My grandson Bram is fifteen and a top athlete. He was selected as a youth goalkeeper by FC Volendam. Due to injuries and a few other reasons, he became overstressed and burnt out[1]. He ended up in a slump because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to realize his dream of becoming a professional footballer. His shoulders slumped even further than usual... And that's how he ended up with grandma.
I taught him to overlay The Flower as a template over his own life.[2] He got exercises, including the 'heart opener'[3], to experience himself again through his body. And we had regular short and profound conversations.
At one point, Bram came to me with a question about dying. "Grandma, what happens to the body, to the person when you die? How do you feel about that, what do you believe?" I had an insight and picked up the empty Coca-Cola bottle he had on his table. 'Look, this bottle is your personality. It represents your body, your emotions, and your thoughts - the three petals of the flower. This bottle cannot exist without the emptiness inside and around it. Do you see that? If there was no emptiness, there would be no bottle."[4]
He needed a moment for that. He looked and looked - and then he saw it. When the penny dropped, I could continue: "That emptiness - that is who you essentially are: the heart of your flower. That's your intuition, your inner voice, or whatever you want to call it. You can't see, smell, hear, feel, or touch that emptiness. But you can experience it. Because deep in your heart, you 'know' that the bottle only exists by the grace of the emptiness. Well, with your conception, your bottle arose. And now, during your life, you are both that emptiness and your bottle. Just as your bottle arose during your conception and took shape in the nine months that followed, so it will also pass during the process of your dying. And that emptiness - that is 'who' you were before your birth and 'who' you will be after your death - just emptiness."
There was a moment of silence. I saw how he absorbed everything and understood it while still not being able to fully comprehend it. And I understood that very well, because it took me a whole life to let this insight sink in deeply. And I'm still working on it...
Next time, I'll tell him about my insight that this emptiness is not something to be afraid of, as I used to be myself. Because I had learned that emptiness is something dark and scary, to be avoided at all costs. I'll let him feel that this is a filled emptiness. An emptiness that sparkles, lives, is energy, and light. And I'll tell him about the paradox that the bottle is also emptiness and emptiness is the bottle.[5] But not all at once. You don’t need to see the whole staircase to take the first step.[6]
I put the bottle back on the table and gave Bram a kiss. And I knew: a Coca-Cola bottle would never be just a Coca-Cola bottle for both of us again.
When the jug that contains the light breaks, where does the light go? [7]
- [1] I find 'overspannen' (overstrained) a fitting word: the nerves are over-strained, that's all, neither more nor less. And so it is with burnout: you are burnt out, there is danger because your energy battery is on reserve mode.
- [2] See Blog 5, The Flower as Template
- [3] You lie on a blanket on the ground with a large towel, tightly rolled up, just below your shoulder blades, and your arms spread out beside you like a cactus: _|. Let yourself sink into your body. Surrender completely to the ground that supports you. Experience your breath and feel how your lungs expand. Also feel how your heart gets all the space to open up. Stay lying like this for five minutes in attention to your body, your breath, and your heart.
- [4] See Eva Wolf, The Flower (2022), chapter 14.1 and 14.2.
- [5] 'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.' This is the essence of the Heart Sutra, one of the core scriptures of Buddhism.
- [6] "You don’t need to see the whole staircase to take the first step." Martin Luther King Jr.
- [7] Source unknown.