About Bicycles And Unconditional Love

My dad’s gout is somewhat better – although it’s not fully healed, yet. My wicked sister has been planning and plotting more evil plans. It seems like she’s unstoppable! I’ve had a successful intake with another potential client and picked up coaching with someone else. And I am very, very excited for my birthday weekend! 25 hours of birthday: here I come! 😀 (We revert to standard time or winter time on the last Sunday of October, giving me an extra hour to feel extra special, hehe)

How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you

• Rupi Kaur •

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While deciding what to write about, thinking I’ve had a “dull week”, it hit me: I learned to love myself unconditionally.

Hah! Talk about a dull week. Only I can think of calling it that 😉

Two major things happened: the unconditional love thing, which, ironically, I have my wicked sister to thank for and will mention after Queen.

And I’ve got a new bike!

Now, I know most of the people who visit my blog might not get this, but in the Netherlands pretty much everyone has a bicycle. We ride it everywhere we can.

I know I do.

(Unless it rains, but I am terribly lazy practical)

Here it is, my new city bike:

Simple, elegant, completely new and all mine! (Don’t let the arrow fool you – it’s a screenshot ;))

My dad took me to this giant bicycle store where they even had a “bike-way” running across the shop floor, to take the vehicles for a test ride.

We had two options singled (or is that “doubled”?) out, and I once again experienced the difference between men and women as I left both my dad and the salesman astonished by choosing the “basic” bicycle over the “more sportive, extra features added to it”-one.

Honestly, I don’t care. It has two wheels, a steering wheel, functioning brakes and lights, I’m good. Nothing was worse than what I had before (which, considering the total loss state my poor old bicycle ended up in, might not have been too hard a thing to accomplish for any bike).

So now I am the proud owner of a new bike! My last one stayed with me for… 15 years at least, so hopefully I won’t have to buy another new one before I’m 50 😉

So, yes, the unconditional love thing.

You might remember my wicked sister being, well, wicked. And mean. And childish. And rotten in general, but only when we’re not present.

This week, I told my mother: “if me being single is the only thing she can come up with to hurt me, she doesn’t know me that well at all.”

My mother then confessed my sister is always cornering her with questions about me: why don’t I have a decent job yet? How come I keep wasting my time on my “business” (quotation marks intended)? Do I ever intend on moving out?

My goodness, where have we gotten to? That’s what I wondered as I sat down to meditate.

I wish I could find a way to let go of all this negative energy, I thought, because I don’t want her to get under my skin.

Sometimes it’s good that Google/YouTube catches your thoughts and turns them into video recommendations.

I stumbled upon a wonderful (yet Dutch so cannot share) meditation on loving the parts of yourself you don’t love right now.

You are here. You are a piece of me, therefore I embrace you

(translated piece from the meditation)

• Meara Luz •

In this meditation, you focus on feeling an overflow of love in your heart with every inhale, and then exhaling-and-sending that love to where it’s needed most inside you.

For instance: I spent this meditation sending love to my head, where I could sense my frustrations about myself and my reactions regarding my sister were located.

Because, as the meditation-voice said: “the parts of us we do not love (yet) need more love, not less.”

That’s how I found out I love myself unconditionally. With my good sides and all my bad sides.

Because a day after doing this meditation, instead of complaining about my sister the way we now do so often in our family, I started joking about the situation in general.

The air’s lifted, people’s spirits are lifted, and the heaviness in my mind has dissolved.

Unconditional love, people, begins in your own heart and expands into the realms of your soul you’d rather hide from. But once you embrace them, good things can and will happen.

That’s all about my week. How was yours?