Tag: sea

Entering Turkey, first impressions and getting bugged down hard on a wild beach (October 2022)

After having a magical time in Strandzha in Bulgaria, I crossed the border to Turkey. The border crossing went without any problems and I got the first stamp in my fresh passport.

In the first city I entered, I immediately felt how different Turkey was. It seemed very lively to me. In every settlement there was something like a central area where people met, hung out and lived their social life. I very rarely eat meat or fish, but when I saw the Köfte restaurant, I couldn’t resist. I’ve loved koefte for years and the ones I got there were minimalistic and delicious.

I took a long walk around the small town and bought different foods to try, a sim card, talked to a lot of different people and got a bit of a feel for how things were going in this new country. What impressed me the most was that the Turkish people seemed to be very talkative. They weren’t afraid of language barriers and seemed very friendly, interested and hospitable.

After that, I continued my trip and went to a wild beach on the Black Sea coast. This beach reminded me a lot of the big beach near Varna where I had spent a lot of time. But to get to this beach in Turkey, Rosinante and I had to go through some muddy off-roading and very narrow passages. We even got lost, but some friendly locals helped us finding the right way. That was a lot of fun. When I reached the beach, I met a very friendly goatherd and we had a nice conversation via Google Translate.

I stayed for a few days of hanging around at the beach, bo staff training, meditating, making music and so on and during these days only the goat herder visited me again, then I continued on my way. Because it would have been be an insanely long trip to return to the road and continue from there, I decided to take the shortcut and drive along the beach. I scouted the beach first, because I didn’t want to hopelessly bug down Rosinante on this wild beach. So I dropped the pressure in her tires to about one bar and took off. Everything was going great until we approached the last little slope that would lead to the exit of the beach. All the momentum I had built up was swallowed up in a second by that little slope and Rosinante’s tires immediately started digging themselves into the sand. Looking at the situation from the outside, I knew this was going to be a tough one. The sand was super soft and Rosinante’s rear axle was already touching it. I took my time and dug very well. I placed my two large aluminum recovery boards and the two small leveling blocks to get a little more traction. I locked Rosinante’s rear differential, let her slowly crawl onto the boards, and once she was there, I let her take off and build some momentum. The little slope swallowed it all with a big appetite. After three meters, Rosinante lay down on the sand like a sleeping whale. So I dug again. And it took me some time to find the leveling blocks because they were buried deep in the sand. After the second digging, I sent Rosinante forward again. The appetite of the slope didn’t seem to be satisfied. Again, it swallowed Rosinante’s entire momentum in just a meters. So I dug again. I dug out and placed the boards and leveling blocks. I launched Rosinante. And the slope got another feast of momentum. So I dug again, dug and placed the boards and leveling blocks, launched Rosinate and… finally we reached solid ground again.

Mutual triggering, pain patterns, and the analytical way (October 2022)

When I was not in Varna, I spent my time at that magnificent beach, which Artha and I had discovered on our trip to the south. This place was just perfect for beach life and life in nature. I found an awesome spot for Rosinante right between the beach and the sand dunes.

Every morning, I took a run on the beach, through the dunes, and through the forest. And these mornings were super magical: when the sun hit the ocean wafting clouds of water emerged from it to dissolve shortly after in a soft breath of the wind. There were only a few other people from time to time and life there felt good, calm, and profound. For one week, I had neighbors from Germany and France who lived about two kilometers down the beach. We had nice and interesting conversations about the minimalistic and cheap car life.

For weeks I switched between Varna and the beach and it felt like this life at that beach allowed me to deeply feel, digest, and process the experiences of the city life with Artha.

As strong as the unconditional love and connection between Artha and me was, as strong was our mutual triggering. Sometimes it felt like the universe had brought us together to let us grow with each other. That we just were the perfect match in all regards. Including our triggers. The energies between us were so dynamic and strong… I remember that I told a friend that with Artha and me everything was possible. Even killing each other I could not rule out. We were never aggressive toward each other, but it just felt like really everything was possible.

Artha and I had profound conversations about our feelings, emotions, past, triggers, and everything else and this exchange felt so intense and healing to me than very few things or times in my life had been before. I believe that it felt like that because this unconditional love and compassion between us was always present and undoubted.

For example, I described to her how some of my triggers
in romantic relationships had been working. A big part of my life these patterns had been very strong. At that time in Bulgaria with Artha, the triggers did not go so hard and mostly the process stopped pretty early in this cascade of emotions, triggers, and thoughts.

But still, I described the whole thing: I was feeling very stressed for a good part of my past. These stress levels went up and down like waves. The reasons for feeling stressed may arise when I was adding a lot of ego stuff to the things I was doing and experiencing. When I was feeling stressed, a habit/ mechanism/ pattern got triggered more easily. But most easily it got triggered when a deeply loved person changed the behavior she is showing towards me in a way that my ego perceived as negative and unpleasant. When my small ego added stories based on my fears to this change of behavior the triggering got intense. The closer I felt connected to a person, the higher the potential of the triggering to happen got and the higher the potential of strength got. I thought it was like that because the fear increases if the ego feels like there is more to lose.

Once triggered, I felt insufficient and like I was not capable of being right, doing things right, or being enough and therefore I felt like I did not deserve the love of anybody. If I did not recognize and accept this arising of doubt, I was feeling like I’ll lose the love of the other person. Mostly this made me feel sad. It triggered a fear of being alone and not loved in me. When I was not triggered, I felt not strongly dependent on external love but when I was triggered, this feeling of dependence arose strongly.

I was starting to feel annoyed by this feeling of my inability and that started frustrating and stressing me. And this stress even triggered me more. I was losing the love and compassion for myself which added to the triggering and a whirlwind of heavy energy caught me.

Shortly after that, I was transforming/ projecting this annoyance from myself onto the other person. So I start to feel annoyed with the other person. I started to search for “mistakes” the other person made. For something that my ego resonated with and that made it feel attacked. It felt like a protective mechanism to make me feel better and somehow tell myself that it is not me who is wrong but the other person.

From there on a part of me was searching for mistakes and “wrong” things about the other person. The perceiving of the behaviors, opinions, and basically everything I had loved about the other person, would now turn completely. I was getting annoyed by basically everything the other person was doing. I got mad at her and sometimes I even started to hate her. Sometimes I recognized this unfair twist and that did even add strength to the trigger because then I was feeling mad and annoyed by myself as well.

A part of me started searching for reasons that would show me that I did not like or need the other person. So that if the other person would leave me, I would be fine with that and I would even appreciate it. A part of me started to persuade itself that I did not want to have whatever relationship with that person in the first place.

I was starting to reject that person to protect myself from getting hurt if she would reject me. So basically this whole thing seems to be about the fear of getting rejected, not loved, and being alone.

When or through what I had established this mechanism, I don’t know. I think at least a part of it is like a basic human pattern that gets pushed by the small mind/ ego.

Right now as I’m writing this all of that sounds so analytical and thoughtful. Like desperately searching for an intellectual, logical explanation that gives a sense to whatever happens. And I guess, that at least partly it was exactly that.

Artha and I were opening more and more to each other. And it felt like this opening would never stop. Like we dived together into each other and everything was possible. And this process felt like healing unhealthy patterns and concepts nested deep, deep inside of me. But it was very challenging and demanding as well. Sometimes I felt I would like to flee. I thought about running away from everything and just continuing to travel somewhere south. But at the same time that did just not feel right. And I loved Artha so much in so many ways and that strong connection between us felt so unique and profound.

To be continued…

Discovering unconditional love and new friends (September 2022)

After our gorgeous days at the beach, I brought Artha back to Varna and headed north along the coastline of Bulgaria. At the Beglika festival, I got some recommendations for nice spots at the beaches and so I started exploring. Like most of the time, I had no plans but a rough direction. But this time it was different. I felt like I did not want to go so far away from Varna. I guess, at that time, I would never have gone south to Turkey and left Bulgaria.

I found a very nice beach of seashells. The whole beach was covered with seashells! I never had seen something like this before and found it interesting. In one direction was a long cliff perfect for walking and after one kilometer in the other direction a small boardwalk started. I had calm walks, some french fries and enjoyed my time there a lot.

One day a French family arrived and after getting to know each other, we spent some evenings together. We talked about life in cars, France, Germany, Bulgaria, freedom, music, and everything else. the father used to play the guitar and his wife and daughter were singing along. They gave me a little concert once and I loved it. I told them that they really should practice playing and singing the theme song of the movie “The Last Unicorn”. Mhhh. I’ll ask them if they did. They just wrote me, that they found a good old truck in France and will now start to convert it into a home and go to Marocco next year.

Making a lot of electronic music on my iPad I more and more thought about getting a real acoustic instrument. I had been thinking about that for a long time but for some weeks the feeling grew stronger. Maybe a Handpan, a flute, a keyboard, or a Didgeridoo?

During that time, I felt something had changed inside of me. Of course, everything is always changing. But, you know, sometimes it just feels like something changed and is different now. From my perspective right now as I’m writing this, I have different feelings about it than the ones I had back there at the seashell beach. Back there, I felt like something big and heavy got lifted off my shoulders. And without that heavy thing, I profoundly experienced that there is unconditional love. And with that, I mean real unconditional love. The love, one can feel for someone else without any expectations, without any doubt, without limits. Studying a lot of Buddhism, the idea/ the descriptions were very familiar to me, but it felt like I did not let this unconditional love I was always feeling for certain people because with it would come a burden. The burden of having to feel that love forever and the burden to show and deliver it constantly. It’s crazy to describe and in a way it does not make logical sense, I guess. But what is the logical sense when it comes to feelings? And especially when it comes to love?

This change inside of me opened and brightened my heart. I don’t know how that time with Artha at that lonely beach contributed to that change, but I’ll be forever deeply thankful for it to have happened. Or maybe it did not happen that time. Right now, I feel like this opening of myself for feeling and living pure love and compassion is happening all the time but at the seashell beach I just really recognized it. Experienced it.

I had profound and honest conversations with my best friends back in Germany and step by step I opened up more and more. I let go of fears about expectations and burdens and made myself vulnerable by telling them that I indeed love them.

In one of my last posts, I wrote about the time I had together with my friend Michele. In that post, I wrote that I love him. Before the opening that I’m trying to describe here, I would not have written that. I would have felt like I can’t do that because it would force me to feel and show that unconditional, limitless love forever.

The most profound conversations I had with Cori. I can’t remember that I had such honest, pure, profound, and loveful conversations in my life. We got to know and love each other back in Germany and always had a joyful, loveful, compassioned, and deep time together. Before I left Germany, we traveled a little bit together and she visited me back in Greece. That time in Greece was partly very exhausting and challenging for me. You can read about it in the older posts. Later, in July and August, I felt a distance growing between Cori and me. At the seashell beach, I experienced the love between us in a very different way. I felt how unconditional and pure it was. That it did not know any measurement of distance. Cori had experienced that for a long time like that. I just felt like I opened myself and allowed myself to feel it. To take it from her and let myself feel it for her in a pure way that does not need any explanation.