On Rising

Dear pyjamas, sad mental loops and depressing songs, rip. I am over you. Ιn the mornings I will get up and I will wear my sharpest clothes, I am putting my best face on because for a while now I have been doing it for myself. On the hardest of days I am still showing up for me. And fick dich to the things I used to tell myself. The you are small, you are unworthy, you are bad have been replaced by you are strong, you are brave, you are kind, you are compassionate, you are WORTHY. As beautifully as Glennon Doyle puts it in her latest book Untamed "you are a fucking cheetah". 

                                                                                                                                                                                         MIKE HILL/GETTY IMAGES

Even on the saddest days I can still come up with three things I am grateful for. At times it can be the beloved friend that supported me, the cat that made me laugh by chasing a tiny moth up and down the apartment, the sun that is shining bright shedding its light on my insides. Other times it can be my lungs that are breathing lively, my legs that carry me with joy, a heart that is feeling deeply. 

Feel, shed, expand, repeat. 

I might have to turn this into a T-shirt. 

Rise girl, rise. 

Thoughts come streaming when I lie in bed at night. All the things that went wrong in life, all the why's that will never be resolved. I tell myself you are better than this. I am better than this. And I switch. I start imagining all the beautiful things life still holds for me. I envision my future, my best case scenario for a change. The content and beautiful days that are awaiting me. I get to the scared little child inside me, that little almost forgotten cheetah cub, I hold her telling her everything is going to be alright. I stroke her and bathe her with my heart like mother cheetahs bathe their babies with their tongues. It's a safe place to be, it's a fun safe warm playground. I've got you now babe, we've got this. 

                                                                                                                                   www.sciencesource.com

This morning my inner critic asked me "Where do you think you are going, Mel?" and I replied "Some place better, old friend. Take care. I am loved by more important people now. I am loved by myself".

Sometimes life will be a hard teacher, especially to us, the ones who are soft inside. However, we are also strong and very much equipped to pull through everything that comes our way. We just have to remember to close our eyes from time to time, call for our inner cheetahs and let our wild souls rise.

I 'll always be by your side

If you know me, you most likely know Spot. Or you knew him, whatever. The reality of him not being with us anymore has been hard for me to grasp. We had to put him down a few months ago at the old age of sixteen. My mom had to make the hard decision as I don't live there anymore and only found out the next time we talked when I asked her how he was doing.

Spot was a jolly dog and lived a happy life. Playful and goofy, sweet loving and sociable, loyal and always up for anything fun we could do together. He was my friend. I will not forget the first time we took him to our beach house in Plaka, Elounda. He must have been around a year old at the time and must have thrown up a dozen times by the time we got there. As soon as we stepped out of the car he run up to the edge of our porch. It was the first time he laid his warm brown eyes on the sea. He eagerly placed his elbows on the concrete fencing and just stood there staring at the vast blue water expanding past the island of Spinalonga till it met the horizon. He was stunned. I must have a photo somewhere of the two of us on that porch where he sits on that concrete fencing while I am sitting by his side holding his paw. Me and him, my friend and I, both so young and content in each other's presence, frozen in time.

                                                      Edit: I managed to find this photo of our holiday together.


I remember at the end of the summer each year on the day of the first September rain we used to go out in the garden together. It was our little ritual, like the ones friends have, just the two of us celebrating the transition of nature.

                                  Spot at the back. Rita (left) and Laura (right) at the front.

Spot passed away in September.

Every animal that dies leaves us with an internal void. The one we didn't know we had until they came to fill it with their presence.  

Last night I dreamt about him. I could feel him again, sliding my fingers through this soft black fur thinking "Could this be real? I thought I had lost him forever".

Two months ago a black and white long haired kitten showed up at my doorstep. He came and never left kind of like what happened with Spot. He had, too, chosen me. He was around six months old at the time meaning he was born around the same time when Spot passed. I like to think that it is him returning to me in a different form. When I told my aunt about it she said "So you think there is a spirit that has been following you throughout your life?". "I guess so", I replied. Fioggos is fun and loving and goofy making me laugh all the time like Spot did. He meows and goes hiding, expecting me to go look for him. And I do go look for him, it is our game after all, our new little ritual. He's brought so much joy into my life. And so much hair everywhere. Every time I turn around he is up to something new. This funny sweet hairy ever moving creature. My new old friend.

This reminds me that there is so much more out there than what we can see or prove or measure by fitting it in complex mathematical equations. It reminds me that life flows and transforms in similar ways to the ones nature is changed by the first September rain after the long dry Cretan summer. I know that to some people this will all sound totally insane, but I really can't deny that it does indeed make some kind of a soothingly incomprehensible sense somewhere deeply inside my heart.

He is still here, living through Fioggos. I have not lost him, I never did.

Sweet boy always coming to say hi and lick your face.

Life II

"Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans." I came across this John Lennon quote a couple years ago. I found shocking the amount of truth in those words back then and I still do. 

I have studied to become a biologist. I find the diversity of the forms of life and life itself on this planet absolutely and magnificently intriguing. About a year ago I started my journey to become a yoga teacher, which is one of the most fulfilling experiences I have ever had and I get to relive every time I teach a class, every time I invite people to breathe, to move, to bring life into their beings. In the meantime I have had the chance to live in a couple of different countries. To cross my Parisian dream off my bucket list. To discover a new species of a tiny little animal which some say it looks like a product of a spider-scorpion fornication, but which makes my heart skip a beat every single time I lay my eyes on one. I have made friends from all over the world. I have burnt out. I have cried pools of tears mourning over the wounds of my past. I have seen and heard and felt things I never imagined existed. I have both succeeded and failed miserably in science, in love, in family, in friendship.

This has been life so far for me. An unpredictable journey which often found me overwhelmingly anxious about what the next chapter was going to bring. You see, a little over a decade ago I had a very different plan in mind about how my life was going to turn out to be. Over the years I have spent a fair amount of time and tremendous amounts of energy resisting the changes that life brought into my path. I have finally come to acknowledge one thing: The only way to live your most honest and most authentic life is to remain open to what life has to offer while you keep yourself vulnerable to feeling what there is to be felt. Feeling is the third dimension to the equation of life. With the other two being thinking and doing, in my opinion. One cannot just think and do. Trust me. Actually, I cannot believe I am the one to be saying this. Me, the avoider of all things to be felt and the seeker of the things that can only be understood. 

If you find yourself overwhelmed by the unpredictability of the script of your own life, dear friend, do not be afraid. Take a leap into all three dimensions.  Life is a movie full of plot twists, but, hey, there wasn’t going to be much greatness in rewatching a movie that has already been played in your head, right? 

As Joseph Campbell beautifully puts it:

With a whole lot of love, 

Meli

P.S. I was inspired to write this blog by Brene Brown's book "Daring Greatly". I loved reading it and I highly recommend it to you guys too, in case you haven't already read it. 

As abstract as I like it to be

There will be times 

when it will be too hard to bear this thing called living

There will be times when this so called reality 

will rip your guts wide open and will devour your heart with outmost gluttony 

And then a moment will come when your veils will be shed

and all of a sudden you will know that reality is nothing more than a never ending cosmic dance between one's brightest light and deepest shadow

As truthful to others as a battlefield covered by an invisible cloak

If in that moment, my friend, you catch yourself wondering "in the end who am I really?"

Then search for what lifts your being into serenity  

For me, as I speak on behalf of my soul, it has come to be the thought of God and Nocturne No. 1 in B flat minor. 

What's yours? 

It's been a while

Hello dear friends, 

I am so happy to be back on the blog and to be meeting you again here on my sacred cyber space. A lot of things have happened since my last post. The most major change is that I moved out of Leiden and I am back to Crete- hello sun-kissed cheeks, hello chaos, hello mama land! This cultural transition won't be the subject of this blog post though, since there are other thoughts in more urgent need to be spilled out of the tips of my fingers. So let's set them free, shall we?

As you may already know in the past couple of years I have been putting a considerable effort to tame this mess called life. There have been bumps along the road of course, it wasn't going to be a smooth ride, but you know, life is life. Thus, according to my experience and after some rather sloppy calculations and repeated observations I realised that that there is at least one time in everyone's life when one or more major life changes take place. This can be due to a loss of a job or a loved one, a divorce, a burnout- insert painful event here. Ok everybody hurts we got it. So why am I telling you this? Because observing this pattern has helped me realise that life changes can be painful but they do not have to be tragical.

"The bird fights its way out of the egg. 

The egg is the world. Whoever will be born 

must destroy a world." - Herman Hesse 

It is fine if you lost yourself on the way. It is fine if you need time to grieve. In times like these which are difficult without a doubt we are called to shed all the parts of ourselves which no longer serve us. The parts which have been throwing us into false circles for years if not decades. Once you rise above this challenge you will be a different yet better person, you will be one step closer to your true self. The one that is not a people pleaser. The one that takes time for self-love and fills his/her own heart first before loving anybody else. You will be one with the child inside you. 

It is fine if you need time. It is fine if you cannot bear being just a cog in the machine. It is fine if you have feelings nested in a heart in the size of a planet. And you know why it is fine? Because life forgives and you, my friend, have already been forgiven 
for 
being 
only human.

With a whole lot of love,

Meli

Healing

It has been four days since I got a decent night's sleep. You see, I always get a bit funky before a full moon. In times like this, it feels like I am a numb observer of my own life. I can just watch this girl being in places doing things as if I am watching a theatre play. I spent the weekend at my yoga teacher's training. It was rather intense, but in a good way. So today I took a moment to let everything that happened during the past few days sink in.

I realised how grateful I am for having made it this far, not only in my teacher's training but also in life. Just a few months ago I was lying in my bed, barely able to get up on my feet and walk a few meters. Yet there I was yesterday, fully engaged in my self-practice. I was there on my mat, breathing, moving, sweating, stretching. There were bodies moving around me too. Every one of them with its own story. I closed my eyes and turned inwards. I could feel their presence warming up the room, supporting each other through this togetherness.

My step was light and my body was warm. I heard the calls of my thighs and spine and I let them move. I let my body flow into the place that felt right. I got into a deep backbend. A wheel- what an experience. As I was bending my back, I could feel my chest open. I breathed in long, deep, cleansing breath. I returned to the floor and I imagined that in that moment my flesh was on the floor but there was another body, a black semi-transparent skeleton, floating slightly over my physical body. It was my pain body. I saw this other chest being wide open with black smoke coming out of it. It was the painful emotional energy that had been stored in my chest for a long time now. I took a deep breath in and I exhaled with force, letting it all go, allowing the remnants of my traumatic past to evaporate into the air.

In yoga, as in life, every day is different. Every day we let a different version of ourselves unfold. Yesterday I saw a version of me I had not seen in a very long time. Yesterday I opened up. No more hunching, no more self-pity, no more denying life.

I will leave you tonight with this song:

There's A Place In 

Your Heart 

And I Know 

That It Is Love 

And This Place Could 

Be Much 

Brighter Than Tomorrow 

And If You Really Try 

You'll Find There's No Need 

To Cry In 

This Place You'll Feel 

There's No Hurt Or Sorrow 

There Are Ways 

To Get There 

If You Care Enough 

For The Living 

Make A Little Space 

Make A Better Place... 

Heal The World 

Make It A Better Place 

For You And For Me 

And The Entire Human Race

If We Try 

We Shall See 

In This Bliss 

We Cannot Feel 

Fear Or Dread 

We Stop Existing 

And Start Living

Michael Jackson - Heal the World

With a whole lot of love,

Meli

Set You Free

Hello dear friends,

I hope you are doing great and that life is getting sweeter and brighter now that Spring is just around the corner. I have been experiencing this change myself, too, and I am happy to be finally switching from winter-hibernating to spring-awakening mode. There is something I would like to share with you today. I spent a large part of the day writing a blog post yesterday, which to my surprise, and maybe yours, is not the one you are reading right now. In that other blog I talked about general truths and gave advice, I included philosophical quotes and motivational pictures. It all seemed quite promising, until it wasn't anymore. When I had finally finished writing I went through it once more, only to realise that there was no sign of myself to be found in all that extensive product of my hard work. So, the question is, what happened in the mean time? 

Fear happened, friends. Once again I had been taken over by this hauntingly nasty habit. The habit of being afraid to speak up, to expose myself, to share my thoughts and personal experiences. Most of the time I find standing up for my own self terrifying. It has to be the consequence of growing up feeling I did not really fit in with most of the people around me. You see, sometimes it is just easier to be nobody, than to be the one who stands out. Because if you make people see you then they might as well judge you and, if you are anything like me, it is going to go straight to the heart. This is why we keep on making small talk, hiding behind our own fingers, when in fact deep inside there's a whole different story to tell.

So as I am discarding yesterday's blog I am clarifying and letting go of the feelings that lead me to write it in the first place. I will honour my choice to be transparent, because how could I ever come to know myself, when all I am doing is masking it out of fear of being judged? Just imagine how different life would be if we dared to set free that bird we call soul for a change.

With a whole lot of love,

Meli