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Our experience reflects the reality of the past – not the future
Our experience does not reflect the totality of reality. It reflects the reality of what we have experienced in the past.
If you use your experience as a measure of reality, then you limit life’s ability to give you a different future. And thus, you limit yourself.
You don’t do this consciously.
That you do this isn’t a bad thing; it’s very human.
You do it to protect yourself from the pain you experienced in the past.Don’t use your experience as a reason to close yourself off to life.
Yet, this very avoidance—not wanting to open yourself up to experiencing pain again—is also what closes you off to life.
Thus, you choose a different kind of pain: the pain of an unlived life.
Life is desire and pursuing desire through decisions.
Desire calls to us in the form of longing.
The longings whose call we don’t follow and/or whose fulfillment we close ourselves off to at the crucial moment create the pain of the unlived life.
The pain of the unlived life is bearable. That’s why so many choose it.
This pain is less stinging, less vivid than a painful experience.
It is dull and lies over you like a lid.
It is bearable.
There are good reasons to choose the pain of avoiding life. For every time we act on a desire, there is a possibility that we will be hurt. That our desire will not be fulfilled. That we will be rejected. That we will fail.
Most people remain stuck with this pain. They perceive it as absolute.
They don’t understand that rejection, failure, non-realization actually mean: Your desire will not be fulfilled in this way.
Vivid pain is, in truth, an important compass.
That’s why many people choose the pain of avoiding life rather than living pain. Vivid pain confronts us with the truth. It shows us that something we desire doesn’t want to/can’t come to us in the way we’ve chosen.
Vivid pain looks like a meter-thick concrete wall, toward which our desires are currently steering us.
The moment we decide to walk directly toward our desires, it’s as if we’re allowing ourselves to be pulled into that wall with full force.
Go beyond the horizon of your experience.
There are two possibilities for what happens next:
Either it turns out that the wall isn’t a wall at all, but our idea of something. The wall dissolves like a veil of fog the moment we prepare ourselves to have to break through it or to be broken by it.
The second possibility is that we truly experience pain. The pain of a shattered illusion. Our longing isn’t fulfilled, and we see our fear confirmed that our wish won’t be realized.
Those who succeed in not stopping at the rejection of pain, but instead recognize its information, come closer to the true fulfillment of their longing.
The opportunity lies in the fact that through the impact we discover that we weren’t moving toward what we thought was our longing. Pain shows us what our true priority is. It gives us the opportunity to recalibrate and align ourselves with our deeper truth.
That’s how life works.
Experience can be interpreted as “not like this” – or as “not at all”
You may have a different image for the concrete wall. It is the “it doesn’t work.”
It doesn’t change anything:
Life is a constant outgrowing of one’s own horizon, beyond the walls with which the mind encloses the known.
That’s why the feeling always remains the same:
No matter how often we experience that we’re heading towards a wall, and no matter how deeply we reach in consciousness that we can trust that the wall is either a smokescreen or a help in recognizing our true desires:
The same feeling, the same choice, remains.
Do we pursue our needs, desires, and longings even when they come accompanied by fear, or do we let them go?
The former is a “yes” to true life—colorful, intense, pleasurable, and connected to ourselves, everyone, and everything.
Making the experience the absolute truth means withdrawing from life.
Not pursuing our desires is also living. However, here the creativity we naturally carry within us, which flows through us and wants to be expressed, is guided by fear.
No matter how powerful the creativity flowing through us may be—it is the guidance of this force that determines the outcome. The content of our life reflects this force.
Since we do not only live an individual creation story, but shape this world together with others through our creative power, the world reflects the individual and the collective creation that represents our inner state.
We ignite the full positive potential of our creative power, which leads to a loving, beautiful world, and bring it to fruition by choosing our true desires AND the associated fears.
There is no path without fear.
There is no path without pain.
Only lived joy is fulfilling.
There is a way to allow joy in our imagination, perhaps even to delve very deeply into the richness of the inner world, and yet to choose not to realize the fulfillment of this inner world on the physical plane. It feels better to avoid pain (or the possibility of pain). The price we pay for this is to receive a life in which we survive but do not live.
There is a path of deep and genuine joy and bliss, which is also connected to deep pain (and thus to deep healing from pain) and deep fear (which turns out to be the idea of something).
Those who truly want to live must answer the question, “What are you willing to pay for it?” with “My life.”
Those who dare to do this will discover that this means “My life so far” and that you will be given a new life that surpasses everything you could have imagined in the best way possible. Again and again.
✨ 💌 ✨
All the best,
Sarine
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Junk food – for real 2
I did make those burgers for dinner today – with homemade BBQ sauce and hamburger dressing and all. Only the ketchup and the mayonnaise in the dressing were not made from scratch, even though there were recipes for that in the Junk food book. I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me this fast food faux pas.
Do you too see a face in this picture? She’s frowning, right? -
DIY – Scented tea cup candles
Do you have a hard time throwing away stuff that’s practically useless? Do you stuff it in a drawer, telling yourself you’ll come up with something it’ll still be good for? Here’s a suggestion for what to do with leftover wax from candles that are technically burnt down:
Tea cups: my latest thrift-store hunt. Wick: some linen cord. 
For the wick it’s important that you use a cord from a natural fiber, since, you know, you’re going to light it. I used linen since it happened to be around. Cotton works, too. 
To make the wick not drown in the wax, I wrapped a rubber band around the cup … 
… and hung the linen cord over it. One mustn’t be stupid, as the Swedes say. Now this step I forgot to document in pix: melting the wax. I just put the chunks into a tin can, which in turn I placed in a pot filled with water. Heat until the wax is melted. I put the linen cord in there, too, so that it would soak up some wax (which I imagined would keep it from burning too fast). Also, I added some tea tree oil. I am sure any essence works, but I probably wouldn’t use anything that’s not organic.
And this is the result. You like? 
I do! These are going into the bathroom. I don’t like having the fluorescent light blinding me when I brush my teeth at night, so I’ve been decking out the place with tea lights. To state the obvious: this is prettier.
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Recipe – Make your own nutella
The hazelnut chocolate cake deliciousness from earlier reminded me of one of my favorite homemade things. Homemade nutella. I came across this recipe when I got into the low-carb thing. I am not that strict about it anymore as I was then but I still use birch tree sugar.*
Obviously you can use any sweetener you like – and it’s still home-made nutella. In all fairness: it doesn’t taste exactly like nutella. In my opinion, it tastes better. Plus, it’s easy, fast to make, with no exotic ingredients (except the coconut fat), and some might even say: healthy. I don’t know if I would go so far considering that I probably eat way too much of it at once. I would however go so far as to say that – as anything home-made, and thus made with love and care – it is a healthier alternative to the stuff from the store.
You need:
- 2 cups of ground peeled hazelnuts
- ca. 4,5 to 5,5 tbs of sweetener (just use how much you like)
- 3 tbs cocoa (the raw stuff for baking, not the sweetened ready-made stuff for chocolate milk)
- coconut fat – I start out with 2 tbs, see how the texture turns out, and add till it’s right
- a dash of vanilla
Just put everything into a blender and, well, blend. Add whatever you feel needs adding according to your preference. Done. It lasts … well, I don’t know, in our household never long enough for me to actually figure out a best before date.
Hazelnutty for you! * Birch tree sugar is a form of xylitol, which doesn’t up the blood-sugar level so much. I like it best out of all the alternatives because although the sweetness is different from the taste of sugar, I don’t feel “cheated”. Stevia just tastes like licorice to me, so that’s no real alternative if you ask me. I make sure I buy it at a health food store because xylitol can also be made from – guess what – GMO corn.
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Junk Food – for real
I am not only a hoarder when it comes to thrift-stores, no, I also hoard books. Library books. I cannot praise Gothenburg’s library enough – free membership, branches in every part of town, a huge selection, and, the best of all (yet also my downfall, as will soon become apparent): you can borrow a lot of items at once. I mean it: A LOT. You’re not supposed to borrow more than five at a time but there is no mechanism in the scanner that prevents you from checking out more.
I try to be reasonable but what does happen to me a lot is, that I go to one of the libraries (they are nice places to hang out in town when it’s cold outside and you’re waiting for someone), and I find something that interests me. Lately mostly cook books, and diy related stuff. Mainly because those are really nice to look at, and inspiring, and also: expensive, so I wouldn’t buy them. What happens next then is me thinking “Oh, I want to borrow this one. But wait, I already have so many books at home. But if I don’t check this one out now, I’ll probably forget the title, and what if it’s not there anymore next time I come here?!” So… you get the picture.
This past week I borrowed a cook book, which makes me want to cook/bake through every single one of its recipes. It’s called Junk Food – på riktigt. I’d translate that with: Junk Food – for real. It combines two interests of mine – junk food and health. Health is obviously relative, in this case I mean that the food is made from the best ingredients possible (because you’re the one making it, duh), no funny business like preservatives, flavorings, etc. So the book has recipes for how you make all the classic junk food meals from scratch. Get this: there is even a recipe for how you make marshmallows!? I’m in love. Also, the food photography is really appealing – lots of vibrant colors.
I am planning on making hamburgers (including making my own bbq sauce and hamburger dressing) tomorrow but since the dough for the buns is a yeast dough, I prepared that tonight (fresh yeast dough tastes great but it is basically a guarantee for a stomach ache).
The yeast dough is rising under one of my beloved Kate Bingaman Burt kitchen towels. Ok, I admit – I just included this pic to have an excuse to show off one of my beloved Kate Bingaman Burt kitchen towels. 
Turmeric is what makes them look so nice and yellow. So, thank you Gothenburg library. I actually think I will purchase this book.
To be continued … -
Thrift-store raid
I can never go into a thrift-store without buying a bunch of stuff. So I am equally thrilled as terrified by the fact that here in Sweden thrift-stores (called “loppis”, short for “loppmarknad” = flee-market) are all over the place. I kid you not: even when you’re driving on the loneliest road through the woods you’ll find signs (some hand-made, some “real”, like the official signs for a town or something) saying “loppis”.
I have, however, found a solution for my problem. Not going in. Yes, unfortunately that is the best thing I have come up with so far. The positive thing with my addiction is: it is relatively cheap. I regularly find myself with a basket full of stuff in the line for the cash-register, preparing myself for the supposedly inevitable heart attack I am going to have when I hear the total. Kind of like at IKEA, you know, where you end up picking up a bunch of small items on the way, which you never planned on buying but now that you’re here, and they’re so cheap, and then at the cash register you find out that you misread the price (or rather: the tagging on the shelves was misleading), and everything is much more expensive than you thought but you don’t feel like bothering with returning the stuff now that they’ve already scanned everything – you know what I mean?
Only, that at a Swedish loppis that’s not how it turns out. I am surprised every time by how a ton of stuff can cost so little. Everything is really expensive here (well, I guess that’s relative, I suppose the Norwegians would disagree but compared to Germany it is – and I do still compare, even after two years, sigh) – except for thrift-stores. Those are really cheap, and the only chance of me dying of a heart attack there is from the anxiety I build up myself while waiting in line.
So, yes, there are a lot of things that are great with thrift-stores: it’s obviously better from a environmental/consumption point of view if we re-use stuff that already exists, instead of throwing away old stuff and producing new stuff all the time. It’s cheap, so I can afford buying a ton of stuff even when I don’t have much money (which is most of the time). And it’s fun. The less central/known the location of a thrift-store, the higher your chances of finding real treasures. Even better when the people working there have no idea what stuff is worth (well, better for me, that is, I guess).
But regardless of all the pros – stuff is still stuff, and accumulating it, no matter where you get it from, still clutters your home. Consumption is consumption is consumption … If I didn’t restrict my visits to these places, and my “feng shui bible”, I might as well be one of those hoarders that you see on tv.
This week, I broke my self-imposed prohibition. I have been to three thrift-stores, it cost me 316 SEK (ca. 50$ | 38€), and here is some of my booty:
Lately I have been buying a bunch of plates … Because I am obsessed with (making) these three tier servers:
Obvs also made from plates found at various “loppises”. 
Yes, I am aware that we have no possible use for more than two of these, so anything I am making from now on, I will somehow have to get rid of … 
I especially dig plates with this kind of delicate flower pattern. 
This lovely can was only 5 SEK ( = 80¢ | 0,60 €), and I thought it would be perfect as a gift – filled with some chocolate chip cookies, maybe? 
Both Peter and I have been wanting to have these kind of spoons for when we eat sushi. Well, actually we don’t want the spoons for the sushi but for the miso-soup that comes with it. 15 SEK ( 2.60 $ | 1,80 €) for 4 spoons. Not bad, eh? 
I bought two of those brass forms … … because I thought I could use them when I try this recipe for making your own bath bombs.
Oh yeah, and the tea cups I got because I want to make …
… these kind of candles. This retro beauty is for my sister, if I can find a way to mail it to her safely (she lives in Jena and used to live in Mainz – how freaky is this?):
Hm, you can’t see it in this picture but it also has a stamp that says “Schott Mainz”, so … I also broke my biggest no-no: I am not allowed to buy any new fabric until I have made something from the tons that I already have hoarded. But I just couldn’t walk past this:
50 SEK ( 7.80 $ | 6 €) … 
… for about 1,5m x 3,2m (1,6 x 3,5 yards) 
Now all I need is an old arm chair that I can make over! Or professional help … Or professional help re-doing an old arm chair!
Like so. Also, I bought …
… this enamel-coated plate … 
… at 40 SEK ( 6.30 $ | 4,80 €) one of the more expensive purchases. But I just HAD TO. Why? Apart from that I think it’s adorable, I want to exchange all the plastic dishes with enamel (both for health and aesthetic reasons) in this lovely picnic basket:
Do I need to mention that this is also from a loppis? 50 SEK (7.80 $ | 6 €). My best buy this year so far. Now you know the severity of my condition. If you know of any cures or remedies – please don’t tell me! I can’t imagine my life without loppis treasure hunts.
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Recipe – Angie’s Flourless Hazelnut Dark Chocolate Cake
It is as divinely delicious as it sounds – and it’s gluten-free! I’d also like to think that it has to do with Ayurveda in so far as Ayurveda is all about pursuing happiness. This cake definitely made me happy. I am spoiled when it comes to mushy chocolate cakes since I live in Sweden. Swedish kladdkaka (mud cake) is the best, in case you didn’t know. I am very patriotic (or whatever it is called when a foreigner is that) that way. I am just telling you this so you fully comprehend what I am saying when I say the following: Angie’s Flourless Hazelnut Dark Chocolate Cake is the best muddy chocolate cake I have made/eaten. Ever.
Just the way I like my chocolate cake: chewy on the outside … 
… and real muddy in the center. 
And did I mention that it’s real hazelnutty, too? -
No poo – tested for you
Well, ok, it wasn’t a completely selfless act, I do dig these kind of diys. I have been meaning to write this post since last Wednesday (that’s when I tried some recipes) but I wanted to wait till I had some pictures. As most of the times, I am not completely happy with them but I am afraid if I wait until I am, I will never share this with you. And that would be sad because trying out these recipes really was a revelation for me. So: do try this at home!
I tried some of the recipes from this ByzantineFlowers post, namely the soap nut shampoo, the green tea conditioner, and the coffee scrub.
Soap nuts The soap nut shampoo I simply did because I had those nuts (that are berries) at hand. It’s actually what we’ve been using to do the laundry with, I had no idea you could use them as shampoo. Boiling the soap nuts in water for 30 minutes, preparing the shampoo every time you want to use it rather than storing it – the procedure is simple yet somewhat time-consuming, so I am not sure I will stick with this one in the long run. The liquid does have a distinct smell, which I find neither particularly unpleasant nor particularly pleasant. It’s ok. As to whether this shampoo worked or not – I find it hard to say. I mean, my hair did get clean and looked nice but I can’t say for sure that it was the soap nuts, or simply washing my hair (after all, some do use water only), or …
… The green tea conditioner. Now this one I loved. My hair usually is very hard to comb (I don’t even use a brush). I have gotten used to it and don’t even think about the discomfort anymore but those days are over! I was skeptical, and wondered how this was supposed to work, after all, the green tea is water, and won’t that just run down before I even got a chance to rub it in? I have no clue how it worked – but it did. My hair was super-easy to comb, and it did look nice (again, I can’t know for sure what to contribute that part to).
Green tea The real revelation however was the coffee scrub. It is easy to make, relatively cheap yet it feels really expensive (which is the best, right?), feels nice, and makes you smell so good! I only deviated from the original recipe in so far as I used coconut fat instead of olive oil. Again: because it was at hand – and also because it is supposed to be good for Pitta (yup, I just had to sneak in something Ayurveda). Also I used vanilla sugar instead of regular since I had prepared a jar full a while ago (you just put a vanilla bean in a jar with sugar and let it sit), which we don’t use anymore (the sugar being white). Same goes for the coffee: we haven’t been drinking any lately, so this is the perfect way for me to enjoy its smell anyway.
In the original recipe it says it’s against cellulite but I just went ahead and used it as a full body scrub. Peter was concerned that maybe that way I’ll just end up spreading cellulite. Very good point, so I will keep you posted as to whether I suddenly develop cellulite on my nose or something.
I have been combining using this scrub with the Ayurveda massage technique from the morning routine, so I fancy myself getting the benefits from both. I am no expert though, so I don’t know, I am just going with my gut here. Another thing that’s great about this scrub (yes, there is more!) is that the coconut fat (or whatever fat/oil you’re using) keeps your skin from drying out in the shower. At the same time, you don’t get so sticky that your towel or clothes feel greasy after using them. Your skin just feels really nice and smells like coffee – how cool is that?!
Coffee scrub FYI: all this coming from someone who normally doesn’t use more than shampoo and soap in the shower – read: I don’t get excited about beauty products very easily. Yesterday I even managed to get Peter excited about this coffee scrub. His only concern was that he was going to a lecture, and that the coffee addicts among the guests might be tempted to start licking his skin. No reports of the sort have been filed, so I guess this delicious scrub is safe for use in public. Well, maybe not the actual use but you know what I mean.
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Ginger – my best f(r)iend
After having had the most horrible stomach aches after pretty much every meal for two weeks now, I finally seem to have found the root of all evil: my beloved ginger!?
First off, yes, I am aware of the irony of me being on such a health trip, and at the same time not really taking any time to look into (or have someone look into) this problem. My stomach was burning after seemingly anything I ate, my digestion was a nightmare – yet I kind of didn’t do anything about it. I attributed this to the sudden changes in my lifestyle I’ve been making, and just hoped it would go away once my body would adjust. As the saying goes, it’s easier to see the splinter in other people’s eye than the log in your own. So maybe this was karma.
I just don’t like going to doctors, especially not here where you don’t even have a specific doctor you go to – you go to a so-called health center, and you’re assigned whoever happens to be on duty that day. Plus I get the impression that the medical practice here is very “traditionally western”. It seems to me that antibiotics are subscribed as if they were skittles. I am just not into that.
Yesterday however I started looking up doctors in town with an Ayurvedic background or a homeopathic one, willing to bite the bullet, and pay for a consultation outside the tax-funded mainstream health system. Then Peter and I had a heated discussion about my state, his concerns that I was downplaying it, etc. And somehow, I don’t remember exactly how, we realized that the number one food that I have increased my intake of since I got into Ayurveda was ginger. It suddenly dawned on me that all the times my stomach couldn’t tolerate a meal, I had added ginger, and I had done that with about anything since it’s supposed to be so good in so many respects.
Perfect example of how there really is no universally valid recommendation, that it always depends on the particular case. For now that I’ve come to this conclusion I suddenly have been able to see all the lines where it says in which cases not to eat ginger – and they were all the symptoms that I had, or rather: developed in a chain reaction after continuing to eat ginger (high metabolism/high Pitta, diarrhea, all that good stuff).
So, today I avoided ginger, drank peppermint tea in the morning to soothe the stomach – and I haven’t had problems all day. I guess I did get around consulting an expert this time after all, and became a little more of my own expert (not sure whether that really is the take home message from this ordeal though).
I did discover one quick remedy (or rather: Peter pointed me to it), which is obviously no solution for the actual problem but which helps the immediate symptoms, and sometimes that is needed: baking soda. Just dissolve about a tea spoon or so in a glas of water, and drink – works within minutes. Baking soda seems to be good for a lot of things, so I guess there is a post about it in the future …
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What’s your morning routine?
Do you get up just in time to throw on some clothes, leave for work, and maybe grab some coffee on the way? Do you get up early so you can take your time and wake up slowly, read the paper, and eat breakfast at home? What does your morning look like?
I have always found myself in the category of people who hate to have to rush, even if that means sleeping less. A while ago, before I got into Ayurveda, I started meditating or doing different mudras (good when you – like me – have a hard time letting your thoughts go – mudras work whether you are able to focus or not). It hadn’t occurred to me that there are other rituals that could help start the day right.
This is the daily routine as presented by Ayurvedic physician Vasant Lad (which is the one you’ll find most in books or online – with minor variations in the details).
I am posting this article from the Nithyayoga-site because it goes a little more into detail regarding the oil pulling technique (“Gargling” in Lad’s article), which I find important. Also, I think that setting a positive intention, and thus: the tone of your day, might be a little more accessible than the prayer for some.Ayurveda knows of routines not only for the morning but for the entire day – the Dinacharya in Sanskrit. Just type the word into your search engine of choice, and you’ll find a bunch of sites giving you a variation of this.Now do I do all of this? Well, sort of but not to a t. I am a person who loves rituals, and to some extend feels lost without them, so naturally, as I read about Ayurveda, the idea of adopting a morning routine (and one for the evening) sounded appealing to me.These days I start my mornings:
- early – I wake up between 4.30 and 6.30, depending on a variety of factors – usually around 5 or 6 (regardless of whether I am working that day or not)
- by drinking some room temperature water, sometimes with a little lemon and honey in it (Ayurvedic remedy if you have problems emptying your bowels in the morning)
- going to the bathroom
- boiling some water for tea and a nose cleanse – during the winter I often wake up with a stuffed nose, cleansing it with warm salt water helps
- over the past few days I started doing some yoga before (I don’t have/take time for this on the days that I work)
- meditating and doing mudras for about 30 minutes
- oil-pulling/gargling for about 15-20 minutes
- while I do that, I usually turn on the computer, check e-mails, start writing something
- after I spit out the oil, I brush my teeth, wash my face and underarms – or I take a shower
- when I do take a shower, I started combining this with a massage (again: if I have the time, so, not on working days, and not even on all days off)
- I get dressed
- drink some tea
- and start writing
The order in which I do things does vary, I also skip some steps some days, when I am too impatient and anxious to actually start my day – working on that one. Like today, I brushed my teeth but never really washed the rest, and I am still not really dressed. Sometimes I just feel like I need to start writing first, and then after a while I’ll get back to finishing the morning routine. In reality, it often doesn’t happen then, and I never actually sit still for a while to contemplate the day I am about to begin. Kind of funny, that I manage to rush into the day even though I consciously follow a morning routine.
I am not ignorant (or I’d like to think at least not THAT ignorant), so I know that me having this kind of extensive morning ritual is largely thanks to me not having a full-time job, and my hours being spread over only two to three days per week. Also, am guessing that not having kids might have something to do with it. Basically, I have the luxury of being able to use a lot of my time as I please.
I find this kind of morning routine very pleasant, energy-inducing, and thus: I find that it helps me make the most of my days. I can recommend it to anyone but I do wonder: is this realistic? Can anyone (who wants to) adopt such a routine? Is it just about setting priorities, and getting up early enough? Or does the world we live in today not really allow for paying so much attention to yourself? Will I still do this as a parent? Do those of you who are parents do this? What do your mornings look like?
