After last week’s crazy roller coaster ride of fighting fears and emotional overflow, I suddenly noticed this calmness within me. It was a warm pulsating centered feeling. It was like I held a big ball of warmness, a personal sun shining within me. It felt like nothing could ever rock me out of balance. Was it possible that I had already attained nirvana?

Last week I had been more or less like a raging bull in how I went about my daily life. Eager not to miss out on anything. This week was quite the opposite. I still felt the importance of taking utterly care of each and every day, but now I turned my focus within me.  Victor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, has said: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”  And during this whole week it was like I had this space constantly present, not needing to pace or stop myself to listen to it. It was just there. Naturally. I felt as though I was put half on mute, and that I wasn’t rushing off anywhere. I was still. Here. Now.

I rarely hasted through a conversation. I took my time. I was almost always pondering what the other one said. It wasn’t like I was pushing this behavior at all, it was more like a natural state within me. Even though fears were trying to attack me, and different events in life were trying to disturb my peace; they couldn’t one bit shake me off my innermost, now wholehearted soul. I’ve lived with Frankl’s quote in mind, for maybe one and a half year or so, because it holds something very beautiful and essential to me. Since I quite often am in the middle of things, always on the go to the next event, project or what not, I more often than not have been reactive. Ever since I heard Frankl’s quote I started to remind myself of it’s importance. To stop, listen, and choose my response. To be proactive instead. It also has very deep rooted loving qualities, it’s about the kind of a person I want to be for the people in my life. I want to be someone who truly sees and hears them. All of a sudden it felt like I finally had learnt the lesson. Even though it was a rather strange feeling to be this still, I felt awesome.

I continued my bead ritual of setting my intentions and releasing them in the morning. Maybe in some sense I was lacking that fierce forceful action compared to the week before, but I paid full attention to every situation I found or put myself in. At some point this week I realized I wasn’t in need of anything. And the realization of not being in need made me realize that I already felt that I had all that I needed. I was somehow living Gandhi’s quote on happiness. Friends I met this week all affirmed my inner feeling of calmness, and I’m sure it wasn’t just me who thought this to be a bit odd.

So did I somehow manage to attain nirvana? Not nirvana, but maybe the first step of getting there. I think some of this calmness was a reaction to me being so hyper and living life fully the week before. But it’s not the whole truth. It wasn’t some magic luck that I all of a sudden had found inner peace. And it wasn’t an overnight shift either, but rather a long process that finally made a clear cut shift  of how I view things. It wasn’t until the end of the week that I realized, that I had actually set very clear intentions of how I wanted to live my life when we started this project. And the fact was that they were starting to manifest beautifully in my life. This week was no different when it came to intention setting. So what did I enforce this week that made my life shift in this manner?

It was something so incredibly simple, yet something I usually forget.

I put myself first, no matter what. Not the outward me, but the innermost me. As a reaction to last weeks craziness, I had now set the intention in the morning to follow my heart, to listen and act upon what I deeply wanted and needed in my life. So it wasn’t luck at all, it was very intended action.

The strange thing is, that before The Bead Movement, I believed myself to be aware of the importance of listening to my heart and to put myself first. But what I realized this week was that I never before so powerfully intended it or intentionally implemented it in my life. And that forceful action was what made this shift happen. I deeply believe that it’s not until we put ourselves first that we can be of any help to others. It’s not until we love ourselves fully, that we can love someone else wholeheartedly. It’s a matter of getting out of our own way, and stepping into our walking boots to get to business of how we want to lead our lives. It’s about being at peace, so we can see others, not for how we perceive them, but for who they truly are. And most fundamentally to let the people in our lives be the ones they want for themselves, not necessarily what we want them to be. It’s about being able to stop, to see and to listen. Because genuinely, that is who I want to be.

Love, Johanna