The soft life vs The path of least resistance
You might have heard about the internet trend ‘soft life’, which usually refers to women who don’t want to work too much and have an easy, soft life with a lot of leisure time. This may even come at the cost of independence.
I talk about de-stressing and finding inner peace and stopping ourselves from becoming exhausted or burnt out and from accepting all of the obligations that outer circumstances put on us. But I would not recommend the ‘soft life’ as it’s currently being presented. Even though I can understand parts of it, because it’s a reaction to women burning out and taking on too many responsibilities.
The kind of inner peace I talk about has nothing to do with not putting ourselves out there or not challenging ourselves. Having goals and dreams (whether big or small) is going to challenge us.
Learning to relax, de-stress and find inner peace is not about being too easy on yourself, being lazy or lowering expectations on our life and goals.
It’s about increasing our expectations of ourselves and life, and realising stress and overload is not necessary to have the life that we want.
It’s about expanding and seeing that there is another way of doing things. One that grows out of inner guidance that we find through stillness even if there is a lot going on in our outer world.
It’s sometimes called the path of least resistance, most commonly used by Esther Hicks. For me, this does not mean giving up on our goals to make life easier on ourselves in the moment. It means doing more of what we are called to do instead of what we feel obliged to do. It will still be challenging at times, but there is an excitement behind it instead of obligation.
You are the ruler of your experience
The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung said:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
A Course in Miracles says it like this:
“I am responsible for what I see.
I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve.
And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and receive as I have asked.”
This is not to say that we are to blame for what happens to us, but on a subtler level our own unconscious beliefs and patterns creates our reality. It can seem discouraging if we have patterns in our lives that our conscious mind does not want. But think about, if our unconscious has that much power, it means that we are much more powerful than we thought.
Carl Jung also talked about what he called the collective unconscious which are collective patterns in the world that affects our collective reality. So our unconscious is also entwined and affected by other people’s unconscious.
So since these beliefs and patterns are unconscious, how can we affect and start to change some of them if that is what we want? Some powerful yet simple ways to do this are through meditation and guided meditations or hypnotherapy (hypnotherapy is a type of structured guided meditation).
These methods activate the parasympathetic nervous system and can connect us to the deeper levels of the mind, the unconscious levels. From there we can have insights about our lives and internal patterns that we do not get from the conscious mind.
It’s really not as complicated as it can sound and to start you only need yourself, a comfortable space and some time put aside.
To get started you can access my free Peace of Mind Meditation Series here.
Morning habits for clarity, calm and focus
Take time first thing in the morning doing something that brings calm and clarity before consuming social media or interact with others (other than family).
Some suggestions are:
Do some short journaling on your intentions for the day.
Do some light stretching to get rid of the stiffness and sleepiness in your body.
Sit in quiet with a coffee or tea and read something for a few minutes (my go to for the past 10 years is A Course in Miracles).
Meditate. This is the most efficient method to get clarity of mind in the morning.
It may be enough to only carve out 10 minutes to do one or two if these things. I mostly only spend around 15 minutes myself: 2-3 minutes of stretching and 15 mins ACIM reading and meditation.
Start with 5 minutes and see how it feels. When you feel the benefits you may want to take it up to 10 minutes.
I focus on the number of minutes because some think that these things take a lot of time but they don’t have to. Most of us can find 10 minutes to spare, even in the morning. Try it out for yourself.
In my free Peace of Mind Meditation Series there is a short guided meditation called Preparing for your day. Sign up here to receive it.
Three things to stop doing for more peace of mind
Stop caring too much about what other people think of you. They are busy worrying about their own problems. Stressing over what people think and holding ourselves back because we are worried about it is something that you will surely regret.
Stop overthinking about whether your professional performance is good enough. People who do this, often women, are usually the overachievers anyway. Your work performance is most probably more than good enough.
Stop beating yourself up when you’re not able to fit everything in. Take something out of your schedule that is not absolutely necessary or can be done another day.
To kickstart your life with more peace of mind, sign up for my free Peace of Mind Meditation Series here, with seven short guided meditations.
Self-centeredness is necessary
Self-centeredness is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s necessary. Hear me out.
For people, like so many women I know, who live their lives mostly for other people, doing everything for everyone else until they burn themselves out, self-centeredness is absolutely necessary.
For people who have always lived their lives acting selfish and giving no consideration to others apart from what others can do for them, narcissists and such, it’s a different story. But those are not the people I’m addressing here.
I’m talking about good hearted, compassionate, creative and often very ambitious women who have so many ideas and things they want to do and could do, often things that will help the world in some way. Because we are compassionate towards others we get easily derailed and put our own dreams aside.
We need to stop now. There is no time for that nonsense.
Center into yourself daily and come back to what it is you want in this life. What life do you want to live? What contributions do you want to make? When you forget or get distracted, as we all will, come back to it.
Even if you are not where you want to be now, start thinking about what you want, journal it out or just visualise it in your mind. Start taking small steps to do things for yourself more to get you into that centered state.
You have probably figured out by now that I relate to all of this myself. I have been there and it’s an ongoing practise to center into myself every day. If you forget one day, because life, then come back to it the next day.
One of the best ways to start doing this is through meditation, whether by yourself in silence or a guided meditation.
To paraphrase The Bible: ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God and everything else will be added on.’ It also says ‘The Kingdom of God is within. ‘ In other words, seek that place in yourself where you are in your power and in your peace. Center into it and everything else is secondary.
Access my free Peace of Mind Meditation Series here.
Busyness is not a virtue
Busyness is not a virtue.
It has been glorified for too long.
This really gets on my nerves. Why?
Many women do too much, striving for the perfect life or the most full life, doing everything for everyone, until they cannot do anything for anyone anymore because they hit a wall.
Women make up 79% of the people who are on sick leave due to exhaustion syndrome in Sweden (where I live).
There is no simple solution but we need to stop saying yes to things that we don’t even really want to do.
It’s not about not being engaged in causes that mean a lot to us or not doing anything for others, but we can differentiate between things that we really want to do and things we say yes to out of obligation or not wanting to say no. This energy of obligation creates negative stress and can cause resentment in relationship to other people.
Next time you are asked, or feel compelled, to take on a new responsibility, whether professionally or personally, take time before you decide, center into yourself and ask yourself; Is this something I really want to do? The answer will come in one way or another.
In my upcoming course next year I will go deep into how to drop the exhaustion and connect to your inner peace and guidance.
In the meantime you can sign up for my Inner Peace Meditation Series here.
Meditation and Stoicism
One of the well known benefits of a regular meditation practice is that it helps us to be in a state of equanimity more often, which is a state of calmness and composure, even in difficult situations.
This is similar to the inner calmness, self-mastery and self-reflection that are some of the main principles of Stoicism.
A philosophy that was founded around the year 300 BC. Some of the principles you will find in Stoicism are:
Being in control of your own reactions, even in a crisis
Accept that there are some things you can control and some things you can’t
What we can control is our inner state of being, not the outer world
There are many other aspects to this philosophy but these are the ones that most relates to the positive effects of meditation.
When we meditate regularly, the peace and equanimity that is felt in and just after meditation spills out into the rest of our day and life.
It helps to balance our nervous system and it makes us less reactive and more reflective. However, in my experience, I don’t think it makes us less reactive in situations where we do need to react.
I think Stoicism is related to other traditions that advocates for meditative and self-reflective practices. Although it came out of a particular time and place, Hellenistic Greece, its philosophy is not so different from Christian contemplation practices or the Buddhist practice of mindfulness.
Most meditation techniques essentially do the same thing. It reduces and sometimes even eliminates mental clutter and trains the mind to be still.
And that stillness is a powerful state to be in…
Artist unknown
Art as revelation
Art can reveal to us a glimpse of something that is beyond this world. A beauty that is impossible to put into words but that can be felt and that renders us speechless and breathless.
That’s what I mean by revelation, the revealing of what is beyond the veil of the material.
Two artworks have in a particularly strong way given me these kind of moments when I saw them in real life:
La Pietà by Michelangelo
and
The Incomplete Truth by Damien Hirst
This feeling can be experienced through meditation, relationships and in the most unexpected situations. But for me, art is a powerful way to give us this otherworldly experience.
The problem with spiritual teachers
Just because someone seems to have spiritual insights, psychic abilities or visions that others don’t seem to have, it does not make them a person we should listen to. They may be worth listening to but they may as well not be. I am especially careful with spiritual leaders or teachers who seem too sure about what the truth is and that their perspective is the right one.
Spiritual pride is one of the worst and most insidious forms of pride, because it can hide behind a surface of enlightenment and righteousness. I am not referring to traditional religion here (although it can exist there too). I am referring to modern spiritual teachers and psychics. Discernment is very important when navigating that world.
A coach I listen to once said something along the lines of: ‘Any coach who does not lead you back to what feels right and true for you is not worth listening to’. This is something I keep in mind when listening to others.
I don’t have the truth either, I seek it just like you. We are all seekers and we can help each other in this. But mostly I seek that inner peace which I know is there because I’ve found it and have experienced it many times. I want to help you find it too.
We don’t need to know everything. Like Socrates is meant to have said: “All I know is that I know nothing.” That is also the whole point of mysticism for me. As long as we live this human life, there is meant to be some mystery to it.
Through meditation practices and finding a peace within, we can become more accepting of not knowing and more open to possibilities.
What meditation has done for me
I started meditating 11 years ago and have meditated regularly since.
These are some of the things that it has done for me:
It made me find a stillness within that I didn’t know existed.
I can bring that stillness and calm with me into my life. Sometimes I forget but I always come back to it.
It has helped me manage stressful or difficult periods in my life.
It clears my mind and helps me see problems in a different light and helps solutions to come without much effort.
The light has come...
”The light has come. I have forgiven the world.” (A Course in Miracles - Lesson 75)
Let us look at what this means. Forgiving the world does not mean that the world owes you something or that it has done you wrong.
Forgiving the world means seeing it with new eyes or in a new light. What is sometimes called the ‘lifting of the veil’ or like Bob Marley sang “take that veil from off of your eyes”.
It can happen spontaneously or through certain experiences.
What I know is that meditation gets me into this state more frequently and consistently, especially between meditation sessions.
It helps remove the clutter from our mind and gives us a new sight.
I need do nothing
“When peace comes at last… when the goal is finally achieved by anyone, it always comes with just one happy realization; “I need do nothing.””
This line from A Course in Miracles is what I realised when I started meditating 11 years ago. I realised that the inner peace, that I had heard much about but wasn’t sure what it was, was there all along and I needed to do nothing to find it. I didn’t need to meditate for hours or years to achieve it. It was there already, waiting for me.
I know it’s waiting for you too, if you haven’t found it already.
"The holy instant is a miniature of eternity."
You know those moments when time falls away and the world around you seems to disappear. Even your own body seems irrelevant.
It can occur when we are with someone we love and who love us. Relationships to others are the most spontaneous and universal ways of experiencing it, and something that most can relate to.
Or it can happen when we do something that we get immersed in. I experience this when I draw portraits. It can also happen in meditation.
This is what A Course in Miracles calls the holy instant, “a miniature of eternity.”
Art by Gustav Klimt - The Kiss
Love and fear in A Course in Miracles
Love is Reality and fear is illusion.
A Course in Miracles makes this clear distinction in the Introduction, which is only half a page long but it summarises the meaning of the course. Here is the second half of the Introduction:
“The Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.
This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God”
When we think too much about the idea of love being the only thing that is real, it is easy to come up with objections to why this is clearly not the case. However, I urge you to think about what is really meaningful in your life, beyond the problems you might be worrying about on a normal day. We usually realise that the moments that really mattered are the ones filled with love, compassion and joy.
We usually don’t remember what started that argument we had a year ago, which seemed so important at the time, but we do remember how it felt when we shared a moment of joy and love with someone or received acts of compassion. Those are the moments when we experience what is real, and it cannot be threatened.
A Course in Miracles refers to these moments as The Holy Instant. If we remember how we felt in those moments and consciously bring that state of mind into the present more often we can train our minds into extending the holy instant and make it a more frequent occurrence in our lives.
The Course is not often encouraging you to delve into the past or future, because this can bring despair if we remember bad things that have happened or anticipate bad things that can happen in the future. It can still be useful to go into the past to remember the ‘real’ moments so that we can be reminded to recreate them in the present.
Or in my interpretation it can be useful to look back in order to process unhealed trauma which, although it seems very real, is a result of fearful thoughts, either our own or other’s. There is one line that can be useful in relation to this and that’s: “Look at the cross, but do not dwell on it.” But more on that in another post…
Gaining perspective on this life through visiting past lives
When I do past life hypnotherapy on others and have it done on myself, I have found that we get led to experiences in other lifetimes that closely relate to what is active in our current lives. Like Abraham Hicks would say ‘we always receive what is most active in our vibration at any moment’.
I have come to believe that past life hypnotherapy is not so much about re-experiencing and healing the past lives. Instead it’s a powerful tool to realise what experiences and energies we are keeping up in our current lives, and be able to release their hold on us through seeing them from a higher perspective.
By going to a past life and seeing certain familiar emotions and life experiences in a different setting and context, in the relaxed state of hypnosis, we can more easily get distance to our current circumstances and be able to see it differently. When we are one step removed from it we’re more open to observing it without too much attachment. Our current life situation and circumstances can often feel too personal for us, so our subconscious takes a different route by working it out in a past life instead.
I believe we move in soul groups and several different individuals may be able to tap into the same historical lifetime. It is bigger than just one isolated soul's journey, which can easily be used as an ego tool to make ourselves special in relation to others. When we tap into universal consciousness, we expand our view and we are then able to tap into more than expected.
Even so, I really do believe we see actual historical lifetimes when we experience a past life regression. And because human emotions, issues and traumas in their essence are not just personal but something that has been experienced over and over by many others in different lives, we can use this archive of knowledge to gain perspective about our current life experience.
Perfect love casts out fear
A Course in Miracles says:
“Perfect love casts out fear,
If fear exists
Then there is not perfect love.
But:
Only perfect love exists.
If there is fear,
It produces a state that does not exist.”
So what does this mean? When we are in a loving mindset, everything that is not aligned with that (like fearful thoughts and old emotional patterns), get released. But if there is anything I have learned in my training to become a hypnotherapist, it’s that when the releasing of repressed emotions and memories happen, they also come up from our subconscious to be felt again.
Love or healing (which is a state of love) basically brings up everything that is not of love.
That is why when we heal and release old patterns and fears, we go through phases of feeling them. But of course in hypnotherapy, and in many other types of therapy and healing modalities, we are aware that these feelings do not derive from our reality now. Nevertheless, they feel real.
This releasing of old patterns and fears can also happen when we fall in love romantically, if it’s mutual true love. All of these old fears that we thought we had left behind can appear again, although it really has nothing to do with the actual reality we are experiencing.
This is “the state that does not exist” in that it is not true but it is a stage of the healing process. The only thing that is ultimately true is the love that made these fears come up.
Healing the past
When I was recently in a period of having emotional flashbacks to past events, triggered by new situations that has nothing to do with the original cause, I opened A Course in Miracles and landed on these words:
“The Holy Spirit’s use of memory is quite apart from time. He does not seek to use it as a means to keep the past, but rather as a way to let is go.”
“When ancient memories of hate appear, remember that their cause is gone. And so you cannot understand what they are for. Let not the cause that you would give them now be what it was that made them what they were, or seemed to be.” (A Course in Miracles, p 590)
Even just reading the words made my nervous system calm down and come to the realisation that these are feelings from the past resurfacing. I realised I cannot let the past dictate my current reactions and feelings. They come up to be released.
The Holy Spirit could be seen as another word for, or a bridge to, the Higher Self or what is also called the Subconscious in Hypnotherapy. That larger part of ourselves that sees the bigger picture and holds all memories and insights that we don’t always access with our conscious mind.
In Hypnotherapy we can actually reach the repressed memories themselves, not just the residual feelings of them, and slowly untangle, process and release the influence it has on our lives now.
Click here to book a Hypnotherapy session with me.
Feminine Sun Deities
Sun deities and the sun as a symbol, are usually associated with masculine energy and the moon and nighttime are more often associated with feminine energy. Even the wording Son (Sun) of God has associations to the masculine aspect of God and there are numerous examples of male sun deities, some of them being Ra, Helios, Liza, Lugh (Ancient Epyptian, Greek, West African, Celtic).
There are some exceptions to this though, and one is found in the mythology of my own Scandinavian ancestry. In the old Norse religion the sun was represented as the goddess Sol, also called Sunna. Her brother was Mani, representing the moon.
Sol and Mani ride through the sky in horse drawn chariots, like many other sun deities are described as doing. The chariots are chased through the sky by the wolves Skoll (Mockery) and Hati (Hate). During Ragnarok when the world descends back into chaos the wolves will overtake the chariots.
In one of the poems in the the Poetic Edda, a figure called Svalinn rides in Sol’s chariot and holds a shield between her and the Earth. Without it, the Earth would be consumed in flames. This sounds very much as a mythological description of the Earth’s magnetosphere, which is even described within astronomy as a ‘gatekeeper’ protecting us from solar wind and cosmic rays.
How the Old Norse, and other ancient people, knew about these cosmic phenomena through their mythologies is an interesting question to ponder.
There are more examples of feminine sun deities such as Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess, Arinna - Hittite (Syrian) sun goddess and Shemesh/Shepesh, Ugarit sun goddess.
The Divine Masculine and the True King Archetype
If we are going to talk about the divine feminine we also need to pay attention to her counterpart, the divine masculine. He can be found within ourselves as well as in other people around us.
The divine masculine energy holds space for the divine feminine to create and bloom. It’s strong but it doesn’t push its own agenda or try to control surroundings. It creates the practical circumstances and safe spaces for us to reach our highest potential. It opens doors and wants to be of service to the divine feminine creative force. Not in a subservient way but in co-creation.
This is where the true King archetype is. It is no coincidence that Yeshua (Jesus) is called a king because that is what he embodied. He was Christ Consciousness (the anointed), devoted to the Divine.
Kings don’t put other people down or control (this is the Weakling - passive shadow of the King Archetype - the shadow masculine, which is unfortunately something that is highly present in this world). Kings lift people and his surroundings up. It requires a sacrifice of the small self, or ego, for the good of others and it’s what Kara Gillighan calls a warrior art.
We all have this within us but sometimes we come across people who seem to embody this more than others. They are the true Kings of this world but are usually not seen in that way because they don’t hold themselves up as that.
Art by John Bauer
The Norns ~ Weavers of Fate
The Norns are female beings in Norse mythology who create and control fate. They spin the threads of the fate of both humans and Gods at the foot of Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree holding together the 9 realms in Norse cosmology.
In Völuspá, one of the poems in the Old Norse Poetic Edda, they are described as not being a part of any of the other beings mentioned in Norse mythology. They are in their own category. Their names are Urd - The Past, Verdandi - What Is Presently Coming Into Being and Skuld - What Shall Be. In Greek mythology, there are similar beings or goddesses called the Moirai (Fates).
Because the Norns control fate they are often feared. I believe the fear is misplaced. The Norns weave and record a persons fate, but I don't see fate as being outside of our free will or control. In fact, the word Skuld, which is the name of the third Norn of What Shall Be literally means 'blame' or 'responsibility' in Swedish, my first language. Things happen that seem to be out of our control, but if we look at the picture from a soul level over the course of one or many lifetimes, we would find that the web of events are related and both the good and the bad are parts of our soul's growth. And most importantly, we always have a choice.
I cannot help but to relate them to what I know about the Akashic Records, also called the Book of Life. This is also closely related to Karma, or cause and effect.
In Hypnotherapy where a person is taken to the stage where their soul is in between lives, there are accounts of a ‘Judgement Board’. These are wise beings, usually three of them, who are there not to judge, but to assist the individual soul in evaluating the life lived and making recommendations for the next life. But the judgement of this evaluation is made by the soul itself. It gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘the last judgement’. It is not some entity outside of us making this judgement. We make it ourselves in our expanded state, and it’s much more forgiving than what we have been told to believe.
Once we become aware of this we can become an active participant in the weaving of our fate and our soul's path.
I have created a 3 month journey with our Divine Feminine Ancestry and Soul Lineage. We will connect deeply with our ancestral mythology and how it can help our soul growth, regardless of where your ancestry is from. I will use my own Scandinavian/Norse ancestry as a starting point. Learn more here.
May the divine feminine rise from all ancestry lines and soul lineages...
Art by Johan Egerkrans and Unknown
