Soulful Sadhak

I just want to stop worrying all the time, worrying about whether I am doing things the right way, even worrying about whether I am being mindful enough. I want to stop getting caught up and carried away by ideas all the time. I just wish I would be a little more solid. I wish I could just feel a little more relaxed. I just want to live a simple life, and try to make the right choices, do good for my neighbour, and not worry too much about whether it is good enough. I know that the most important thing for me, is just to keep my mindfulness, because if I don’t, if I think that there is something so urgent that I have to leave all my resolutions behind, then I know in no time I will end up somewhere with my head in the clouds, and stress in my body. I know that if I can keep my attention here, I will be fine, things will turn out all right one way or another, and I will be safe from harm. I will not lose myself. And I will not achieve great things, the kind of things you read about in b...

"How did you find the practice of mindfulness?" someone asked me recently. I answered him: "I found it when I stopped looking for something." He was confused: "When did that happen?" "Oh, only very recently, long after I arrived here." You see, what I had been doing was whenever an unpleasant feeling would arise, I would just try to become very 'mindful' in order to make it go away, and I would tell myself that I would have to practice even harder in the future to prevent this from happening. But now matter how hard I tried, unpleasant feelings would still arise, which after a couple of months, made me quite desperate. It was only then that I realized that this was not what the practice was about at all. I was just running away from things I did not like (unpleasant feelings) and holding on to things I liked (pleasant feelings). In the end, this was not different from what I had been doing before whole my life. In fact, it is how most peo...

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...

I sometimes hear people say around here that it is so hard to practice around people that are not practitioners and that they need to find a more practice-suited environment. This always confuses me a bit. Off course, it can be helpful to find favorable conditions for personal growth, but in the end, if you do away with everything that does not help your practice, just to replace this with things that you think do suit your practice, you are no better than all those people you left behind. We do not practice to replace all things we think are 'bad' with things we consider 'good'. We are still trying to get rid of the things we don't like in order to replace them with things we do like. We are still caught up in hatred and greed. We are still caught in attachment. You can even be a monk and have done away with all worldly affairs, just to become attached to the simple monastic life and still not be a real practitioner. No, we do not practice to replace good with bad,...

This morning after I woke up and was getting ready for the day I felt some tension coming up. It was the same tension I had been feeling regularly the past months and had been trying hard to get over. I thought to myself: 'Oh no, not again. Why is this tension here? It should not be there. Not after all this time and all this effort. What on earth do I have to do to get rid of this?' All these thoughts and more flashed through my head in mere seconds, all similar to the thoughts I had been having the months before. 'Ok, just relax. But what if that does not work. What if I am just trying to run away from it?' But then another thought came to my head. Yesterday I was reading about the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, about how it is completely out of control and how the whole health care, in fact whole countries are falling apart. And then I thought: 'Gee, these guys have something to worry about. And look at me, still worrying about the same silly thing, some tensi...

(geschreven voor B-magazine , studentenmagazine Taal- & Letterkunde)   Je moet niet alleen, om de plek te bereiken thuis opstappen, maar ook uit manieren van kijken. Er is niets te zien, en dat moet je zien om alles bij het zeer oude te laten. 'De Plek' – Herman de Coninck Vorm is leegte. Leegte is vorm. Vorm is niets dan leegte. Leegte is niets dan vorm. Alle dingen zijn leeg. Ze kennen geen ontstaan en geen vergaan. Hartsoetra 5u15. Opstaan. Te vroeg, ik wil nog blijven liggen. Ik zie hoe de gedachte om te blijven liggen zich vormt – wat een opmerkelijke gedachte – en weer we ggaat. Alles gaat voorbij. Dat is de enige zekerheid die je hebt. Ergens vaag in mijn achterhoofd hangt het bewustzijn dat ik moe zou moeten zijn, dat ik me aangevallen zou moeten voelen door het geluid van mijn wekker zo vroeg in de ochtend, dat ik me zou moeten verzetten. Andere gevoelens, andere strijd, andere tijden. Ik kom overeind en haal drie keer diep adem. Ik leef! Mijn lichaam z...