Selective perspective

Selective perspective is a term that I use for the way we filter our reality, based on our assumptions. Everyone observes differently, and your way of thinking influences what you see.

In the first place, your way of thinking influences how you see others. If you think bad about yourself, then you will filter out all the stuff that confirms this, and only see them. A person with jugdement is never able to see the world as it is. You are narrowing you mind to these observations, and spend the rest of the time thinking about these observations, instead of making new observations that can disprove your former.
Also when you are allready making judgements, you are emitting them in your facial expression, body language and therefor your energy, into the world. And obviously people are going to respond to that. Not everyone will be able to greet you nicely if you are carrying a wall around you that says: I do not trust you. You cannot expect love and openness from everyone if you you are not giving it back. I see this is really hard, and i've also dealt with this for quite some time. That's why i'm writing about it. When I realized that I was judging other people that they we're judging me. I could finally see that it was me all along. Judging myself and therefor others.

So how can you stop this cycle, when you finallly realised this?
First, you have to learn how to get control over your own thoughts again. And realise that you are the one feeding them. This you can do by conciously observing your thought wherever you go. This might seem impossible and at first you will catch yourself slipping into unconciously judging. But you will also reconise your fears, when they start to appear. And when they start to appear, you need to try to stay calm. Fear is our instinct to survive, our alarm for when we are in danger. And for some people this alarm is going of to often. So whenever you feel this fear come up. Start asking yourself these questions: First: Am I in actual danger (is your life at stake)? This is the first that will calm you down. Cause in the most cases, you won't.  After this one, you have to challenge yourself to observe the situation objectively. As if you weren't involved. Try to zoom out. Try not to be emotionally attached to the situation. Try to tell yourself that this moment will be just a brief moment of your life. And then ask yourself: how real is my observation? What is my body language telling? Are there any memories that are popping up, and why? What is triggering the emotion that i'm having? This can be really confronting, but remember, you are the one creating your observation, and the one selecting your thoughts. Whenever you get too anxious, try to focus on something you feel safe by. When your in the supermarket, try obsessivly focus on things you like most, when your outside try to focus on the leaves of the trees. Or the birds singing. But if your fed up with feeling anxious, try to put the situations your experiencing in perspective. If someone is not threating you so well, and you came to the conlusion that you are also not emitting any negative energy to them. Then try imagening that this doesn't have anything to do with you. You are no victim. You are just the reciever. And this person might have had a really rough day at work, or might be in the mitst of a devorce, or might even experience the same anciety as yours, but expressing it in a completely different manner. This will give you tremendous freedom, and suddenly you do not blame yourself for every negative experience you have with people anymore. And you'l actually start to ephasize with people you have never ephasized with before.
After this you will see that you become lighter in your head, and that you'll want to think nice about other people.
If you completely want to let go of negative judgement I reccoment to "punish" yourself whenever you have a bad thought about someone, to justify it with also a positive thought. After a while you will do this automatticaly, and actually you will learn a lot about yourself also. Often bad thoughts on others are a reflection of the things you don't like about yourself.

Should I commit suicide? (Advice on suicidal thoughts)

No. Just no, you shouldn’t. It might feel like the only option, now. It might feel as if you have to, as if there is no space for you, as if the world is better off without you. It might feel that there is a better place after this life, and while this might be true. You don’t have to, this place can wait, it will wait. 

If there is even one small hope in you of a better life, if there is still one thing in others you admire, if there is still a video on youtube that you enjoy, then let this be your saviour. You might not be seeing it in yourself right now, or deem it as possible to be like this. But you are, and you are fully capable of doing it. You might just have to take a closer and a more gentle look on yourself and your past, present and future.

Before I start talking a lot I would like you to do an exercise. This works better in a video, and this video is yet to come. Read this paragraph and do it while reading.

 Let’s take a moment, to take a deep breath here. Feel how your lungs get filled with air, maybe you can feel your heart pumping. Breath out again, feel yourself getting heavy. If it hurts or feels uneasy in any way, just be okay with that. Love the fact that you care about things. Take a breath and imagine how the air wants to be inside your body and give you all the love and care you need, now let it go and feel how you share this love with your whole environment. Now you can breathe at your own pace again, if your head is now trying to solve problems that aren’t there, let us take a look at our surroundings. What do you see? Is there a direct threat here? If yes then run away as quickly as possible! If not, then ask yourself whether there is something in this room or surroundings that you are absolutely grateful for. If not, then take a memory of a moment that you were feeling like this. Close your eyes, and fill yourself up with the feeling and when you’re ready open your eyes again.

So, and we’re back at the subject. Now did you notice a small change inside you in the previous exercise? Now can you imagine that you could develop this same grateful feeling, for your suicidal thoughts? This might seem crazy and weird, but I’ll tell you. This is the feeling that saved my life, this is the driver of my life, I could even make it more fantastic, by telling you it is the very driver of my greatest inspiration. 

I am here to congratulate you with your absolute golden ticket to life. Which might seem wicked and absurd. But it can be. For let me ask you a question: what freedom in life do you gain, when you are not afraid of dying? Can you make this your ultimate freedom? Isn’t your willingness to die not secretly your love letter to death, telling you that you accept it. That you are willing to see the imperfections of yourself and of life. Now the only challenge for you is to get this desire to work in your favour. 

You might be thinking, that easy talk for a person that is not feeling like me. Well yep, it is, but iIve felt the same way as you. Maybe I didn’t experience the same horrific event as you did, but I've been where you are. I’ve asked myself a thousand times: should I do it? I’ve told myself a thousand times that I wanted to die. And when I got to the point of truly conceptualising it, I realised I was free. I realised I could go anywhere I want, I could forget about everything, I could let go of the people I didn’t like. I could let go of the feeling that didn’t serve me any more. I realised that death wasn’t so far away from life anyhow. And that what I was seeking in death, could be found in life as well. I just hadn’t been in the right place, mindset, time or whatever yet. 

And actually, at first I hated to know this. How easy would it be to just not be doing the things I was afraid of. How easy would it be to just be laying in my bed all day. How easy would it be to just wither away. I will tell you, a lot less easy than really facing the fears. A lot less easy than accepting and loving the pain inside me. 

I had to accept the harsh truth that I was being completely irrational, that it was not my job to take my life. As much i’d liked to be in control of it, this was not my job! My life is not just influencing me, it’s influencing everything around me. I’m not the only one deciding for me to die. Everything around me is. As this is creating me, as i’m creating it. Even if you feel like right now you aren’t loved by anyone or anything! This is untrue. And actually you’re having a grand discovery about yourself. You are willing to let go of all that does not serve you anymore. 

So let’s look at death in another context shall we? What is death to life? It is the end. But what if you take a look at the death of the grass getting eaten by a cow. Then it gives energy to the cow, the cow can make milk from the grass which makes it able to feed her babies. This image not only shows the meaningful aspect of death, but also the transformational aspect of it. 

So what does this have to do with you? Now I’m not asking you to compare yourself to the grass becoming the milk. Well maybe I do, and if you want to, then just go ahead. Yet what I actually want you to do, is to visualise this process within yourself. What part of you is the grass wanting to become the milk? Can we let this symbolic transformational aspect of death take part of us? Use it to let go of certain patterns of ourselves that don’t serve us no longer? Can we be a place for ourselves that arranges both birth and funerals for the different characters in our lives we wish to become or have identified with? 

This way, your suicidal thoughts can become meaningful to you. The thought might trigger a fear in you, they might trigger a feeling of unworthiness or sadness in you. You might feel completely strange or weird and lonely for having these thoughts. And that is okay. We’re here, you are loved, you are guided and protected. The very fact that you’ve found this article and made it to this phrase, tells me that there is hope. Even if you can’t see it yourself yet! And why would you? If your past makes you want to kill yourself, then it’s for the good that you can’t see your future yet. It means that it won’t be anything like it. It means that there is a space for a new possibility. 

Make space for a fictional funeral for your old life, you’re allowed to make it as dramatic as possible. Invite all the people you wish to be there, let them tell you exactly what you want to hear. And you? You’ll both be present as your corps and as the new person you’re becoming. The person you already are! 

When the old you has died, there will be space for the new one. It doesn’t have this space when the old character is still alive! Take space for all the grief you need. Cry everything out, cry for yourself, cry for your death, cry for your birth, cry for the people. And reach out for help. Whether it is professionally, a friend, a family member,  a random person on the streets offering their service. Well maybe don’t do the last one, unless this person seems in no way capable of abusing or hurting you. It doesn’t matter whether this person understands your thoughts completely or not. You’ll find those people eventually. For now just find a person you feel like you can trust, a person who is kind and compassionate. Yes they exist.

 In the beginning I didn’t tell anybody about these feelings I had, it has taken me years to tell them to my relatives even. Yet the first time I spoke to somebody about it, who’d had the same experiences, already changed a lot within me.

I encourage you to seek most help in your direct environment. And professionally. Next to this I would like to offer a space to share this with others, a virtual environment where it’s safe to share this with others. I haven’t found the right form yet, but i’m working on it! 

Ideas, tips, sharing experiences are very welcome in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

Much love and appreciation,

Ilse Vos

Special thanks to perception trainers, Alan Watts and Kyle Cease. For their inspiration, words and advice. Without them, this article would not exist.

Am I bipolar?

Sometimes I'm wondering why I fluctuate so much between being super energetic/unstoppable, and feeling completely exhausted. Usually aware of the fact that I'm working towards this exhaustion, yet still doing it. 

These were my thoughts a few months ago. In the meantime I've realized some things about this, which I wish to share with you. 

So the thing is, when you’ve once experienced a deep and long depression. Once you get out of it, you want to run as far away from it as you can. You want to forget all about it, and wish to never feel like it again.

What I experienced, and am still experiencing, is periods of manic. Periods of bursts of energy, and trying to completely overuse all the energy I have, as I'm afraid there will be a scarcity again. But the funny things, and a thing I often forget, that actually this manic way of doing things, creates a scarcity. For I'm using up all my energy, and then fall back into tiredness. 

The things that get me out of the tiredness, such as exercise, socializing etc. I do every day in excess. As it makes me feel super good at the beginning when I've gone through this period of being very down and filled with aces and pains. But as I start seeing this as the full remedy (forgetting about the rest and relaxation I had) I start overusing them again. Then I start seeing them as bad, cause everytime I use them, I start burning myself up.

As a child I never had this. This is really something that I started to develop after my graduation at the art academy. 

Most of my middle school and academy years I see as one exhausting, depressive blur. With some good moments and days. (Usually the ones that involved alcohol or weeds.)

So yes, I do have a history with the wrong kind of self medicating. And even though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I feel as if it were those things that did save me at that time. The alcohol to numb my senses in an atmosphere my nervous system is not built for. (Too many impressions, too many people, too many tasks, too many questions.) The weed to release tension, from the oppression I felt from society and my school environment. And also to numb my emotions, as I had no way to release them, or had no place where I felt safe to express them. 

This is all past now, but it has been such a large part of my life, I think it was about 9 years that I experienced deep troubles within myself. And after that it’s been 3 years of recovery now, of going back and forth. Step by step, every time. Still experiencing some burn outs, but most of the suicidal thoughts are gone, and i’m even feeling a bright future coming ahead. I even dare to make plans for the future. I’m starting to trust myself and my body again, which makes me able to dare to make promises and plans. 

I usually couldn’t do this, as I was afraid I would lose my energy again. Fall back into the hole. The thing is, when you’ve felt like this for so long, part of you starts to believe that you’ve been doing it all wrong. Part of you thinks that you can’t take care of yourself and never will, that all you make and will make are the wrong choices. As the choices you’ve made before led you towards self-destruction etc. So you start to listen to others more then yourself, which in the beginning is actually a good thing. But here a new vicious circle could start, of not listening to yourself, and your dreams. Which can lead into a new depression. XD

Yes this really makes it seem as if there is no hope. That every decision you make is bad or wrong. That all good things are actually bad things in disguise. And that we’re completely doomed once you’ve stepped or fallen into this spiral. 

But I’ve come to tell you that this is not true. And I’m here to tell you something so absolutely trivial that you might not even want to hear or read it. As it’s been written over and over again through the years. But it might be something that we as a society have forgotten, and haven’t implemented yet. No, I'm not here to tell you that good and bad don’t exist. Bad choices do exist, not in the sense that it makes you wrong, but in the sense that they could hurt you. I also won’t tell you that you should only make good choices from now on. And that you aren’t allowed to make mistakes. As our wrongs make us learn, make us grow, and our “goods” give us motivation to keep going. So what do I want to tell you?

I would like to ask you a question… Why should we be so stressed about our wrongs and rights, why can’t we collectively observe them as they are. As a process of growth, a process of evolution, an experiment in which we experience front row what kind of influence we physically have on existence. If good and bad are both neutral in the sense that there is always a way back to another, a way back to harmony a way back to the middle. A place where we come to understanding why it all happened, or what it all meant or could mean. That the actual existence of both parties implies a divine balance of the two. 

This might be a quite abstract description of the energies that take form in our everyday life. And you might be asking how to practically apply them. I think this question you should first  ask yourself. Where is my balance? How do I find my balance? 

And remember that in every situation, harmony is at the door. You have the choice to make it escalate in an instance. You have the power to make things terribly miserable for yourself, tremendously pleasurable at the other end and harmonious in the middle. Where you take a sneak peak at both sides. To check what the situation is teaching you. 

This is everywhere. If you’ve made a mistake, one simple word, or question or deed can bring you back to balance. 

If you feel like all is going so well, you’re doing nothing wrong, but the feeling starts creeping up that you can’t keep up. Just allow yourself to be vulnerable. Trust in the idea that it will come back eventually. But the more you keep it up it will turn into a bad thing anyway. The more you’re resisting the more strongly it will come up. As the resistance is already a symptom of tiredness, of the flipping time, of the other side of the coin. 

Begrijpen

Waarom wil ik mij verdoven?

Waarom wil ik mij verdoven?

Ik voel te veel. 

Ik voel te veel voor dit systeem

Ik voel teveel voor deze mensen

Ik voel te veel voor deze wereld.

Ik voel te veel 

Ik voel te veel blijdschap

Ik voel te veel nuances

Ik voel als je iets achterhoudt

Ik voel jou archwaan

Ik voel je onzekerheid

Maar ook je goede bedoelingen

Ik bedoel het goed

Ik wil me veilig stellen

Het is makkelijker als ik weet wat jij voelt en me daarop aan kan passen

Het lijkt makkelijker als ik voel wat jij voelt en we hetzelfde lijken

Maar waar ben ik dan?

Wie ben ik dan?

Wat voel ik dan?

Wat wil ik eigenlijk voelen?

Waarom wil ik me hetzelfde voelen?

Wil ik niet verstoten zijn?

Wil best even verstoten zijn,

Door iemand

Die ik toch niet mag

Door iemand die ik toch niet begrijp

Waarom voel ik dan ook diegene haar pijn?

Wil haar begrijpen

Wil haar vastgrijpen

Vertellen: het universum houdt ook van jou

Maar in plaats daarvan neem ik het over

Doe hetzelfde masker voor

Wil dat je me begrijpt ook al begrijp jij enkel jou

Wil dat je me begrijpt ook al begrijp ik jou niet

Wil dat je mij begrijpt

Je kan me alleen begrijpen

Als ik mij laat zien

Mij laat horen

Laat voelen hoe het voelt

Hoe het is 

Mij te zijn.

 

Beschermde chocoladehazen

volg de regels van gepikeerde dwazen

opdat ze een vakantiehuisje aan zee willen beheren

bedenken een situatie over hoe het beste te regeren

regie over doemdenkscenario's

eigenlijk ben ik best wel boos

wil me er niet mee bezig houden

wil liever leven in vertrouwen

opdat ik mezelf kan beschermen

en me over belangrijkere zaken kan ontfermen

dan bijvoorbeeld dat sportschoolabonnement

of een leven met een droomvent (sorry mannen jullie zijn wel erg leuk hoor, maar weet dat dat soms ook puur alleen aan de hormonen ligt. Haha)

Liever op zoek naar de zin van het leven

want je bent hier als mens maar even

niet eens een glimp van de weelde van de zonnejaren

sterren zijn de ware bejaarden

allicht zijn zij de jonkies in het grotere geheel

om het grotere lichaam energie in te stralen

waarom zou ik me dan druk maken over beschermde chocoladehazen?

Let's gooooo

Let's go where our breath moves slow
Where we know
That it's okay to not know
Where we let our thoughts go
And our inner movement flow
Let's go where time moves slow
And where peace is the way to go

Het bittere scenario van vergulden nagelriemen en 86 % chocolade.

Waarvan de striemen nog 20 dagen nazaten

de bacteriën voluptueus in aan het baden waren.

Getriggered door de woorden

die jij had gezegd.

Mistieuze nagelriemen van gespannen handen

om de wisselwerking op spannen

tussen ons luchtgevecht.

Lucht geleidt geen elektriciteit

wordt gezegd.

maar de shock was zeker voelbaar.

Wat er nu tussen ons gedijt?

Ik ben de draad wel kwijt.

20 dagen later

het bittere scenario begint wat meer naar dadels te smaken

de nagelstriemen zijn nog zichtbaar

en ik weet nog steeds niet of we elkaar nu liefhebben

of haten.