a nice and hard polished marble staircase. Feel the unyielding solidity of the stone under your feet. Now… feel your body leaning forward, until you lose your balance and start falling headfirst down the stairs. In slow motion you see the sharp edges coming closer and closer. You know there is nothing you can do to stop the fall. You are microseconds away from crashing your body into the hard stone… Full impact…NOW!

I do not know about you, but if I feel or sense my way through this sequence, I involuntarily start contracting different parts of my body – my stomach muscles contract, my shoulders tense up, my neck and jaw muscles become stiff – all in an attempt to avoid the (imagined!) impact. In my physical ‘reality’ NOTHING is going on, yet, my mind is unable to tell the difference, with the result that my body reacts the same way as if I were actually falling down a flight of stairs.

Fascinating, isn’t it? As you can imagine, this holds true not only for physical pain, but also for different kinds of (imagined or ‘real’) emotional pain.

The words, ‘I hate you!’ will – if uttered with the frequency of pure anger and hatred appropriate for such a statement – create a bodily sensation in anyone receiving it. It is simple physics. Intuitively this is perhaps easiest to understand in relation to sound. In the same way that you can feel the beat of a good bass rhythm in your body if you turn up the volume enough, music, words and other sounds also resonate in your bodily tissues (whether you are actively aware of it or not).

Not only will the (audible) sound of the words move through your body though, the emotion will as well. It is all energy. The only difference is in the frequency (sound) of the emotion, which is higher, and outside our range of hearing.

And that is all! … Or rather, this is how it could be:
Hateful words are uttered. They move through our body. We feel them. We move on.
However, for most of us, the story does not end there. Because we resist.

Most people, including me, do not truly want to feel negative emotions. Negative emotions feel uncomfortable. They feel bad. They feel painful. Or rather, most people associate negative emotions with pain, suffering and feeling bad in their mind. Just as with the example of the staircase, the image of pain in our heads (whether ‘real’ or imagined) causes our bodies to contract. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Nonetheless, contraction never feels good (just try contracting all your muscles and then let them go all at once - the relaxed state sure feels better).

And most people just want to feel good. What is wrong with that? Well, nothing, of course… given a choice everyone would choose to feel good over bad. The problem is: life simply does not always feel good. Yet, most of us are trapped by elaborate strategies to avoid feeling pain and resist whatever does not feel good.

Sooner or later we will encounter a situation that feels painful, whether it is emotional or physical pain. For most of us this happens sooner, rather than later. Starting the first time our parents do not come immediately when we cry, the first time we are hungry and do not get milk immediately, the first time we fall and are not comforted but are told to toughen up, the first time we are jumping up and down in anger, but are prevented from expressing our full will by well meaning parents who try to distract us instead. It happens to all of us, over and over and over again. So we build walls around ourselves to avoid feeling the pain. 

There are many different systems that describe these walls. One of my favourites is the enneagram. This system recognizes nine different defence mechanisms and strategies for avoiding pain. 
… There’s a silver lining to every cloud. Let’s do something fun instead (7).
… Others may have issues, but I certainly do not. I am in control (8).
… I do not really need anything anyway. Let me help you instead (2).
… I need to know more about this (5).
… I need to adjust my response or fix this to make it perfect (1).
… There’s something wrong with me, I am not worthy of a life without pain (4).
… It is your fault. I need structure to feel safe (6).
… Failure is not an option. I can turn this into a success (3).
… If everything would be peaceful all would be well (9). 

My preferred strategy is to tune out. I will just disappear into my head (either going into dream mode (9) or analyzing my feelings(5)) or get out of my body completely (9). Because if I am not really here, I cannot feel pain (nor any real happiness, but that’s just the price that has to be paid). Another favourite of mine is to comfort and numb myself with food, chocolate, tv… or anything else that will give me a sense of ‘fullness’ (9) – so I do not have to actually feel the emptiness inside me. 

This has worked reasonably well for the past 40 years (note that the words ‘reasonably well’ are yet another 9-strategy: ‘I’m fine… it’s OK as it is…’). Do not get me wrong – defence mechanisms are a necessary part of the life of most children. And yes, a healthy sense of fear is a handy thing to have when you are standing on the edge of the abyss. But… I am 40 years old. Do I really still need all these strategies??? And another question: what is it costing me to keep up these defences?

During the past few months I have had quite a ride with regard to my (ego)defences. Although I have worked with the enneagram for a decade or so, it seems I never truly believed that it was possible to transcend these mechanisms. After all, we need some kind of ego in order to interact with other people. Even with people who are clearly higher up the spiritual ladder (guru’s and such), different enneatypical behaviours are still recognizable. 

Obviously, I still have not transcended all my mechanisms. I feel things changing, though, more than ever before. Two keys for actually wanting to change things was 1) to fully see and accept that my defence mechanisms are still very much active at a subconscious level and 2) the realization how much my defences are costing me. 

In my case, tuning out and numbing myself in order not to fully feel has been the biggest energy thief of my life. I thought I just had low energy reserves and needed to be really careful with my body, my activities, how I spent my time and with whom I interacted. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the more I actively engage in my life, the more I exercise, the more I connect with the anger I feel inside – the more energy I get, the more alive I feel and the more free I feel to be myself. And paradoxically – the more I allow negative emotions and pain in my system by staying present regardless of what presents itself – the better I feel.

So, take another look at the list of pain avoidance strategies above. You just might recognize yourself in one or two of these typical behaviours… and ask yourself how much your resistance and defences against pain are costing you? 

Is it a price worth paying?

I must have been about eight or nine years old when my teacher at school asked each pupil in the class to write and illustrate his or her own fairy tale. When the project was finished, I held the end product in my hands – a yellow exercise book with orange dots containing a story about a princess. I do not even remember how the story went. What I do remember is the feeling of holding that book in my hand and realizing that the story did not feel like mine at all. It was no unique creation, but rather a mix of regurgitated fragments of tales I had read before. Although I loved to write, after that day, that feeling stayed with me – a voice at the back of my head, whispering to me that I was telling somebody else’s stories and not my own.

As I became older, my writing gradually became less and less free. The more I tried to follow ‘the rules’, the more difficult it became to write. The more difficult it became, the more pressure I put on myself to get it right. Writing a simple essay or column felt like the wrestling match of the century. I simply could not relax into the process and let the words come – I had to control them. I felt stifled by the form I thought was imposed by others on my writing. Although, in reality, I was being suffocated by the harness of rules and perfection, in which I had encased myself.

When I went to university, I basically gave up creative writing and focused on my scientific career instead. In science, the rules of writing are uncompromising; the structure of a scientific paper, including the placement of every dot and comma is predetermined. In essence, the rules imposed from the outside were even more constricting than my own. Strangely enough, at some level, it felt like a relief. I did not need to be creative; I did not have show myself or be myself, at all. At another level, after following those rules for ten years, after writing other people’s stories for a decade, every cell in my body was aching to be free.

I embarked on a journey of personal development and self-discovery. Peeling off layer after layer of protecting armour that was clouding my mind, encasing my body and surrounding my heart. Allowing my mind to absorb new knowledge beyond the conventional. Allowing my body to feel its pain and to express itself freely in movement. Allowing my heart to open up and express itself through my voice. Opening myself up to the present moment.

One day, I felt words inside, words wanting to be released. A hesitant start, taking baby steps, unsure what was expected of me, how to navigate this uncharted territory. Being afraid that it was going to feel like before, that I would freeze, that nothing would come out. Grappling internally with my self worth – or lack thereof: What could I possibly have to say that would interest anyone? Incredibly afraid that my writing was not going to be enough; that I was not going to be good enough. A that moment a friend gave me the decisive push I so needed. ‘Milena’, she said, ‘I want you to write something to me, every day for the next two weeks’. The topic: ‘What I love about myself’.

I had tried free writing exercises before. For me, they had never worked. For some unfathomable reason, this did. The exercise gave me just enough structure to be able to find the beginnings of a shape, yet was boundless enough to encourage free fall. I started writing whatever came into my mind and miraculously a structure and distinct style started to develop from within.

I found out that I love writing about nature and the connectedness that can be experienced in the natural world. I look at all the ugly things in this world and give myself permission to change my perception and find beauty, even when my mental and emotional habits are telling me otherwise. I enjoy contemplating spiritual and existential questions – trying to feel and understand what this whole life experience is all about. And I adore the feeling when the words come out just right, engaging all the senses and capturing that fleeting moment of clarity. 

The process of writing always was (and still is) a perfect mirror of the level of freedom I feel and the room I have within myself to be myself. As long as I am not free to be myself, I cannot express what I feel inside. I cannot tell my own story. That 8 year-old girl already knew this. So she embarked on a journey, determined to find her own voice and her own story. She has travelled a long way, and has a long way to travel still; opening up to the present moment and whatever wants to be seen. In the process discovering that it is not so much about writing her own story, as it is about allowing life to tell its story through her.

A few weeks ago I was in an exceptionally calm and happy place during a whole weekend (after a pretty mind blowing spiritual experience). I was open, easygoing, in tune and connected; feeling my own needs and the needs of my husband and daughter, able to do what was asked in the moment and respond to my own needs and those of others without feeling conflicted. (Yep, I want to experience that more often as well).

During that weekend, my five-year-old daughter was happy, radiant, friendly, spontaneously helping out clearing out the whole(!) table, simply wonderful and a true joy to be around.

Now she is testing boundaries, fighting me every step of the way (especially in the morning). She just wants to play (of course she does) and refuses to conform to my rules (which I do not even like myself). She is acting out and going into drama (which really drives me insane).

Me? I feel a lot of frustration. I feel contracted in mind and my body (tense shoulders, tight belly, buttocks all clenched up). I see myself acting out old familiar (fear based) patterns – feeling an almost compulsive need to control what she does, how she does it, what she eats. Feeling nauseous with myself and beating myself up for being that way (I am especially accomplished at that!).

I see that I become triggered especially when there’s time pressure of some kind (having to get to school on time). I hear this voice in my head: ‘We HAVE TO get to school on time, because otherwise…’ Yes? How exactly is the world going to end, if a 5-year-old child is 5 minutes late for school?

I get triggered when she is going into drama. I try to reason with her from my mind (which, of course does not work at all). I need to contain her emotional outbursts (because they feel unsafe to me). I have this idea that I to behave like an authority figure and set boundaries. But how do you set loving boundaries without acting old-school authoritarian?   

Hmmm… I wonder if these experiences are linked somehow? (she said with sarcasm dripping from her voice). No seriously, although I have known at some levels (and in my mind) that children really reflect us back to ourselves, this time around the game has been taken to a whole new level. There’s no place to hide anymore (and believe me, I have been searching).

It is what it is: maybe the best thing I can do is simply to accept the facts as they are?
- I feel open and connected. Result: She feels open and connected.
- I feel closed and constricted. Result: She feels closed and constricted.

Mirror, mirror on the wall,
you are no different from me at all...
I may not want to stay,
but it is useless to turn away.

Even if I do not agree,
you are just another reflection of me.
Anger, sadness, joy and shame -
we might seem different, but are one and the same.

If I feel closed, I can relax as much as possible and open up again to whatever is, now, in this moment. I can actively remember that many of the voices I hear in my head are old behavioural programmes stemming from my own childhood (and generations before that). If my mind feels the need to control the situation and her drama (= my inner drama?), I can try to do the opposite: feel my body, relax, feel safe in myself and do my best to stay calm. And I can really work on that guilt thing I have going, be compassionate with myself and stop beating myself up when I get it ‘wrong’. How’s that for a start?

I would love to hear from you as well! What are your experiences with children as mirrors? What do you do to stay in a healthy mother / parent energy?

For most – if not all – of my life I have felt that the food I eat never really satisfies me. Knowing that I should slow down and chew, take my time to feel the food, but unable to actually do it. Instead, feeling the need to fill myself up. Fast, and a lot, always just past the point when I am not even hungry anymore. At night the additional urge to stuff my mouth full of chocolate, again, not stopping until a feeling of slight nausea settles on my stomach.   

I have tried different ways of eating. When I came to the Netherlands I did my best to adapt to the milk, bread & cheese culture – and gained four kilo’s. I found out that I was lactose intolerant. A few years later I discovered that gluten did not agree with my digestive system either. I tried to eat more salad and vegetables, but they just felt cold in my stomach and I became hungry immediately again. 

So I switched to three warm meals a day. Eating lots of rice, more fish, less meat and the occasional vegetarian meal. Still this gnawing feeling stayed with me. Gradually feeling a desire to include more vegetables and fruits in my diet, yet I simply could not make it work. The bottom line was that they did not satisfy the hunger I felt inside. 

A few weeks ago experienced a state of no mind and total oneness during a retreat. At one point we had lunch, while I was in this state of expanded consciousness. I remember sitting at the table with a fork and knife in my hands, looking at them thinking: ‘I know what these things are, but I have no clue how to actually move them’. My mind still knew what to do, but could not communicate directly with the body. 

I felt like a baby learning to eat for the first time. The beautiful, freshly made, crispy mixed salad with pine kernels, fresh herbs, olive oil and soft, juicy roast beef on a toasted piece of (gluten free) bread filled my whole vision. I felt my hands grabbing the fork and knife in an awkward way and, somehow, slowly managed to cut a piece and bring it to my mouth. Every mouthful was bliss – I could feel every texture, taste every flavour, my mouth was filled with food, swallowing it was complete fulfilment of now. I could not interact with anyone else. I was food. 

When I had eaten enough, I stopped. 
My plate was not empty, but I was done. 
I was not hungry anymore.

Back home, I find myself picking and mixing ingredients in new ways. I have gone from 60% carbs and 25 % vegetables/fruits to maybe 55% green and 30 % carbs. I feel an urge to eat more raw food, but still also mixed with warm. I eat less and stop when I’m done. We went to a restaurant and I chose the salad (something I would NEVER have done before), because all the rest seemed unappetising to me. I saw the rows of sweet pastry and creamy sticky cakes and felt sick to my stomach. It was a quite novel experience for me, indeed…

Now I am very curious to see how long this will last. What strikes me this time is that the changes do seem to come from within. It is not a system I have read about that I am trying to apply. I genuinely want to eat salad as well. So, I live in hope…

And the chocolate? Until a few days ago, I did not crave chocolate either, but I can feel that the addiction is creeping up on me again. It seems to be a real Pavlov reaction. I go to the living room, turn on the TV to watch a nice movie and my mouth starts watering at the thought of combining this cocooning event with chocolate. Even now, as I write this, I have the same reaction! So far, I have been able to stay off the chocolate, but I can feel the seductive call of delicious imported Finnish chocolate bars from the kitchen… Will I succumb or not? 

Tell me about your experiences with food (addiction)! Did something happen to make you radically change your eating habits? Are you able to keep the new habits alive? How? Please, share!

Have you ever thought about what you deepest wish is? I am not talking about that beautiful dream house you want to buy, the six month trip around the world or the red Porsche with leather seat covers. Nothing wrong with those wishes, they are perfectly legitimate. But they are not true inner wishes in the sense of finding out who you really are and what your life purpose is. They are strategies you think will make you feel better than you do right now.

So let’s try this again. What is your deepest desire? What do you really long for? What would make you feel as if you have it all? What is that one thing / state of mind / experience you would like to have in order to die happy? Or let me put it another way: What is it that you want so badly that you can almost taste it. You probably do not have it right now, but you just know in your gut that if you had that you would feel really good.

These are interesting questions. I have been asking myself these very questions many times. For me, at least until very recently, my number one wish has turned out to be ‘complete inner and outer harmony, peace and quiet´. This is not a very big surprise to me, as it corresponds for 100% with my favourite enneatype, type 9, the peacemaker.

At one point a good friend and fellow colleague Rob de Best took it one step further by asking: You have this thing you want so badly, but you are convinced you cannot have it. Why are you not allowed to have this thing you really, really want? And here comes the punch line: What would go wrong if you got what you wanted?

My mind went completely blank. A glimpse of how things could be and the immense freedom it would entail. I felt panic. Restricted beliefs parading by: If I were to get this, then I would have no excuses anymore. If I were to have it, I would do nothing anymore. Who would I then be? Aaaaarrgh… Existential terror. And then I felt as if my mind shut itself down, because it just could not take this kind of information. Let’s tune out, numb out, disappear. We need to protect ourselves from this. Ego pressing the button for ‘automated programme number 9’ to protect itself from change.

Some time later another good friend, Miriam Kasbergen, had an interesting follow-up question. So, you know your basic desire… What would you do now, if you only had half an hour to live? Does your wish stay the same, or does it change?

As she posed this question to me, a somewhat unexpected answer came out. All I could think about was a range of physical experiences I still wanted to have. Something like: if I am going to die anyway and go into a different blissful state of being where I do not have a body, then I want to have a full body experience before I go. This desire was centred around food. I could see this huge buffet with delicious food, and I would stuff myself until I felt completely saturated. Half an hour left – never mind any highflying ideals or noble ideas I might have about who I am  – I just want to eat. Now… That’s a clue!

Funny, how a few innocent questions can tell us so much about how our ego operates. And it is very interesting to see what added time pressure (you have ½ hour to live) can tell us about areas in our lives where we still feel we lack something.

Try it yourself! I would absolutely LOVE to hear what these questions show you about you (ego and beyond)! So please, share!