The moment I KNEW that I am ready and fully capable of loving another in their light AND darkness, EVEN if my darkness is raging in the loudest language of trauma.

This is a self mastery I wouldn’t have believed I was capable of just a few years back and yet I choose to work towards it nonetheless. Choosing to keep getting up from my knees, look back, forgive, learn and do or fail better. Again, and again. 

And here I AM.

Reposing in this knowing, celebrating another milestone, thanking the Beloved for all the lessons that led me here and the grace that empowered me to transcend more of the past. 

Grateful to my closest friends of the past decade who had a big part in helping me grow towards this NOW by co-creating relationship with me where I could safely practice showing up as a more whole version of me and allow more of my soul to embody. Without our beautiful connections, your role modeling and love this would have been a more arduous and maybe even impossible journey. 

Thank you for the gift of your being, your medicine and unique soul expression which keeps enriching life and making this world a brighter place!

I also thank those who made it unsafe to show up as myself, those that triggered my core woundings and gave me opportunities to feel and release the raw pain that was still stored in my body. They might no longer be part of my life but I do not want to forget their part in awakening me to the need for growth, for confronting me with my complicity in my suffering and for teaching me discernment in recognzing and choosing my people.

Now I am raising my gaze towards new horizons expanding before my newfound eyes and envisioning how this new skill can be utilized to live more dangerously, grow in novel magical ways, serve others in their journey of healing and growth and serve the ALL as a ‘more hollow’ bamboo.

Will you journey further with me into the mysteries of love?

The post Milestone appeared first on Venuskind.

I stopped congratulating people on their birthdays

This is a rather funny thing to me as I wasn’t allowed to celebrate birthdays into my early 20’s due to being in a christian fundamentalist cult that strictly forbade it. Then upon leaving the cult, as part of my deprogramming, I started celebrating birthdays. And now here I am stepping back from it, for at least a year, to challenge myself to find more authentic, spontaneous and inspired ways of expressing my appreciation for another’s being and my gratitude for our connection.

Beyond that lie a few more mystical or spiritual reasons of no longer wanting to consent to time divisions, manipulation of our natural cyclical nature by virtue of clocks and unaligned calendars and the trance of aging. But those are of a more ethereal, subtle and non-verbal nature to me and hard for me to put in accessible writing just yet. I have the feeling I will come back to this later this year.

It is fascinating to observe how strong the pull to comply with our social codes feels (peer pressure, conditioning), especially when social media platforms like Facebook enforce them without the choice of opting out of birthday reminders. It has become a daily practice of internal dialogues to detach myself from the emotional responses to not congratulating a loved one. 

Often asking myself why is it so hard to not be a part of choir of celebration? 

Don’t I trust my friends to know, sense and feel how much I love them without this formulaic ritual?

Who taught me that it was unloving or uncaring if I expressed my appreciation on any other given day but not this one? And what is that based on?

I started writing intentional and authentic messages of appreciation & expressing feelings of appreciation and gratitude whenever I feel them

I have held myself to a code of integrity and honesty for most of my life. Therefore I do not make a compliment that is not truthful and if I have nothing kind and appreciative to say I remain quiet. That took some practice and unlocked a deeper dimension of meaning and value to the words of affirmation, validation, appreciation and praise I speak – as they are heartfelt, honest and not serving an egoic manipulative agenda. At least not to my conscious knowing.

In reflecting on my expressions of appreciation I realized a while back that though I have achieved integrity and honesty in these I still allowed societal or cultural programmings to hold me back from expressing them as often as I felt and thought them. Thereby denying the other whose existence, deeds or expressions allowed me to tap into beautiful frequencies of gratitude, awe, adoration, admiration and appreciation to partake of it and become aware of who they truly are. This felt unbalanced and quite lacking to me. So I intended to express these feelings and thoughts as often as they occurred or I could make space to express them, to make it my intent and conscious practice of giving and mirroring back to those who enrich and illuminate my life. And so I brave the dangers of being misunderstood, judged or made fun of while trusting that what I say reaches the heart of another even if their ego might be incapable of receiving it.

In a world filled with endless messaging and cultural conditioning telling us about our many inadequacies it is a radical act of rebellion to be part of the growing choir of voices that truthfully speak to our gifts, beauty and power.

To me all of these messages are small modern day love notes. Reminiscent of love letters, the forgotten art of speaking to and engaging the ineffable as well as the luminosity of our being. Love notes to God/ the Beloved/ the Divine/ Universe/ Source through their manifestation as this individual consciousness. Expressions of gratitude, delight, pleasure and the enrichment I feel through and with them. 

This choice and practice bring a new dimension of inner alignment, a feeling of rightness and flow of love to my experience I no longer want to be without. And what is more, it has taken even distant acquaintances into a more heartful and nourishing realm of relating. Something our world definitely needs more of…

I would of course never tell you to stop celebrating or congratulating people on their birthdays. It is a rather touchy subject to many for reasons of insecurity and lack of self love or lack of understanding the other’s motives. Yet I would like to inspire you to reflect upon your expressions of appreciation and gratitude towards people in your life.

Do you feel happy with how and how often you express your appreciation? 

Do you feel you could learn or do something to make your words reach their hearts? 

Are you giving yourself enough appreciation and gratitude for all the ways you show up for yourself and others?

Can you come up with fun, playful and inspiring ways of seeding, cultivating and nurturing a culture of authentic, heartful and uplifting appreciation with others around you?

Photography: Balinese girl praying by Gede Lila

The post Appreciation appeared first on Venuskind.

“By learning how to self-generate love, you can raise your vagal tone. And with higher vagal tone, your attention and actions become more agile, more attuned to the people in your midst. You become better able to forge the interpersonal connections that give rise to positivity resonance. Through vagal tone, then, love begets love.

Likewise, evidence suggests that positivity resonance raises your oxytocin levels. And under the influence of oxytocin, you grow calmer, more attuned to others, friendlier, and more open. Here, too, your skills for forging connections sharpen, which increases your ability to cultivate positivity resonance. Through oxytocin as well then, love begets love.

Recall, too, that positive connections with others create neural coupling, or synchronous brain activity between people. With repetition, positivity resonance also produces structural changes in the brain, for instance, rendering the threat-detecting amygdala more sensitive to the calming influence of oxytocin.”

~ Barbara Fredrickson. Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become

Photography: Ed van der Elsken, Paris, 1950

The post The Neurobiology of Love appeared first on Venuskind.

Mind “He is fun and i enjoy the conversations we have but he is not my type, I am not attracted to him physically.“
GTS  “You cannot be so superficial, it’s the personality that counts, looks will fade away but the personality stays. You are not being very spiritual, are you?“

Inner Child “He does not respect my boundaries. I don’t think a relationship with someone like that has a future!“
GTS “Come on, you can be quite ____  yourself – you have to cut people some slack unless you are perfect. He can learn and grow, give him time. His other traits are not too bad, you liked them in the beginning didn’t you?“

Mind “He keeps doing it over and over. I see no understanding nor a want to change and learn to honor my boundaries. I am wasting my time – waiting for a tiger to change his stripes would be less hopeless than this. we need to move on!“
GTS “He might just need more time, this is just your impatience acting up. He is intelligent, he will surely get it in time…“

As convincing as goody-two-shoes’ points may seem my past experience shows whenever I listened to it I achieved „no conflict“ at the price of my aliveness and had to put up with undesirable experiences. I do appreciate this voices temperance of reactivity in my life, but I am no longer willing to allow it to make me SETTLE FOR LESS than is available.

I deserve to be happy in my own way, in the truths of my deepest soul even if these do not align with being “good”. I allow still too many unwanted experiences to prevail in the name of learning, when it takes a simple decision to change them. From now on goody-two-shoes will have to be in the backseat while other aspects will be the main creators of my experience.

I do not want to harm other people but I would rather discomfort them with my truth than suffer the effects of settling for what I do not want and live a lie. Especially when i know from experience that expressing and living my truths have always been rewarded with happiness and joyful experiences!

Allow for the things you wish to prevail and let go of what doesn’t serve you!

The post Internal Conversations appeared first on Venuskind.

„I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by the Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.“
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.”

What a poetic expression of the truth that growth is not found in our victories but in our surrender to life and its challenges! Reading Rilke’s poetry is definitely better in german as the translations lose much of the beauty, flow and subtlety of his word play, therefore I will post the german original in the comments.

Photo: Daphne Groeneveld by Peter Lindbergh for Numéro #126, L’ange 01

The post The Beholder appeared first on Venuskind.