There truly is a place inside of you where you feel completely free – in complete bliss and in connection to all that lives. Where you can truly experience love in the moment, stillness, joy, and happiness – yet experience your endless possibilities of creation while you are here on this planet – all simultaneously. And of all the things we can do in life, this may be one of the greatest goals: to be completely and deeply in the moment, full of love and light and joy and surrender and in connection to who we truly are. Yet at the same time, going for the goals you wish to achieve. Not because you have to achieve them, but simply because you enjoy going after them.

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Presence

There truly is a place inside of you where you feel completely free – in complete bliss and in connection to all that lives. Where you can truly experience love in the moment, stillness, joy, and happiness – yet experience your endless possibilities of creation while you are here on this planet – all simultaneously. And of all the things we can do in life, this may be one of the greatest goals: to be completely and deeply in the moment, full of love and light and joy and surrender and in connection to who we truly are. Yet at the same time, going for the goals you wish to achieve. Not because you have to achieve them, but simply because you enjoy going after them.

Finding Enlightenment – What’s Next?

Some of us, especially the monks in the East, spend their entire life finding stillness and true bliss, walking that path of enlightenment. To them, it’s the greatest thing that they can do. And to some degree, it is. They are shining their light: it is holding up a vibration of love and light, and from there, teaching others unconsciously through the energy that they emanate. And it is from this point that they bring enlightenment to Earth. So to them, it may be one of the greatest gifts they can give to humanity while they’re here on this planet. 

However, to us in the West, once we find that state, that state of complete bliss and enlightenment – what’s next? Do we spend our life sitting and waiting, doing nothing but meditating? 

You may.

Or – you may begin to understand that life is endless, all possibilities are endless, and that there are millions of outcomes that can be realized in the endless field of creation that Earth is. 

• What is it that you choose? 

• What is it that you choose to live inside of yourself first, holding in your heart? 

• What are you dreaming into being? 

• And then what are you taking action on?

Burn What You Are Not

So the question is: are you putting the things in motion from your ego, or are you putting things in motion from your heart, from what you are called to do? 

This can be difficult to determine because we are often living inside of our heads thinking, “How do I make money with this? Where is the business plan here? How can I make enlightenment a business plan?”

Yet if we understand that every answer will present itself in the right moment, all we need to do is to follow along with the first step and things will unfold in front of us slowly and gradually. 

Taking one step at a time in complete faith. 

In the end, this is one of the great goals in life: to be able to live from that state. To find that enlightenment through going on your path of healing.

So you detach from everything that you’ve learned by burning everything that you’ve learned. You burn the stories of your past, the stories of your failures, and especially the stories about your success. 

Burn them: put them into the fire by consciously saying, “I let go of you; I let go of this story. Because even though it might be a beautiful story, it’s merely a story. And I should never identify with any story at all. Even if it’s beautiful and it might make me feel great – feeding my ego temporarily – it’s just a story and I will let go of it.”

More important than feeding the ego through stories of success is making the distinction between our worldly success and who we truly are. 

We are not our failures. 

Nor are we our success. 

We are a conscious being of light and love – descending down to earth to heal, to learn, to explore, to do. It is such a big paradox that we go through life searching, which is in reality, healing.

Start from Surrender

So we find that freedom within ourselves and then, once we’ve found that, we can continue our path from a new sense of freedom within ourselves. 

Not taking action because we think we need to do this. 

Not building our businesses or setting certain goals because we believe that once we achieve them, then we can feel free, successful, happy, and good about ourselves. 

It’s a matter of letting go of all the expectations that our culture has imprinted on us. 

Let go of all of that and be OK with not doing anything at all.

Only from complete surrender – only from complete nothingness – can you act from true purity. Because otherwise, every thought in your head will derail you: thoughts about who you think you need to be or what you think you need to do, or maybe the thoughts of anticipated regret for missed opportunities or unfulfilled potential. 

These thoughts seem so real and convincing that we follow them and derail ourselves from the path. But at the end of the day, they are all just thoughts.

It’s just our ego that is screaming so loud. 

Finding Stillness

You know you’ve entered your soul when we can simply be and be still. When you can simply be OK with who you are, where you are, and to be OK with not doing anything at all – to simply experience love. 

And getting to this place is a path. 

We should never go through life expecting to arrive to a conclusion or to go searching for it. 

The only thing we can do in life is be present with what’s presented to us. And to be completely present means acting upon what is asked of you in the moment. 

You might have a different vision for your life or want something different. You might not like the situation you are in today at all. In fact, you might hate it. But what can you do? You can ignore it. You can escape it. And through those two choices, the situation will not go away – you will fail the test. 

You can only face it. You can only accept it. And that doesn’t mean you are trying to force yourself through it. It doesn’t mean you are controlling the situation, fixing it from the intention of, “I need to get this done so I can get it over with.” 

Your action can be to fix something, but if your intention is to escape it, then you have not learned. 

If life presents a situation, and your immediate response is to take action from the ego (“I’ll fix this and get it over with.”), then you are acting without first accepting the situation. Without seeing and tuning in to experience why this situation is presented in the first place.

Finding the Lesson

In every situation, there lies a bigger lesson – a bigger opportunity to learn. Every situation in your life is a reflection of what lives inside of you. 

And if we understand this concept, we must be truly honest with ourselves when we are faced with something we don’t like: “What is this a reflection of? Let me accept this first. Let me choose to accept this. Let me first say ‘thank you’ for this situation.’

And accepting a situation doesn’t mean you have to become passive. It doesn’t mean that you ignore the situation. Surrendering doesn’t mean you become complacent.

Because the purpose of surrendering is to no longer fight or ignore a situation, it is to become completely OK with the situation in your awareness and in your emotions. So you merge with that situation and become one with it. 

You and the situation become one – almost like when pouring a glass of water into another glass of water – you become fluid and merge with the water. 

Say “Thank you,” and feel the joy of it, even though a particular situation was something you hated previously. Because hating the situation or being frustrated by a situation doesn’t serve you at all. In fact, it brings you further from change. 

Trying to change something from frustration will never work. You might temporarily fix something in the outer world, but it’s like sticking a Band-Aid over it – it’s not truly fixing or healing the situation. It doesn’t come from that intention of accepting, loving, and surrendering. 

Once you’ve found the stillness with yourself, then you can choose to act on a situation. You can choose to act, and you can choose not to act – depending on what the situation requires. Not every situation requires action, and it’s up to you to determine which situation does.

My Own Story of Escapism

For many years, I was struggling with my business partner and had so many lessons to learn from this experience. I was overwhelmed by the fact that the business wasn’t doing well in the first few years while my business partner had been in complete faith that the businesses would become successful. 

He even loaned the business a lot of money – half a million British pounds to be exact, which was almost like €600,000. I was overwhelmed by this, thinking: How am I ever going to make that money back? I had never made so much in profit yet. Yes, I earned this money in revenue, but not in profit. 

How was I ever going to make that money back? 

I understood: “I need to step up. I need to play a bigger game. I need to think bigger so that these figures become small.”

And I chose to go in the direction that I felt was the right: to build my business, Bioprofile, a system of health analysis and one-on-one personal advice. I had a big vision for the company. It was going so well in the beginning and the service was very well received. People loved it and got great results. Sales were coming in almost effortlessly. 

Bioprofile was doing well, but it was also a software business. And if you are into software, you know that it demands endless investments, right? How many rounds of investments have companies like Uber had? I don’t know if they have ever made money. 

So Bioprofile necessitated endless investments in software development. So even though the business was successful, it wasn’t making a profit yet, which is normal for a software company. But I was ignoring the fact that – I was half a million British pounds in debt to the other business that I owned with my business partner.

I wasn’t stepping up to that situation and focusing on Bioprofile was my excuse: “Yes, but if Bioprofile becomes successful, we’ll have so many clients. We’ll give them nutrition advice and they’ll all be buying our health foods and supplements (because the business I was in with my partner was a health food business of raw foods, superfoods, and health supplements). So that business will become successful.” 

But this was just a story I told myself; it wasn’t a reality. I was ignoring the reality. 

I wasn’t standing with my two feet on the ground in that reality. I wasn’t accepting the situation, I was fleeing away from it. 

And of course, my business partner became more and more impatient. He had been so patient for so many years but grew to be more and more frustrated because the business wasn’t working. 

And I didn’t feel seen or accepted by him. I didn’t feel recognized by him because to my idea, I was doing everything I could to fix the situation. And he wasn’t able to give it words, but I’m sure in some ways he felt I was ignoring the situation in our business, Superfoodies.

So it was certainly a big conflict. But it was through that conflict that my journey of healing started. I embarked on a journey of healing and followed each step as it was presented.

A Path of Healing

I hated the situation I was in and I wanted to get out as fast as possible. It ended up costing me years to make the business healthy enough financially so the bank would loan me enough money to refinance part of my debt and refinance the other investments my business partner had made so I could buy him out. I ended up spending almost three years to resolve this.

Of course, if I had dedicated all of my focus on the business and it could have gone a lot faster. But I was healing in the process and I understood that two were so intertwined, so I chose to instead do both hand-in-hand and trust the process. 

This decision was my biggest saving grace: to just go step-by-step. Through my process of healing, I started to understand that my path is truly one of the medicine man. To work with the sacred plant medicines of this Earth and to bring healing to people. 

I started to remember. 

I started to remember shamanism. I started to remember holding ceremonies. I started to remember how energy medicine works and how to bring healing to people in the setting of a ceremony. Holding ceremonies came so naturally to me, so effortlessly, so easily, like I had been doing it for thousands of years. 

Receiving so many visions of past lifetimes, of living in the Amazon and working with the plant medicines so effortlessly. And for a while, I was conflicted because I felt like the path of my soul was different than what I was doing – that it wasn’t the path of running a business, the path that I had been on, the path of how I was spending my time.

Finding Presence

Later, I started to understand that there’s just one path and that all we can do in life is to be present with what is in the moment. And I decided to become fully present with the situation. I decided that if I ever want to develop myself as a medicine man, as a shaman – if I want to go on that journey of truly learning the ways of working with plant medicines, then I would need to be free. I would need to be free from this business relationship. 

And for that reason, I needed to spend my time on fixing that business situation. So through all these difficulties, I became truly present.

It was like the universe was steering my head in the right direction: as if it was holding two hands on the sides of my head. And even though I was constantly looking away – looking left when I needed to look right, and looking right when I needed to look ahead – the universe was steering my head in the direction that was right for me. 

I was a difficult student but eventually, I did end up learning to surrender – learning to be present by learning to surrender. 

All we can do is be present with the moment and to truly accept the moment. To BE with whatever IS, even if you don’t like the situation. And then just do it: take the next step. Find joy and laughter and love in the process. 

The joy is in the process. 

The joy is not knowing what’s next. 

The joy is in the constant curiosity and excitement about what’s next, but hopefully while being present and being here. And hopefully, that moment of presence isn’t only when you either die and go to the light, or when you just had an orgasm, or when you’re on holiday and you’re laying on the beach – hopefully you’ll train yourself to find those states of bliss and connection on a daily basis. 

Life is the True Ceremony

Once you start to experience this state of bliss, then you start seeing the endless possibilities of life. You start to become consciously aware that, “I can steer my intention in every direction. It is ME who creates life. I am participating in this great experiment and I can participate consciously. And it starts with what lives inside of me. And it’s followed by the intention that I walk my path with; the intention that I set – what I’m dreaming into being. And then through that intention, I am informed. I am informed by something greater.”

Like this, you wake up in the morning suddenly having a great idea that is informed by something that lives outside of us. Fields of consciousness – a field of information and knowledge that we are one with. We become one with that field through our surrender. So that’s why we seek that state. So we become that state. We become the oneness and we steer life in whatever direction we want it to go. And we become the true creator of our own lives, truly and consciously participating in this great experiment that Earth is. 

In the end, there’s only one path, there’s only one process, and it’s called life. There’s only one true ceremony: it’s called life. Life is the true ceremony. Life is the true process. And it’s up to us to find joy in every moment, to find our happiness in every moment. To enjoy the process, to say thank you to whatever it is, because if you always knew what would be next, life would be pretty boring, wouldn’t it?