Love…is hard, difficult, breaks you, tears you apart. Love brings momentary happiness, but with devastating consequences. Love makes you suffer, sacrifice, surrender and disregard your values. Love steals your mind, makes you illogical, nuts, crazy, dangerous.

Due to the above statements, love has to be stopped! By all means!

This is what we have seen in the past thousands of years, this is what we have been told, taught about, scared about! We tried to annihilate love with arranged marriages, logic over heart conditioning, punishment, imprisonment, anything to avoid the sweet/bitter touch of love. When that didn’t work either, we started shaming it, ridiculing it, turning it into something for soft pansies, and shallow people. We got so afraid of love!

We became afraid of love so much that we reached to a point where WE KNOW it is going to ruin our lives. We included it in our religions, but with a measure of severity, of cruel, but justified intolerance towards the weak souls that could no refrain from it. We even made our Gods vengeful, stating in the holy books that ALTHOUGH they love humans, they MUST punish and not tolerate mistakes. We cut out love and we proclaimed it the opposite of a righteous, logical, error free existence. Where there is love, there is no logic! Where there is love, there is no progress, no righteousness.

To be honest, we were never capable of handling such a powerful feeling. Or to interpret it, or to accept it, never mind about using it to our benefits! We found something way beyond our capacities at that moment, we became scared of it so… we almost made it illegal. No, wait, in some countries public affection gestures and/or trying to make a relationship based on love and not on an arrangement, are still illegal. We took this to a soul shaming level, where we started imagining all kinds of punishments in the after life, for daring to fall in love, given of course, by an all mighty, all loving, but severe and righteous God. We started seeing as normal the combination between love and punishment! And there was just one more little step to take us to love/hate and physical punishment relationships. They became a normal thing in our society, saying you love someone but punishing them for the rest of their lives (due to a reason seen more than logical to the punisher) became the standard. Sentences like „ I love you, but now I am punishing you exactly because I love you and it is for your own benefit” became the norm.

It is a messed up norm! Love has nothing to do with punishing someone else, or yourself. Love is kind, forgiving, understanding! Love is powerful and can be overwhelming! But that doesn’t make love bad, nor should we get scared of it. Love doesn’t leave too much space for the Ego! And I think this is the main reason to be afraid of. Love dissolves the ego just like heat melts butter. It doesn’t leave room for selfish things, doesn’t shout, doesn’t beat, doesn’t push. Love transforms! Love recreates who we are from scratch, and that can be scary!

We have treated love in a bad way for too long. Anything we treat with disrespect comes back one day, to bite us in the face. It’s just the way the Universe goes! So why not give more tolerance to love and to people being in love? Can we trust and put our faith in the fact that if we get to love, everything else will come? Because love is not scary, it is powerful. It is the power at the basis of our Universe, and it takes only one small step to accept that as soon as we let ourselves feel it, everything else will fall into its place.

It took me a few years to recognize the long runner in my life, always there for me, by my side. In my early years, it was almost of no interrest, things got more interesting in highschool, we fought, declared war, still…we always went to sleep together, hoping for better days to come.

I have to admit I even hated it at one point, couldn’t understand it and wasn’t even thinking about listening to it. I could see, everywhere around me, that my long runner was not up to the standard expectations, I was dissappointed and frustrated because of this. Plus, I couldn’t even imagine I could do anything to change it, although I was beating the holy tomatoes out of it. I gave it all kinds of treatments, to control it, I pushed it for years, didn’t care about it, just asked and demanded more and more from it.

No matter what I did, it stuck silently by my side, my only real support and the only one I could count on, even in my dreams. We have been together through the weirdest experiences! It saved me from death several times, woke me up from my sleep when my heart almost stopped, helped me run out the chasers and jump walls, if needed. Whenever my mind wondered off, it took care of everything, making sure we remain safe. It gave me clues, whispered to me, talked to me, yelled at me, but eventually had me fall asleep when it saw my mind was out of control or under too much stress. Whenever my mind lost it, it was there, just standing, as a pole, as the safest place on earth for my soul. It never treated me disrespectfully and it always fullfilled its duties. It never failed me, never gave up.

It took care of my child and myself, fed my child when nothing and nobody else could, carried on for years with almost no resources and no respect shown, but it always made it. It showed me how to calm down, how to embrace it and let myself go. It gave me signs and hints about situations, people and places, making me avoid dangerous stuff, litteraly pushing me forward when I was not sure of myself and making me step up.

In the last years I started to recognize it as mine, as my best friend, my helper, my only belonging on this world. It is the one that makes this existence and all its experiences, possible. I had to first learn how to listen to it, then how to trust it and in the end, how to treat it. I made it my long-runner and I started appreciating it, even if I haven’t always been happy with its decisions. I took a break when it old me so, I went out for a walk and some exercise when it felt down, I followed it and it improved my life. I promisse to give it my well deserved respect for the rest of my days, and I am counting on it to keep doing its job. And, when it gets old, we get to laugh in the mirror and tell the story of our life through all the scars that wrote on it.

I will always be grateful to my safe place, my carrier, my carrer, my long runner!

I started writing this article by looking for the definition of what a “wish” is, and I have to say I am shocked!

First one, directly from Google, says that a making a wish is

“a feel or express a strong desire or hope for something that cannot or probably will not happen”

Or even worse, the Cambridge online dictionary calls the act of wishing as:

“expressing that you feel sorry or sad about a state or situation that existed at one moment e.g. I wish I was there, I wish things could have been better, etc.”

And only in the end, finally I found a better meaning to it, however, not the best in my opinion, and not even close to reality:

“to hope that something you want will be made real because of good luck or magical powers”

I don’t know about you, but all these definitions and perceptions on the “wishes and wishing act” sounded wrong to me since I have known myself. Hope and wish are two words that although should be the ones that make the world go around, have been cast upon with either an awful definition, either with an empty meaning. Hope is what keeps us alive every single day and the wishes that we have make the world happen. It can happen that our hopes and dreams lead us to a terrible path, and that is perfectly normal because the Universe doesn’t differentiate between good and bad, doesn’t have our perception about right and wrong, but that doesn’t mean we should use these words and do these acts ironically or with the certainty that they won’t happen.

It’s been a long time since us, as a human species, considered some actions too difficult to understand and control, so we made them seem worthless, sometimes even outlawing them entirely. Just remember that making a wish come true was seen as sorcery in the Middle Ages and praying or meditating to be healed is taken ironically even in our own days. Instead of trying to understand and use these tools, we considered them demonized and too difficult to use, especially by the regular people, so we either forbid them, or we turned them into irony/sarcasm/childish/foolish things so people would get embarrassed to turn to them. Luckily, there are still people that work with themselves and still manifest their wishes: they are the one envied and blamed at the same time for everything they managed to achieve, without realizing that everyone is actually capable of that.

I always believed in the power of wishing for something, in the power of thoughts and mind over matter. I always had a feeling that you can do anything as long as…you follow a few guidelines. Before we go with the actual steps of how to make a wish come true, I would like to bring something else into attention:

1. There are no good or bad wishes, all of them can come true. However, no matter what you wish for, it will always affect you, as being the source of that wish. I hope this clarifies that wishing bad things to someone is not just useless, but it causes damage on the one having the wish, rather than on the targeted person.
2. The wish is triggered and designated for the person that makes it, it is always following it’s source. This means that it is more than useless to wish something for someone else. Just think about it, what if the other one dreams of the exact opposite? Well, their wish will always come true for themselves, while you are left with a feeling that your wishes don’t. Wish for yourself, and the joy that your fulfilled desire will bring you will lighten the ones around you too. Also, don’t forget every person has his own destiny, children, spouses, parents, and we have absolutely no authority on someone else’s life.
3. Make it be a wish! Not a need, an obligation or something to achieve just to prove things to others, for fame or for show off. Those wishes will still work, especially if you are particularly persistent in them, the Universe will make things work. The catch is, they will also come with severe side effects, e.g. you want more money, for status and glory, it comes, but maybe with a small disease attached. Another example would be getting a job, or married, or having kids just because of the society pressure, peer pressure, culture, etc. These things might eventually come, but together with stress, health issues, worries, battles, anything else but happiness. A wish should bring happiness, without harming anyone around, and cause joy, peace and fulfillment to the person that is the source.
4. Never run away from something, always run towards! This is especially important because this means that wishes expressed with negations in them simply don’t work. E.g. I wish this situation stopped, I wish I escaped this situation, I wish I never get into such a situation. Rather use positive, clear directions, like: From now on I wish the situation would be like this, I wish to reach to, I wish I have peace and we understand each other, etc. Never wish for the negative to stop but wish for the positive to begin.

With this being said, let’s begin with the “recipe”.

1. Take a deep breath! Or two, or three, as many as you need until the only thing you are focused on is your breath.
2. Have in mind the clearest image that you could ever have about what you wish for. Put as many details in it, fill it up as much as you can. Keep in mind the Universe will fill in the blanks, and maybe you are not happy with its choices. Be precise and accurate, or accept that the result can and will most likely be different than expected. Wherever you leave an empty space, it will be filled with the right things according to your level of perception. Let’s take as an example, getting a new car. If you wish only to have a Lamborghini in your backyard, but you don’t consider yourself worthy enough, or you don’t see it in a realistically possible way, you might end up with someone driving that Lamborghini into your fence, due to a traffic accident. You still end up with a Lamborghini in your backyard, but I think we can agree that it is not exactly what anyone would have had in mind when making that wish.
3. Think and act as mush as possible in the direction of your wish. Imagine who you become, how you get transformed if your wish becomes true. Imagine it while feeling ready for all the wave of changes that wish will bring with itself, once it gets fulfilled. How would you feel, talk to people, walk in the street, act, react, think, be overall, once it becomes real. Be already that person, already act and think and feel as if you have it all. Also be ready for all kind of some “side effects”, which, although may seem adverse in the beginning, are more than necessary for the wish to come true. In this category we have: ending relationships with some of the people, ending or making a turn in a professional career, changing living places, change in general! Accept all the consequences of your wish, because you can’t receive something new as long as you keep yourself as an old version. All the wishes that we make are desires for change, so if you don’t accept change, there is almost no possibility for any of your wishes to come true.
4. Repeat all the above steps, while calibrating the cause-effect by measuring how your wishes have materialized, weighing what fears or negative perceptions keep you from moving forward. As soon as you observe an obstacle in the form of a fear of change, admit that that pattern of making life work didn’t make things work much until now, so the only logical thing to do would be to change the old pattern. If not with love, fear can be treated effectively, for short moments of time, with logic. Logically assess your steps and make changes to your perception without attaching emotions to this act.
5. Maybe the most important thing, in the end, is to let things go and enter the flow. By accepting to navigate life as is, not taking anything personally, and bringing enthusiasm under all circumstances, the only thing we need to do may be to accept that “Thy will shall be done!”.

Happy wishing!

Aveam vreo 5-6 ani cand am auzit prima dată Povestea Lebedelor, de Hans Christian Andersen. Ascultam in vremea aceea povești de pe viniluri, până se toceau discurile și trebuia să schimb acele care citeau. Învățasem să le schimb singură ca să pot asculta povești la orice oră din zi sau noapte, fără ajutor. Mai aveam un magnetofon, dar ca benzi pentru copii, aveam doar Fram – Ursul polar, care îmi provoca atâta milă și supărare că…am ascuns benzile jos în șifonier, sub haine, numai să nu mă tenteze să le mai ascult odată.

Revenind la lebede, îmi plăcea să ascult și să reascult povestea asta, era una dintre preferatele mele. De fiecare dată când o ascultam mă revoltam și toată deveneam foc și pară, la auzul unor asemenea nedreptăți! Nu le prea aveam cu nedreptatea, și de multe ori am mers până în pânzele albe cu susținerea dreptății. Eram un copil justițiar rău de tot! În caz că nu știți povestea, aveți aici link-ul, nu vreau să stric lectura nimănui.

Dar acum câteva zile, discutând cu cineva despre ”dacă se merită X sau Y lucru/acțiune”, mai ales în timpuri tulburi, mi-am adus aminte de povestea cu lebedele. La vârsta actuală nu mă mai oripilează nedreptatea, știu că ea există și este parte din viețile tuturor, la fel ca alte lecții. Tot mă răzvrătesc împotriva ei, bineînțeles, dar încerc să nu o mai iau personal. În schimb, acum observ stoicismul eroinei. Indiferent ce ziceau și ce făceau cei din jurul ei, indiferent cât de greu îi era sau ce se schimba în jur, ea avea un scop și atât! Nu spun care scop, vă las să îl descoperiți, și pentru că până la urmă nu contează. Era scopul ei, știa că atunci când va termina totul avea să fie bine și să își găsească dreptatea. Este o poveste nu neapărat despre sacrificiu, idee în care eu personal nu cred, ci mai degrabă despre urmărirea scopului, a nu te da bătut când ști ceea ce ști, și că orice ar zice cei din jur și orice ar face, adevărul este tot același. Nu o consider nici o poveste despre luptă și înfruntarea greutăților, pentru că dacă așa le vedem, așa vor fi, ci mai mult ca pe o poveste despre credință în sine și în puterile proprii, despre continuarea drumului ales orice ar fi. Acum îmi dau seama că este și despre judecata strâmbă a celor din jurul nostru, care ne judecă în baza convingerilor lor, indiferent câte argumente sau dovezi le-am da că nu au dreptate. Nu poți schimba părerile celor din jur, dar poți să nu le iei personal, cel puțin să nu le lași să îți influențeze scopul și drumul în viață.

Tot acum mai înțeleg și că este vorba despre acceptarea unui ajutor care vine nu neapărat în forma dorită sau așteptată, dar vine. Și nici nu mai contează de la cine vine, sau cum, atâta timp cât vine! Este, în final, o poveste despre determinare, despre asumarea drumului de parcurs, oricare ar fi el, având convingerea că la sfârșitul lui, rezultatele se vor fi meritat. Este vizibil și faptul că atâta timp cât nu ai cum să comunici cu cei din jur, nu au cum să te înțeleagă, dar asta nu înseamnă că trebuie să te lași descurajat. Și ca ultimă idee, totul ține de perspectivă! Degeaba au încercat unii să o convingă pe fată să renunțe, ea nu s-a lăsat influențată și nici nu considera ceea ce avea de făcut atât de dificil sau inutil.

Nu eram mare fan al comentariilor literare în școală, deși poate dacă lecturile mi-ar fi fost interpretate astfel, din punct de vedere filosofic și al cunoașterii psihicului uman, aș fi înțeles mai repede, mai multe! Timpul este irelevant, iar mintea își schimbă perspectiva în timp, așa că poate ar fi o idee să reiau niște basme. Conțin adevărate comori de adevăruri universale!

Cum ar fi să fim mulți, mulți de tot ca fata cu lebedele?

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I was around 5 or 6 years old when I first heard the Swans Story, written by Hans Christian Andersen. I used to listen to a lot of vinyl stories, until the vinyl were all worn out and i had to change also the needle tip. I had learned quickly how to change the tips myself, so that I would not depend on others to listen to the stories, at any hour during the day or the night. I could have also used a magnetophonon to listen to stories, but the only tape I had for it was with the Fram, The Polar Bear, which I was never able to follow through all till the end because it made me awfully sad. So, I hid the tapes in the closet, deep in the back, underneath clothes and pillows just not to be tempted to listen to them.

Coming back to the swans’ story, I used to listen to it over and over again, it was one of my favorites. Each time I listened to it I used to get mad at the injustice that was going around main character. I never liked injustice and I went to great lengths a lot of times, sometimes even against odds, to pledge for justice and the right to defend yourself. In case you don’t know the story, here is a link where you can follow it, as I don’t want to ruin anyone’s experience.

But a few days ago, while speaking to someone whether an action or decision is worth doing or not, especially now, when there is so much uncertainty around us, I remembered the swans’ story. Today, I am not shocked and raged by the injustice anymore, as I have learned to accept it, as part of our lives and of our lessons. I still fight against it and don’t tolerate it around me, but now I know that I can’t single-handedly manage it, throughout the entire world. But now, at this age, I noticed something else: the heroine’s stoicism. No matter what was happening around her, how much people hurt, judged, blamed or shamed her, she minded her own business. She had her purpose and that was all she was focusing on. I am not going to say what was her goal, I let you discover it; however, the actual goal is irrelevant. It was something she needed to do, and she knew that by doing it, everything will be back to normal and she would finally have her justice. It’s not necessarily a story about sacrifice, idea that I don’t resonate with anyways, but more about remaining faithful to your path and destination, not giving up into listening to others’ fears or threatens, because what you know is true and that is the only way to make things good again. I don’t consider the story being about struggle or fighting your destiny, either, but more about self-confidence, listening to your inner truth, sticking with your road no matter what. I also realize now, that the story speaks about poor judgement too, about people that judge other based on messed up biases, not considering the actual facts and not even be willing to listen to other possibilities. The fact is, you can’t change other people’s feelings or perspectives about yourself, but you can keep on doing your thing until it will be visible for everyone.

Another idea that I understood only now, was about accepting help for others, even if it’s not in the form you would have expected. In the end, it’s still help, and still gets you further than nothing. It doesn’t even matter where or from whom it comes from, as long as it comes! Overall, this is a story about being determined, taking responsibility of your chosen road, whichever that may be, knowing that in the end, it was worth it! It also speaks about communication boundaries, about the fact that if you can’t or are not allowed to explain your actions, the people around you will mostly judge you based on their own fears, according to their own mindset. So, it’s pointless to let yourself discouraged by people who know nothing of your story. In the end, it’s all about how you look at it: a lot of people around the girl pitied her and tried to convince her to give up such a hard task, but she had a purpose, so she didn’t allow herself to get influenced by them.

I was not a huge fan of literature or commentaries in school, but maybe things would have been different if they were explained like this, more from a philosophic and psychological point of view. Time is irrelevant, and the mind changes a lot of perspectives throughout time, so it might be a good idea to go back to reading fairy tales for a while. They really hide universal truths!

I wonder how the world would look like if more of us were like the girl with the swans.

It’s the end of a working day, like any other working day. It started bumpy, had some hiccups on the way, technology failed, internet speed failed, it was a normal morning. Just to shake you to wake you up, back to reality.

But our reality is that all these little things are annoying, irritating and time consuming. We focus on a lost internet connection sometimes for hours! We have something to do online, the online environment doesn’t work, we need it now, we start troubleshooting! And we get to lose track of time! Did you ever notice how caught up in your sideway troubleshooting you can get? After two hours of trying to hack the internet, if necessary, because my appointment was ONLINE and HAD TO BE DONE in a specific time frame, I finally made it work. I felt a genuine joy and sense of relief when I saw that everything was back on track, like that was the supreme victory of my day.

Although is absolutely OK and sometimes quite necessary to stay on track and not give up no matter what, things get weird when we make this exterior reality, made out of troubleshooting and stress, our only reality. We get caught up in all the things that we have to deal with: internet speed, coffee machine troubleshooting, car needing repairs, kids having troubles in school or with understanding life in general, other people in our lives that are also caught up in their things, etc. We forget sometimes we are not the only ones dealing with exterior stress, everyone is! This is the main reason why we should not treat these things too seriously: because everyone has it, everyone has to deal with exterior things, they are universal because they are part of our learning path. We have so many things coming to us for solving, from the outside. And that is not a bad thing, as long as we don’t get caught up in them.

When you dream about your issues, about what mail you should send, what bill to pay, how to dress up tomorrow, or how to answer an e-mail from work, you are caught up! When you stress yourself about what the others will say related to something you’ve done, about how your future will unravel, about yesterday’s and tomorrow’s meals/politics/economics/etc., you are caught up! When you suffer due to other people’s opinion, due to the government decisions or religious beliefs, you are caught up! When you are upset about ten years’ ago history, when you don’t forgive, when you seek revenge and invest energy in it, you are caught up! When the only thing you feel is that you would run, break free, shout, stand up, defend yourself, you are caught up!

You are caught up each time you get absorbed by this earthly existence. You get caught up in a bubble, that grows its walls thicker and thicker the more you take this life seriously. The life doesn’t take you seriously, life says: Let’s play! Life is not caught up in bills and synthetic torments, like judgment, criticism and blame. Life explores and tries, doesn’t consider anything like a failure, but just like another type of result. Success, just like failure, are just the end results of some actions that we have conducted, and they are not separated at the absolute level. By changing our actions, we change the outcome. So why consider it is already set up? And, more than that, why take any result so seriously that you consider it absolute? It is just a result of an experiment that Life did on the playground of your life. It is your attribute to change things so that you have your desired outcome.

Whenever you get too emotional with this life, too worried and too serious about it, you get caught up. Stop! Ask yourself “What is this?”, “Why is this affecting me?”, “Why am I taking this so seriously and personally?”. Just stop, rewind, playback and review what just happened. Find the moment when you got caught up and lost focus, rewind, review and repeat with a different approach.

Getting caught up drains your energy, distracts your attention from what you would really need and like, torments you in a useless way, because that is not the purpose of this life. The purpose is far from being rigid or constrained or serious. The purpose is to explore, understand ourselves, and evolve, mainly through testing, experimenting, trial and error. Well, actually there is no error, it is just a different type of outcome.

So, my advice for today is to stop taking things too seriously. We are not on this Earth forever, the amount of time, although irrelevant, is limited. So why not use it to our own benefit instead of getting tangled in invented values, that don’t care about us? Let’s be flexible, go with the flow and stop taking ourselves so, so, seriously!