Our  biggest strength is to embrace our biggest weaknesses.

Soulchess, a 3  minute 22 seconds listen to.

Well here it is.I have to admit it. I’m addicted to the chess app on my phone.

Whenever I feel overwhelmed — when the world gets too loud, too close, too much, when there’s too much yet to perfectionate — I reach for the little green icon and disappear.

My chessapp is my hideout.
My digital monastery.
A safe haven from the dreads and threads of daily life.

While I’m playing though, I know deep down inside I’m avoiding..

Something I don’t want to face.
Something I should be doing.
Something inside me still unfinished, unsaid, undone.

I used to scold myself for that:
But then someone — or perhaps I should say something — made me realise:

It’s my Soul who is doing the playing
All my Ego does is move the pieces.

My Ego plays fast.
It defends the familiar, even when it hurts.
It jumps to conclusions. Reacts rather than creates.

It often assumes the worst.
and most of all fears to lose, even when winning means staying stuck.

And my Soul?
My Soul waits.
It plays the long game, without a care about the score or winning

Soul makes its silent  moves without Ego being aware….yet..

Soul watches for openings — not to attack, but to invite.

Soul is not interested in checkmate.
It’s Ego’s Soulmate.
Only there to make Ego aware what on earth it is doing….literally.  It whispers into my subconscious; nudges me into the moves I COULD be making, by making me aware I’m addicted to my chess app.

Sometimes, she lets a piece fall on purpose.
So I’ll notice what I’m clinging to.
What I’m scared to lose.
What I keep guarding, instead of releasing.

And when the board is chaos,
When I don’t know what’s mine or where to go
My soul stays calm.
She stays.
She observes.
and sets the board again.

Soulchess I found is an initiation,
a beginning to insight of who I am.

It isn’t about winning.
It’s about remembering who’s playing.

When you recognize this…
Maybe you’re at a board too.
Or at some other distraction.
Maybe you’re a serial binger.
or workaholic or a diary-filler from dawn to midnight.

If so, know this:

Your Soul is patient.
She bides her time waiting to implement her own purpose.
waiting for you to stop blitzing through your life…
So you start to create and  feel her next move. Until you get bored and delete your chess app to focus on what matters and play your two cents to make this world a better place.

So what’s your vice? What’s your Ego getting at? And what is your Soul secretly making you aware of? What really moves you? What moves did you recently make?  In our Pilgrim gatherings we talk about things like this. In the end we all walk our our path on the same earth. Find out more on the pilgrimpage. energycounseling.nl and the blog Soulchess, the difference between checkmate and soulmate.  Bring your own set of Ego and Soul and let’s play…

The post Soulchess appeared first on EN Energycounseling.nl.

A locksmith came to my house recently. Using his strong grip, my oldest son  had opened the front door from the outside while it was on its safety lock on the inside. Apparently, when you manage to do that, something shifts within the lock, causing the key to stay stuck in the lock unless the lock is turned back to its safety position; all very complicated.

Fortunately the locksmith quickly came to my aid and turned out to be a jovial man with 20 years of experience in his trade.

‘I still love it’ he said answering my question on how he liked his job. ‘Every day is different and I come across the weirdest situations’.

‘Such as…? I dared.

The answer came swiftly. ‘Once a family called me up in total panic.  The door of the room in which a deceased family member had been laid for the wake, kept opening without apparent reason.  That was scary, especially at night, when the door would unexpectedly open, much like in a horror movie.  The solution, the family felt,  was to place a lock on the door, so they could sleep peacefully. So I placed a lock and yes the door stayed put, unless of course they forgot to lock it.’

‘Did you believe it to be a  supernatural occurrence?’

‘Ofcourse not!’ the lockmaker firmly answered. ‘The coffin is placed on a cooling element and it was a small room. It turns cold quickly.. That triggers a difference in air pressure between the hallway and the small room. At a certain point the door will spontaneously succumb to that, especially at night for then the door stays shut the longest and the little room gets cold easiest.

Now some people might find a story like this disrespectful; but when you think about it, it are exactly these mundaine occurences, the weird happenings, that at times make it easier to talk about death or a wake. In western culture people often still keep their distance from death. We don’t really know what to say about it.  In spite of the big steps being made in making dying and mourning more understandable; it is still often viewed with fear and seen as a difficult subject. It was only a short while ago when people in the end of life phase were separated from the living and when relatives processed their grief alone. Religious people were given a sermon, but everyday life gave little opportunity to show feelings or exchange experiences. ‘What was it like for you to witness the end of a life? What experience did it give you?

Stories like the mysterious opening of the door are in fact portals to expressing emotion. The fear, the confusion en in the end the humor, when it turned out to be a natural phenomenon. Then it becomes a family anecdote; ‘Remember when he had just passed away …’? It enables reminiscing; the good memories, the sad but also the funny ones. Death doesn’t always need to be lofty and solemn. It is ….in the end …pardon the pun ….also part of a lifetime in which funny things happen.

The One of Insights

A fitting card with this experience would be the 1 of insights, as an example of becoming aware that what we think we witness, can differ from what is actually happening. We sometimes lead ourselves to believe in ghost stories that turn out to be way different than expected.

Mind you! This goes the other way around as well, when we discard unexplained experiences and give them a ‘perfectly reasonable explanation’ because to witness them is so outside of our comfort zone that we prefer to look the other way.

Whatever way you look at it; nothing has only one explanation. Everyone experiences life differently and is entitled to that.

Click the card for further explanation or draw your own card at the right of this page; and see which mind jab your inner wisdom has in store for you.

The post The Unexpected Explained appeared first on EN Energycounseling.nl.

Especially with our world today offering such a diversity of challenges,
daily life can distract us from what really matters to such an extend that we forget to take good care of ourselves.

Breaking news flashes, famous people dying, terrorist attacks, presidential elections fought over in the media;  commercials attracting us into thinking we need certain products in order to be happy, it simply doesn’t stop!
Thousands of impulses a day attack us from television sets, computers,  cellphones, billboards, shop windows and friends who go through exactly the same experience and share that again!

It can make you weary; by the end of the day feeling you’ve done all sorts of things, yet very little of it had to do with you.
Eventually, when you have many of these days in row, body, mind and spirit start to protest. They start to feel drained, perhaps even to a point where certain ailments start to surface, physical aches, colds, lack of resistance, mental issues, feeling wobbly, mental tiredness.
As a result; the next day like this, will take up even more energy to perform.

One option to escape this vicious circle  is to take a break, go on a holiday.
Unfortunately this is only a short term solution, for after the holiday it’s back to normal and the same cycles start all over again

Holidays are also infamous for fatigue that finally gets a chance to surface once daily pressure falls away, igniting anything ranging from mild irritability to illness and escape into excess drinking or eating.
Or holidays can be overshadowed by an inability to actually enjoY being away from it all, as too little energy  is left to do that.

So….what we can we do to break this cycle?

When ever I catch myself reading my mails or watching the news straight after waking up;
or spending too many hours behind my computer;
or using my time off to meet dead lines rather than relax;
then I know its time to think of our ancestors, the hunter and gatherers, who had to live without holidays, who couldn’t break the vicious cycle by going away for a few days and had to regenerate on a daily basis in order to stay tuned.

Suppose they would have jumped out of their animal hide beds first thing in the morning;
pick up their spears and start hunting and gathering for 8 hours or more, 5 days a week or more;
how long do think they would have survived?
And they didn’t even have commercials, presidential candidate debates, terrorist attacks or breaking news from all over the world thrown at them many many times a day.

So what did these people do differently from modern day men and women?
The answer is: they took their time and created their own space.
They took care of themselves while life was happening; nourished their needs on a daily basis, wove relaxation into every day activities; integrated well being into their daily life occupation no matter where they were went or what they did.

In my next blog I’ll reveal what our hunter and gatherer ancestors did to keep fit during daily life, using their own body language and their own healing powers.

Ingrid Schippers Friday 6 May, 2016

This blog is featured as spoken end note of the Dutchbuzz edition of May 10th 2016 and can be listened to on The Hague FM from 10.00 tot 11.00 pm or on the Dutchbuzz podcast of May 10 2016

The post Paleo Fitness: The Bodylanguage of Energy appeared first on EN Energycounseling.nl.

In traffic today, I stood waiting at the intersection of Westduinweg and Kranenburger weg, which  is really is a most peculiar intersection with 3, actually 4  roads coming together.
Traffic on the Westduinweg has right of way, so anyone coming from one of the 3 other roads needs to wait.

Still… I saw a Grandfather, in one those cars that are higher than that are wide, who could not care less about all the traffic signs indicating he should wait. With a speed of about 5 kilometers per hour, he gently nudged his car forward; since that was where he needed to go.

A sturdy young man wearing a cap, driving a black Volkswagen Golf, really had to hit the breaks and gestured in a wide variety of body language that Grandfather was crossing more than one border.
Grandfather himself gently inch-wormed himself through traffic in blissful ignorance of the black car and its cap-wearing owner.

I had to smile, in fact the whole scene made me laugh, Grandfather stubborn ignorance; the young man’s heated gestures
I observed it all and thought: One day cap-wearing man, you’ll be the inch-wornming grandfather.

Does that mean I’m turning into a granny myself?

Ingrid Schippers
26-01-2016

The Trick is to EnjoY It.

This blog is recorded as weekly end-note of Dutchbuzz.nl, the radio program for internationals, every Tuesday on The Hague FM from 10 to 11 pm.
All programs are archived at Dutchbuzz.nl.
This blog will be broadcasted on January 26 2016.

The post Observation appeared first on EN Energycounseling.nl.

It might well be an unusual subject to start a new season of spoken Dutchbuzz blogs with, but this first week I want to talk about silence.

Take a moment to sample that word….Silence…
Play with it, say it out loud, think it, feel it.
What differences do you perceive between saying it out loud and thinking it.
What sort of feelings does the word ‘silence’ evoke from within you?

You see, at times people fail to perceive the true meaning of the word. That is because they blabber a lot leaving little to no space or time for actual silence.
They blabber to find reassurance on what they have been blabbering about before and about what they heard other people blabber, that way blocking their own thoughts from within to surface.

For that is another unusual thing; did you ever notice you can’t think while you talk?
Talking is basically thinking out loud. As long as we are talking we can only sort of think of what to say next, but we can’t think while we speak. It is always beforehand we do the thinking, which leads to an interesting deduction:

The more you talk, the less you are inclined to think, let alone meditate, i.e. allow the words to rise up from within.
There’s this general misconception that in order to meditate one needs to clear ones thoughts completely and stop thinking.
Truth is one only needs to stop talking silence the chatter of the brain, to then see what comes up from within, that source of silence, staying away from the blabber.

Would you agree that in the Western World we tend to , as they say ‘live in our heads’?
We have constant chatter in our heads. Boss-chatter, partner-chatter, financial chatter, commercial chatter, culturally conditioned chatter, parent-chatter, court-case-chatter, shopping-list-chatter, no wonder some of our children grow up to be chattering human beings.

This is where meditation should come in.
Clearing the mind from chatter, I’ll use the word one more time and then no more…..silence.

You’ll find when you meditate and reside in that place of silence,
the most profound thoughts will come to mind….mindful thoughts.

Try it once, sample the silence, sample the word.
Play with it, say it out loud.
Think it, Feel it, Live It

What differences do you perceive when you think the word silence and when you say it out loud?

This blog was written for the Dutchbuzz podcast of September 8 2015 and can be listened to on the Duchtbuzz.nl programm archive.
You can leave a comment to this blog on the ‘leave a comment form’ at the bottom of this page or sent me a personal response at: info@energycounseling.nl

I wish you a silent week.

Next Dutchbuzz blog: Tuesday 15 September.

The post Thinking Out Loud appeared first on EN Energycounseling.nl.