"Being grateful does not mean that everything is necessarily good. It just means that you can accept it as a gift." ~ Roy T. Bennett

Once I allow a glimpse of the simple fact that everything is always (and in some way I have, perhaps, not quite seen yet) a gift, then gratitude becomes a predominant feeling throughout the day each day. In that accepting everything as a gift, I will discover that everything actually is ‘necessarily good’. In that chronic state of gratitude there is no longer a question of ‘meaning of life’. 
Love, Diederik

"First the fish needs to say: Somethin' ain't right about this camel ride...and I'm feeling so damned thirsty.” ~ Hafez
 
Love how Hafez addresses my sense of dis-ease. About twenty years ago, I realized that there was something drastically wrong how I was choosing to live my life. Over and over, I made a sadly misdirected attempt to quench my ever present thirst for Truth with booze. There had to be a better way. There is. Choose Again.
Love, Diederik

"Remembering and Forgetting. You have not forgotten to remember; you have remembered to forget. But people can forget to forget. That is just as important as remembering to remember – and generally more practical." ~ Idries Shah

​Forgetting is remembering better. I have to learn to forget, or, rather, forgive, the past I invented. That past I seem to remember never was True and only served to prop up old ideas about the ‘s’ self. As I heal or release these ideas I begin to remember. What I remember has nothing to do with people, places or time. It has to do with the infinite ‘S’ Self.
Love, Diederik

"As long as man was in the moonlight he desired to reach the moon…there was bliss in the moonlight but the moon itself was distant. Moonlight was near but man longed for the moon…man reached the moon but there he was without moonlight.” ~ Wasif Ali Wasif
 
A wonderfully poetic way of teaching that ‘what is’ is all I want. I constantly long, yearn, ache for something ‘other’ than ‘what is’ and when I get that ‘other’ it becomes the ‘what is’ and now, again, I want ‘other’. Are we all rolling on the floor laughing yet? If I am not finding all of this extremely funny I am seeing it wrongly. Happiness is that moment, fleeting as it may be, when I am free of all desire. 
Love, Diederik

“What is sin? All that binds you.” ~ Nisargadatta
 
What a remarkably wide ranging definition of ‘sin’. Could it just come down to the idea that ‘sin’ is every thought, every opinion, every personal belief that contradicts Oneness can be seen as ‘sin’? 
Love, Diederik

"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." ~ Carl Jung
 
To be able to talk about what I find ‘disgusting’ within and have it received as just information with no judgment is the end of loneliness. There is no there there. 
Love, Diederik

"Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
 
The way I see this now is to consider the relationship to be a container. Within the container everything, absolutely everything, leads to a deepening of Love and, here is the good news, there is nothing outside the container. Whatever happens in the relationship is within the container. 
​Love, Diederik

In the last of our video series, Diederik responds to a question about NOT being in a Relationship.
Christina wonders if she is running away from healing by not being in a relationship, and Diederik reminds her that being gentle with herself is an important part of this work.