A Tibetan monk just chanted in my ears for twenty minutes. It brought me right back to last year when I was living in a little village by the sea in Spain. Almost every day I walked up a mountain to a lighthouse where the only thing you could see was the endless mediterranean sea. I often sat down high up there on that mountain and let the Tibetan monk chant the same words in my ears. This morning I sat in my living room in winter-y Stockholm, early and still dark outside. The contrast between sunny, tranquil Spain and cold, busy Sweden is enormous and yet listening to this monk on Spotify made me connect to the same space inside myself.

When I think about that space, the word remembering comes to mind. Because it feels a bit like that: remembering something that I seem to have forgotten for a while. So what is that? It is a feeling of being truly alive. Of having energy that just flows without effort. Of being inspired to be creative. Of wanting to move my body and use my voice. It is also a feeling of being incredibly grateful. Of my health, my family, my friends and the fact that I live in a country where there is no war or extreme poverty. And it is a feeling of knowing and living my truth. Of feeling that I’m not stuck and that I always can move (because after all, I’m not a tree).

I often catch myself having forgotten this; it really is so easy in the busyness of the world I currently live in. My work has become so important that it most of the time is the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. Work for me has a tendency to take over and before I know it I find myself in it pretty much 24/7 and feeling pretty energy-drained. Something you recognize?

If you have read this blog before you know I like the author and life-coach Martha Beck. She says:

You were born knowing your way.
Your task is not to learn, but to remember.

So this morning I took the help of a Tibetan monk to remember. He chants in a language I don’t understand and at the same time I really do because to me it feels like this language is universal. It speaks to me on a deeper level in a way that I find hard to describe with words. It’s like this chanting cuts right through my mind and a lot of noise and wakes up this space inside me where I remember what life and living to me is all about.

Finding ways to remember has become really important to me in my life. I think there are thousands of different ways to do it and that different things work for different people. I can for sure name several people in my life who would absolutely hate listening to a Tibetan monk chanting in their ears at 6 o’clock on a saturday morning! My point is also that remembering life does not have to be a major thing; for me it’s often the smallest things that can shake me right awake again.

In case you decide to give it a try and end up in your own space of remembering and suddenly wonder what the *** you’ve been doing in your life lately (in my experience, this easily can happen) I hereby leave you with some wise words from Martha Beck that might be of assistance in such a situation:

We’re here for the experience of being human – period.
That means no moment of your life has ever been wasted, and you cannot get this wrong.

Photo: the lighthouse in l’Albir (Spain) where I lived