We started off our yin class with this open heart pose and stayed in it for over 5 minutes. As I came to release them from this rather big challenge for the chest, I asked “what is your heart’s deepest desire?” Today we will talk about fear. Why do we fear? To survive. Fear comes along when we switch on the sympathetic mode of our nervous system. Fight or flight. The body store information, it is also for our survival. That way we know how to react to a situation we have already experienced, in order to avoid danger/pain. So we have that reaction to fear already installed and we remember it (not consciously) from the first time it happened, from the first slap we got with this danger. As a little baby, we are completely left out to our mother. First mother, then the rest of the most intimate circle we have around us. Our base. So the danger at that stage was to be abandoned. If our mother abandoned us, we would not survive. But in order for the individual as a person to exist, we need to separate from her. This is where the Ego is born. From the day we stand on our own little chubby legs, we start to write the story of our life. Who we are. Our identity. The paradox that comes along the way of experiences is that our Ego feeds on pain. Pain reminds us of our first loss. It will always bring us back to that emotion. Not the memory, that our mind has taken care of and stored it far away not to look at again. But the emotion comes back. Ego feeds on pain (if you’re familiar with Eckhart Tolle and his pain body, you might agree with me here) because it makes us feel separate from the rest. So the mess we are in is that we act out of the story of our life, written on the sheet that is our body but in invisible ink for the consciousness to understand. So we keep on behaving accordingly without realizing it. In psychoanalysis we call this “repetition” (hm, for once it’s easy). So we keep having the same conversations, relationships or living the same situations, thinking this is happening to us. When really, we are doing it to ourselves… What is your heart’s deepest desire? What are you doing to keep avoiding it? Photo: @saskiakoerner (at Canguu, Bali)