I'm fresh back in Stockholm from the States and it's been quite a day…beautiful in the sunshine and then a dramatic thunderstorm which I watched through the windows at Rival Café. 

It feels good to be back in Stockholm after what I realize was some real grounding at home in the States. I've come back having spent a lot of quality time with family and friends, and with people who have known me my entire life. I feel that support and love carrying me through some of the unknowns that I face here in Sweden, where I have the good friends that know me here but not nearly as many years of history. 

In my last days in the States I was facing a feeling inside of me that was uncomfortable. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I knew it was taking away a lot of my ability to be present to what was going on now. So I went out to the park and I took along a book on tape by Pema Chodron called "Getting Unstuck". I found a stump to sit on and I began to listen.

She was talking about having the ability to stay with the uncomfortable feeling. We all have it. And she called our getting "hooked" or "attached" to that feeling and our reactions to it "shenpa". I didn't realize that that feeling was part of our human condition. It can come from our ego's constant need to feel acknowledged or satisfied, it's deep sense of lack, of not being complete. I was dealing with an incredibly deep seeded discomfort of not knowing what the future holds, and not being enough to handle it, and my mind was racing to find solutions or interpretations of what was happening in my life to justify that feeling of being unsafe. But Pema reminded me that there is no safety in life. The nature of life is the flow of all possibilities. And by letting my mind race over circumstances or relationships, I was just letting myself get hooked to searching for an answer when there are no answers … because all those thoughts were coming out of that deep discomfort, and that was what I needed to be with. 

So I sat there on that stump for a long time, listening and being with the feeling, and laughing at myself for making up such funny "reasons" for why things were happening around me and letting them get me bent out of shape. It was definitely zapping my creative energy .. and as I stayed with the feeling, I started to see subtle beauty of the park again. Not just the trees, but the wind and the sunlight and the animals and the dust and the dirt, the space between the trees and the leaves blowing against the distant sky. By staying with the feeling I was able to feel the fullness of life again, instead of an emptiness within, and it's been feeling better the more I stay with both the discomfort, but also the good feeling of life being full of opportunities and happiness. 

I recommend the book to you, you can find it here on Sounds True.

http://www.soundstrue.com/shop/SelectProd.do;jsessionid=mfJhtvJAqLvY3NgYngZd.45?prodId=219&manufacturer=Sounds True&name=Getting Unstuck

And also let me point you to the Eckhart Tolle videos that helped me in this discovery….

Enjoy ..