Blog Posts

  David Harry Stewart Heidi and I interviewed the high end fashion and advertising photographer, David Harry Stewart, as part of our "Conscious Ageing" series that you can find on our website, thewisdomfactory.net. I, if not Heidi, approached the conversation with some trepidation because David is a very talented artist, which is a "genre" of person whom I've always held in a bit of awe, like another kind of creature in contrast to me.  So how would we relate personally? Luckily, he turned promptly into a human who was very personable and seemed interested in who we were also.  Thus the talk flowed quite easily among the three of us so that as we got "into it" some insights emerged.  One of those I want to talk about. As he [...]

Life is all about love - even if we don’t want to admit it. We desperately need the love from our caregivers in childhood and later we search love in our relationships. And all our life long we are trying to figure out how love increases and with that our happiness. Happiness enters our life when we FEEL happy with whatever happens in or around us! - That seems to be a contradiction in itself: how can you feel happy when unfortunate things occur, when you lose your job or a loved one? What is happiness? Sitting - a spiritual practice which can lead to equanimity Well, we are talking about 2 different ways happiness is understood. Often people think they will be happy when they have reached x, or [...]

AGEING is a taboo topic - probably because it is connected with DEATH - and everyone fears death and tries to avoid it. Well, we all know that we cannot avoid death, this is the only certainty we have in life, but we don't want to be reminded that our time on earth is limited. Collectively we live in fear of death and hope in magical thinking that it won't visit us if we don't speak about it - with the result that the FEAR increases into excessive levels. What if we knew that dying is a great experience? Love and light is expecting us and we will literally "come home"? There is a lot of evidence that our death will be an incredible experience. Below I will post some videos regarding [...]

What do you want in your life as a young person? What do we Desire from Life From early on we are asked - and we ask ourselves: where do you want to arrive in your life? As a teenager or young adult, it seems to be all about the profession and about love and creating a family. Later the focus shifts to being successful in our career, as parents or in whatever else we are doing. Then, very often between 40 and 50, there comes a moment of crisis, of re-orientation, of thinking over our goals and our values. This happens often in consequence of the children leaving home, the spouse getting oriented elsewhere or a burnout at work. Other scenarios are possible, like losing the job, encountering bankruptcy etc. They [...]

When you realize that life is not eternal you most likely ask yourself questions like "What can I do to become wise and calm now that I am getting older?". For someone, it starts around the 50ies birthday, for others later or even earlier. It is the eternal quest: Why do we live here on earth and what are we meant to be and to do. The 4 Quadrants - Spiral Dynamics Integral NL Integral Theory gives us a good map about what to consider when we want to give answers to questions of whatever kind. Regarding our personal life, Ken WILBER, TERRY PATTEN (who will be guest in our Conscious Ageing Series, too) and 2 others have written a most valuable book "INTEGRAL LIFE PRACTICE" which gives indications and [...]

Possibility through the energy of our heart So what are our possibilities - especially when getting older? Since the New Age times, we believe that we have infinite possibilities - if we only think positive. Well, this is right and not right. It is not just that you WANT something and then it HAPPENS - although many promoters of the Law of Attraction try to make us believe. They are not wrong, but things are not so simple as they tell people - who then get frustrated if it didn't work out for them. In "The Science of Possibility" Jon Freeman talks about similar things which can happen, about our potential to make them happen - and about the difficulty to open up the potential and allow it to become [...]