Soulful Sadhak

I surrender. Today 23th of November shall henceforth be known as the day of Armistice, the day I stopped fighting. I have been fighting so long. So long I have been building walls and fortresses. And everyday I kept making the walls thicker, hiding deeper and deeper inside, until nothing could touch me anymore. But still, no matter how hard I tried, the fortress was never untakable. Each time I increased the defenses, something was still able to creep in and I had to increase defenses again. On and on it went, until... Until I realized that this was a battle I could never win, in fact, there was no point in fighting it at all. Why was I hiding there in my fortress, while life was going out there? So I decided to abandon my fortress and just go out. I decided I would no longer hide away from anything, but would accept whatever would come, surrendering completely to whatever was coming my way. And you know what is funny? Never when I was crouching behind my thick walls in my tightly cont

Today I faced my biggest fear. What could that be, would one think. What could a healthy 25 year old, who lives in a peaceful and quiet Buddhist monastery in the sunny south of France of all places be afraid of? There are no drugs and violence here, not even stress and competition, only some rats and an occasional shower. What could there be scary here? Are you afraid to look inside your mind? Well my dear friends, the most scary thing in the world is actually quite close, especially here, it's there all the time, waiting for you behind the corner, until one day you run into it, or rather, it hits you when you stop running for it. The most scary thing there is... is your own mind.  You see, usually we are too busy too look into our own minds, usually we are running around like headless chickens, trying to achieve this, or wanting to get away from that, stuck in some form of stress or some idea that keeps us going. But once we slow down and see, really look our mind in the eye, then