Learnings of the last months

After rediscovering posts from my old ivodr.com blog, I decided to bring my travel stories back to life—making them accessible again and preserving the memories of an incredible journey I returned from just over two years ago.

This is Post #9, the final post of this series!

📍 Find all my travel posts here.

I’m sitting in a bus from Istanbul to Munich, somewhere around Salzburg. The trip went very smooth and I think I’ll make it home today! Sooooo exciting!

Sticking to an old habit, I used some of the time of this bus ride, attempting to consciously transition from the last phase of my life, open ended travel, to the next one, time at home with family and friends.

I would like to share three learnings of the last months that I consider most important for me. While the travels with all the new stimuli and challenges provided a fertile soil for learning, I actually feel that my spiritual practice of the last months and years, was a major and definitely necessary ingredient for these learnings.

1. What to do with my time?

After removing all todos and commitments from my life and giving myself the freedom to do whatever I want, I reached certainty that the best thing to do with my time is to love and learn - in the most general sense.

With loving I mean holding myself and others in love and acting in order to help them be well and to reduce their suffering.

Learning for me means learning about life, getting wiser and opening my heart, in order to love better and creatine less harm in the world.

By doing this, we learn to get less caught up in self-centered stories created by the mind, that cause us to act out of greed, fear and desire.

2. Life takes care

Listening to life and following its signs was one of my main intentions for this trip and some of the best moments happened when I followed it (See also “About letting go”).

I don’t mean being reckless or careless, but I mean approaching every day, every minute with curiosity and without fixed ideas of how things should go. So much in life is random, and if we can only be happy when things go in one specific way, we will be disappointed a lot. On the other hand, if we are open to whatever life brings, we discover that there are many good ways of how things can evolve. And even if sometimes we run into less pleasant situations (e.g. standing in the darkness for two hours and not being picked up by a car), usually they are not killing us and they always give us material to work with and learn.

Next time you find internally resisting to any situation (physical or mental), try letting go of the resistance and checking if there are any opportunities or if there is anything to learn. Particularly interesting and useful learnings are those about how to deal with your own mind - because that’s where pretty much all suffering comes from.

3. We are always held by and connected in love - even if through our minds, the world appears very different

I tried, but I currently don’t feel comfortable writing more about this. The only thing I want to say is that experiencing the world like this is deeply freeing and has positive repercussions across your and other people’s lives.

And, this experience of the world is shared across practitioners from many traditions and that it’s absolutely reachable within a some years of dedicated practice.