Tag: spirituality

Mindfulness | A strategy for life.

Posted on by Henriette

Life is pain.

Life is suffering

This is true on Earth—but truer on Olrania

These are the introductory sentences of Chasing the Sun, a sci-fi novel that took me multiple years to write. I wanted to touch on a universal truth in those sentences. That everyone—no matter who they are—suffers. Also, things can always get worse. This is certainly the case for the crew of the Algora when they crash land on a desert planet. The story also touches on the idea that, as humans, we are often our own worst enemy.

But this post is not about Chasing the Sun. Rather it is about the suffering that we all have to endure while we are here on Earth. It’s about how we can counter that suffering with a strategy of mindfulness, a strategy to stay present even when things get difficult. My view is that mindfulness lessens our suffering in the moment, but it also moves us closer to peace as we cultivate it.

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The burden of meaning

Posted on by Henriette

Meaning is often seen as a good thing. We want the work that we do to be meaningful. We want our relationships to be meaningful. We attach a lot of value to meaning because we believe that a big, important “why” will counterbalance the inevitable difficulties of the “how.” This idea has merit, but attaching too much meaning to something can also be burdensome. Meaning can bring a certain amount of expectation and heaviness.

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Dreamwork: How to interpret your dreams (and stay relatively sane)

Posted on by Henriette
woman dreaming pen sketch

Dream interpretation can be difficult for many reasons. For one thing we might not always know what our dreams are trying to tell us. Sometimes it might seem like our dreams are contradicting itself. Also, prophetic dreams can be terrifying and instill fear for some possible future outcome that we would do anything to avoid.

This article discusses some of the challenges related to dream interpretation and gives a few basic guidelines to navigate them.

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Emotional Work: Anger

Posted on by Henriette 3 Comments on Emotional Work: Anger

Anger is not an easy emotion to contain or process. Until recently I’ve been largely unaware of how much anger I was carrying around inside. Terrifying dreams showed me that I needed to work on this emotion but I had no idea how. I was intuitively nudged towards Anger by Thich Nhat Hanh.

This ended up being one of the most profound things I’ve read this year. The writing is simple and the book is short, but it contains an enormous amount of wisdom and great practical advice. This was indeed the single best book I’ve ever read on anger—and maybe even the best book on any single emotion that I’ve come across.

It’s really hard to do a complete summary of everything so I’ll instead point to some of the main ideas and advice that I found particularly helpful.

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Writing is an exercise in trust

Posted on by Henriette

Writing is an exercise in trust.

To hear the voice of a character you have to be receptive and calm. You have to sit at your desk, stare out of the window for a while, and trust that something will come to you. You don’t yet know if it will be a good writing day or a bad writing day but you’re showing up to find out. You’re sitting in silence, thinking about things.

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The Texture Of An Emotion

Posted on by Henriette

Spiritual teachers often talk about the importance of being with emotions. This is hard because we usually repress and avoid difficult emotions. Sometimes for years. Also, the physical discomfort of strong negative emotion can be unbearable. Also, we don’t really see the value in feeling it. But awareness and feeling is the way to move past these difficult emotions.

One way to cultivate more emotional awareness is to ask: What’s the texture of this emotion?

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