Going to work with a fancy car and clothes piled up inside a garbage bag... you know the big black ones? Yes, one of those.

That was the darkest but also the most enlightening time for me.

Not knowing where to iron your shirt for the next day and not knowing where to sleep... until one day I find a small bungalow inside a campsite not far from the place on this picture.

The most devastating time but career wise I was on the rise.

What a hero I was... so fully functional!

Keeping it all inside.

The only one who I was able to open up to, died, my dad.


What made this mess such an enlightening time?

In the peak of desperation, I found freedom from hope.

Yes from hope.

No longer hoping for things to change to please me.
No longer hoping to end pain.
No longer hoping to die.

In that loss,

I've experienced the freedom to be

vulnerable,
fragile,
subject to pain like everyone else,
free from having to figure out my way out of it,

as pain is an existential experience to be lived,

not a problem to be solved through thinking.

When this "thinking self" is seen for what it is, freedom from suffering begins.

Thoughts no longer have a grip on you.

Pain doesn't vanish

but you live it totally as you see the futility of a mind made effort to resist to what already is.

Then love arises out of nowhere with compassion for all beings who are still trapped in their unconscious behavior,

the same you were hostage to.

Kindness, humility, gratitude are not "acts" that virtuous people display.

They are the consequence of the end of all acts.

Please know that you are that.

See what you are.