I ended part 2 with the moment I started to notice gross sensations in a very specific area of my body. My uterus and vagina. There was a lot going on there 😳.

I need to set a record straight. The word gross in this context does not mean disgusting 😅. It’s the word Goenka, the teacher uses for ‘big’. So I felt big sensations.

I felt it tingle, waves of energy flowing through me. This will sound strange, but almost felt like there was a moving object inside of me. An energetic being making itself known through sensations.

As per the instruction, I observed it as much as I could with an equanimous mind. But there were a lot of emotions that came with it.

The first wave of emotions came when it occurred to me that I had been single my entire forties. I felt sadness about that, even though I consider myself a happy single woman.

But the sadness was real. I hadn’t known it sat there until I had nowhere left to hide from it, or distract myself. I cried for a while. Tears were running down my face. All in silence. Whilst being around over 50 other souls who were immersed in their own inner worlds.

Anicca. Nothing is permanent. Everything arises and passes.

This isn’t just a nice line I picked up there. I actually felt it happen, in that moment, to that specific grief. Once it had moved through me, that area in my body strangely somehow became new fertile ground. Open to receive. Something else started to bloom.

My uterus shared her wisdom

On day 6 to 8, I kept having these sensations in my sacral area. Those sensations didn’t feel painful, just tingly. Like Tinkerbell was wandering around with her magical wand leaving tiny sparks.

With those sensations, new thoughts arose.

A little backstory. I hadn’t consciously decided to stop dating. I just had two really nasty experiences with men who didn’t accept no for an answer. Both had led to stalking situations. The last one, I even needed the police to get involved as this guy drove 90 minutes to just sit inside his car parked in front of my house scaring the shit out of me.

Somehow that experience got under my skin and I decided to stay away from dating for a while. Apparently subconsciously it even turned into me not allowing men to approach me at all. A part of me started to believe most single men were nasty.

So, when, during the meditation, I began to have thoughts about exploring what dating could look like, it changed my inner state from aversion into curiosity. That’s a big deal!

The actual wisdom came on day 10.

Years ago, when I moved back to the Netherlands after living in Bali, I made a decision that I was only choosing JOY going forward.

On the plane from Denpasar to Amsterdam, I did a whole exercise on what that actually meant, and part of it was digging into what I call my JOY givers, the things that always light me up. One of my biggest ones is having deep, meaningful one-on-one conversations with fun and wise people.

On day 10, whilst still noticing these sensations in my uterus and vaginal area, I remembered having meaningful one-on-one conversations as being one of my biggest JOY givers.

I started seeing dating not as a search for an outcome, but as an opportunity to have beautiful one-on-one conversations with fun and wise single men. I also remembered how I approach most things in life: for the experience of it, not the outcome.

This now feels so obvious. It also takes so much pressure off dating. I’m excited about it.

The week after the course, I ended up meeting quite a few men in Austin and I already had the most fun and deep conversations, just because I changed how I view men (and dating).

I am truly grateful for this insight coming from sitting in silence for 10 days.

The moment you finally get to talk again

They lift the silence on day 10, after the morning group sit. They do this to ease your transition back to normal life. You still aren’t allowed to talk inside the meditation hall, but outside, suddenly you can talk to the other women.

That was so nice.

And weird.

Sitting next to each other for 10 full days, I had started to build stories based on people’s resting faces, like ‘she must hate this, she must be so bored, she looks angry, she looks so zen’.

All projections. I didn’t know if any of it was true. And let me tell you, most actually wasn’t 😅.

The actual moment was after we all walked out of the meditation hall, still in silence.

The minute we were outside a flood of sounds spread through the air.

A sudden flow of chatter after total quiet. Hearing your own voice out loud again. Yes, mine still worked. Listening to their experiences and sharing mine was amazing. And funny. One of the women, a medical doctor, shared how during the first body scan on day 4, which lasted 2 full hours, she kept thinking ‘this could have been an email’. 🤣🤣🤣.

I actually had my own story around that same 2-hour sit. Watching all of us come out of that sit, walking as stiff as we were, we looked like zombies to me, and I had the Cranberries song stuck in my head afterward. 🎵Zombie, Zombie, Zombie he, he, he, he, he🎵.

In that moment we actually became a group. With shared language, stories and laughter.

When I say (in Goenka’s low bass voice):

Work diligently, diligently, diligently.

Patiently and persistently, patiently and persistently

Continuously, continuously, continuously.

You’re bound to be successful. You’re bound to be successful.

The people that have gone through the 10-day Vipassana will smile. It instantly brings us back into the meditation hall.

After lunch on day 10 you also get your phone and other items back. It was fascinating to watch, in myself and in everyone else, what that did to us. There was a really clear difference in generation.

The millennials and older among us were more like, ‘I don’t know if I even want to turn this back on yet’. Knowing how much of our attention we allow our phones to take from us. Generation Z and Alpha turned them on immediately and were back in it, scrolling, within seconds. You could see, so clearly, how much of their life actually is behind and inside of that screen. This is no judgement, just an observation.

Turning my phone on, later that day, was an event. The flood of notifications.

My friend who I talked about in part one, had sent me a few whatsapp messages to ‘check if I still had my phone off’ during the past 10 days. his last message was one of pure encouragement!

The final hours

Even though it’s a 10-day experience, you actually leave on day 11. In the morning you have one last group meditation sit. I felt super emotional. Tears were running down my face during his last ‘Bhavatu, sabba, mangalam’ and then our shared ‘Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu’

I knew this wonderful bubble was going to end. I would get back into normal life, which, don’t get me wrong, I love so much! But the goodbye still felt emotional.

Going through this experience, I feel mostly gratitude. For the stronger connection with myself. My mind, my body and my spirit. But I also witnessed something even bigger.

We all walk through life thinking we’re separate from each other. That you and I are two different beings. That’s all an illusion though. It’s temporary. Anicca, not permanent. Underneath it, we’re not separate. We’re created from the same energy source. Having your own physical body and personality doesn’t change that fact.

I experienced this during psychedelic events (ayahuasca and bufo alvarius) and now again just by sitting still for 100+ hours over the course of 10 days.

After our last group sit, we gathered in groups to clean our own rooms and the shared spaces. I joined in cleaning the meditation hall. I also set up the cushions for the next group that was going to start in just a matter of days. It felt special to prepare this for the people going after me.

In the weeks since I completed the course. I use my phone way less. I can feel, so much more clearly now, how fast I get pulled into an algorithm that doesn’t serve my wellbeing at all. How easily I hand over my attention, which is my actual power, to whatever is loudest outside of me instead of whatever is quietest inside.

I was already meditating regularly before this course, and I still am. I don’t follow the Vipassana practice. I sit and do a quick body scan, letting whatever arises come through. If I notice that I get ‘lost’ in a train of thought, I repeat a quick body sweep.

Most days I sit for 30 minutes or so. I don’t have a clock and because I don’t have to do a full hour, I don’t need to control the time 😅. When I feel inclined to open my eyes, I open them and that’s the natural end of my meditation.

Will I do it again and advise others to participate?

These are two other questions a lot of people ask me.

Right now, I don’t feel called to do it again. I am still integrating. I spoke with people who have done it multiple times. I wonder about that.

I have noticed, over the years working in personal development, that sometimes people stay in it because it feels good ‘to work on yourself’. That personal or spiritual development becomes something they chase or get addicted to. Usually not because they believe they’re great as they are. I am not interested in any of this.

Doing the course when I did it was exactly right. It lined up with turning 50, with my other responsibilities in the US, with that specific location taking applications at that exact time. It all fell together. That doesn’t mean the next right move is to go do it again.

People also ask me if I’d advise this to others. I genuinely don’t have an answer. I’d only advise it if you feel called to do so. So many people have told me they don’t believe they could do it.

My questions to them are always:

• What part exactly do you think you couldn’t do?

• Which part of you actually believes that?

• What’s the foundation of that belief?

Because most of the time, it’s your Ego offering you thoughts because it thinks it’s life-threatening. It won’t come out and say that. It will offer you sneaky thoughts instead like the ones I shared in part 2, and you just believe those.

Henry Ford said it correctly: ‘Whether you think you can do it or not, you’re right.’

Which brings me back to where this 3-part series started.

I wanted to do it for the experience of it. I wanted to meet myself. Looking back I am grateful for every single aspect of myself that I got to meet.

There wasn’t a goal, other than to complete it. Sit it out.

If any part of this series stirred something inside of you, I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Message me.

I’ll read and respond to every single one.

Love, Rianne

P.S. This Substack is the new home for my writing. I write about expansion, identity and self-expression. Mostly for the woman or man who knows how to make stuff happen, is ambitious, but not in the traditional sense of the word. It’s not about more stuff, more status or ego. It’s about experiencing more of who you are.

If that’s you. Subscribe to follow along!

My next article’s concept title is: ’Who am I in a room I’ve never been in?’

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I ended part 1 by saying the hardest part of this whole thing wasn’t my body, and it wasn’t even the silence. It was my own mind, working overtime, several times a day, trying to talk me into leaving.

My Ego didn’t want me to do this.

Ever since the course ended I told friends that I don’t think I could have completed it had I done it 10 years ago.

Back then, I had zero inner awareness. I was walking this earth blissfully unaware of my inner dialogue. I believed that every single thought that came to me actually came from me and therefore was obviously true to me. I believed all of them.

I hadn’t yet learned that the most important job of my Ego is to keep me safe inside my current perceived identity. My Ego doesn’t appreciate any deviation from what it considers my normal.

It wasn't until my forties that I realized, and this sounds obvious now, but it wasn't to me, that our identity is something we build from a really young age. Based on what people told us about ourselves. And then from that, we just judge everything. ‘Oh, this is for me. This isn't for me’. We never even ask ourselves: where is that judgment coming from? Why do I even think that? We just accept it as our own reality.

I’ve done a lot of inner development work over the past nine years. That allowed me to go through a mental challenge such as this 10-day silent meditation course. I knew beforehand my Ego would offer me thoughts to get me the hell out of there.

I’m able to laugh about all of it now, with a lot of respect actually for what a true mastermind my own Ego is.

Because the thoughts it offered me aren’t regular: ‘get the hell out, this isn’t safe’ thoughts. It’s way smarter.

It offered me thoughts that felt like they're mine, you know? That's the sneaky part. Because they feel and sound like my own thoughts, it's so easy to believe them. So easy to just... react like they're actually true. Which would have made me stand up and walk out.

I had one advantage: pure logistics. I took a rideshare from Houston to the meditation center, which was in the middle of nowhere, and the person who drove me there wasn’t the person who was going to drive me back.

I didn’t even know yet who that would be. There were no Ubers out there. So I was, quite literally, stuck. There was no easy way out. That probably also helped me more than any amount of discipline would have.

The thoughts my Ego offered me to get me to leave

The thoughts. Jeez, they were sneaky. The first one showed up on day 1.

There were 36 women and 18 men at our course, and a good handful of the men and women were of Indian descent.

One of the thoughts that came to me, early on, was something like:

That was my Ego, offering me a thought designed to get me to agree with it. Yes. This isn’t for me. Let’s get out.

I agreed with it. Sitting cross-legged was something I had been scared of beforehand. It was painful the first two days. My hips were burning and at times my legs went numb with that tingly feeling allover. It would have been so easy to believe my Ego and throw in the towel. Good thing I recognized the self-sabotage, laughed and stayed.

The second attempt came a few days later, when the teacher spent a full day talking about aversion, how we react when we don’t want something in our lives.

How we suffer because we don’t want things. And to me it felt super negative. With my background in marketing, I just associated that kind of talk with pain-point marketing. You know, the stuff that makes you feel bad about yourself so you’ll buy something. So my Ego handed me this thought:

I really don’t like marketing that presses deep into your pain when you try to sell something. So this thought felt true to me. And yet, nothing in this experience had anything to do with marketing. So again, I could see the sneaky tactics of my Ego. I laughed and stayed.

On day 8, my Ego really did its best. It shifted tactics. It had learned that negativity didn’t make me move, so let’s try compliments. Playing into my vanity by offering me these thoughts:

That one almost got me 🤣. It took a full day before I could actually see the thought for what it was. Not actual wisdom. Just my Ego, dressed up in a Halloween costume, pretending to be wise.

I still remember catching this on day 9. I was in my room, just before breakfast. I laughed so hard. I was also really impressed with how smart my Ego is.

I really enjoyed witnessing the game my Ego played with me all week. I am proud I won 🤩.

What actually got me

It wasn’t all fun and games. There was one mental thing I was not able to control at all, and it had nothing to do with wanting to leave.

So each sit is exactly one hour. Goenka's voice comes on for a few minutes at the start, then... silence. You're sitting there for like, 50 minutes or however long, and then his voice comes back at the end to bring you out of it.

The clock in the meditation hall was on a wall behind me. To check it I had to physically turn my body. From day 4 onward we’re invited not to move at all during sits, whatever aches or itches you have, you just observe it, you don’t shift.

The reason, they explain this, is that you actually have to feel the sensations to learn from them. If you make them go away by moving, you don’t learn to actually feel them long enought to watch them come up and pass. Your discomfort, your pain, it becomes the tool you're learning with.

So I couldn't see the clock, it was behind me. I had no idea, literally no idea how much time had passed and how much I still had to sit. And that's when it hit me. I really, really use time as a way to feel in control. I felt so annoyed.

So much so that on day 5 I chose to cheat.

I had packed an alarm clock and I smuggled it into the meditation hall under my blanket so I could quietly check the minutes without turning around.

Opening my eyes and tilting my head down to check the time meant moving my body, and thus breaking the one instruction that actually mattered. I moved my arms to push that little button so the little blue light would turn on and I could read the actual time. I was aware that I was out of integrity and still I chose to cheat.

On day 6 I started to feel really guilty about it. I left the alarm clock in my room only to bring it back on day 7. Out of maybe forty or fifty sits, I only made it through a full hour without checking the time about half the time.

So, whilst I was able to catch the thoughts trying to talk me into leaving, I absolutely believed the thoughts telling me I needed to know how much time had passed. Yes, I’ll admit it, I’m still human, far from enlightened. Thank god 😆. Still room to grow.

This is what helped me to get through

I do believe the structure itself helped tremendously. Probably more than any mental willpower. I liked how rigid it was.

Same seat, all ten days.

I can’t really explain it, but something about this group experience is what also kept me going. The schedule, all of us doing the same thing. It's so much easier to stay committed when you've got all that structure around you.

If I'd tried to do this at home, alone? That would have been so much harder. There’d be a hundred ways out. My integrity to my own promise would have to be so much higher (and harder to keep).

Here, I was just….going with everyone else. Walking away would have been way harder. No car, nowhere to go.

So I just... surrendered to it. And that's what kept me there. Wanting to complete it was my driver. The circumstances helped to actually complete it.

This surprised me the most

Now there’s one thing I did not see coming at all.

On day 5, I started to notice gross sensations in a very specific area of my body. My uterus and vagina. There was a lot going on there 😳

Read part three for what I was shown about my love life.

Subscribe and it lands in your inbox the day it’s out.

Love, Rianne

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That question fascinates me because it reflects a very goal-oriented way of looking at things. As if every single thing you want to do must have an outcome which must be known before you start.

I didn’t have a goal. I had a reason.

The same reason I have for most things in my life: the experience itself. I wanted to participate in a 10-day silent meditation course purely for the experience of it.

• What would I think?

• How would I feel?

• How would I react when it became challenging?

Eight years ago, Vipassana came into my life because a great friend of mine did it and told me how life-changing it was. He’s naturally very introverted, so being silent for 10 days wasn’t going to be a huge stretch for him. He spent most of his days quiet anyway.

I’m not introverted, more of an ambivert. But I live alone and there are plenty of days where I don’t hear my own voice aside from telling my somewhat overweight cat to stop begging for more food. The not-talking part of Vipassana never scared me. Other things did 😅. More on that later.

It had been on my bucket list ever since he shared his experience. I tried to enroll a few times over the years, but for first-time female students, getting in is a challenge. It fills up so quickly.

This year, however, the stars somehow aligned and I had the opportunity to do it in New Ulm, Texas. Not the most likely location for a woman from The Netherlands, but it coincided with me needing to be in the USA for work.

When I signed up and got accepted, I felt both excited and nervous. I obviously didn’t know yet what those 10 days actually looked like from the inside. Before I share what it did to me, let me just tell you what a 10-day Vipassana course actually is.

What is the 10-day Vipassana meditation course

10 days without your phone or any other electronics. You hand those in on day zero before it even starts. No books. No writing materials. No journal.

You have nothing to read, nothing to write and no one to talk to. Basically nothing to distract yourself with when it gets hard. And yes, it will get hard.

Just you, your thoughts, 11 hours of meditation a day, for 10 full days.

You wake up at 4am to a not-to-miss sound of a gong. You have half an hour to get ready before the first (meditation) sit at 4:30. Lights out is 9:30pm. In between there are eleven hours of meditation spread across the day, some of them alone, some of them in a meditation hall with everyone else. Sitting in total silence, because the talking stops the evening you arrive and doesn’t start again until day 10.

You receive two vegetarian meals per day, at 6:30 and 11 am. First time students also get a fruit break at 5 pm. You eat those in a dining hall where you have your assigned seat. You eat in silence and after every meal you wash your own plate and bowls. The only thing you hear is cutlery touching plates, water going into cups and the occasional sneeze.

Men and women are strictly separated. You have your separate residence buildings, walking paths and seats in the meditation and dining hall.

There’s no fee to enroll. It’s free. Genuinely free. The reason for this is that they invite you to have a similar experience to monks and nuns: you live off the generosity of other people, in this case the people who came before you and donated. They give you a room, food and the presence of a teacher to guide you along the way.

Only after you’ve completed the full 10 days are you invited to donate. If you want to, whatever you want. No one tells you what it costs to have you there. You’re paying so that other people can also have this experience.

What is Vipassana?

Underneath the rigid schedule and environment is the part that actually made me want to sign up.

The 10-day Vipassana course teaches a meditation technique from Buddha. I don’t mean the Buddhist religion. I mean Siddhartha Gautama, the actual human being who became enlightened during his life on earth and therefore received the title of Buddha.

He discovered that, basically, all suffering comes down to one of two things. We crave something we currently don’t have, and the lack of it creates suffering: the not-having. Or we experience something we don’t want, and the not-wanting creates suffering because we’re pushing against it. Craving and aversion. That’s it. That’s the cause of all of our misery.

Just deciding ‘I’m going to stop craving or pushing against it and just accept what is’ doesn’t actually do anything. Because craving and aversion don’t reside on a cognitive level. You have to go deeper, into the body.

You’re most likely aware that you have a conscious and unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind isn’t actually unconscious. It’s just unconscious to your conscious mind. It’s unconscious to you on a cognitive level.

It is, however, always, one hundred percent of the time, aware of your body. Every single sensation.

Noticing your own sensations

What Buddha discovered, through thousands of hours of sitting in meditation, is that the moment craving or aversion happens, your body does two things: It interrupts the natural flow of your breath and some kind of physical sensation shows up somewhere in your body.

Most of us never notice either of those two things, because we’re so busy paying attention to the outside world. To what we can see, hear and touch. We have zero to very little awareness of what’s happening underneath. The whole point of the 10 day training is to teach you to notice.

For the first three days all they invite you to do during meditation is to focus your attention on the tiny triangle of skin under your nose. The nostrils and the area above your upper lip. Nothing else.

Why? It’s to train your mind to become super focused on the tiniest shifts in sensations. Day 1, hour 1, you don’t feel any sensation and you’re distracted by every cough, hiccup or physical pain you experience.

But by hour 30 on day 3 you notice hot and cold, the difference in airflow from breathing in vs out. It’s almost mind-boggling to witness how focused your mind can become in such a short period of time.

From day four onwards, you use that new powerful skill to scan your entire body, inch by inch, learning to notice sensations. At first you’ll only notice the gross sensations: a tingling leg, pain in your butt, possibly a headache.

But, as the days progress, you start to notice more subtle sensations until you reach a point, and this only happened to me on a few occasions, where you actually notice that all that you are is pure vibration. I could observe my little pinky and just feel the energy flow. You transcend the physical aspect of your skin, nails and bones and all you experience is pure vibration.

It’s not just observing what they invite you to do. They ask you to observe with what they call an equanimous mind. Meaning you observe without any judgment.

They want you to feel every sensation, to observe without any reaction to it. This is basically the entire course.

Underneath all of it is the concept of ‘Anicca’: nothing is permanent, everything arises and passes. That itch, pain or ache in your thighs from sitting cross-legged for the 50th hour: it arises and, if you just watch it without needing it to go away, it passes. On its own. Every single time.

I didn’t believe that until I felt it happen.

My headaches no longer ache

I’ve been getting more headaches over the last few years, most likely because of perimenopause. Paracetamol (Tylenol) was doing less and less for me.

After Vipassana, nd I still can’t quite get over it, I just go inward. Before I even let myself label it as a headache, I observe the actual sensation. Is it throbbing? Moving? Where exactly? Where do I feel it and where don’t I?

Basically like a scientist I just observe the thing my human brain wants to call pain. Within a minute, sometimes two or three, I feel and see it arise and then pass. Gone.

I can cure my own headaches now. Even the big ones.

It’s not just headaches. A few days after the course ended, I was walking around downtown Austin in the heat, wearing fairly new sneakers, and I felt a blister starting to form. That annoying ache with every step you take.

I did the same thing. I sat down on a bench, closed my eyes and went into the actual sensation underneath it. With my focus on that sensation, I opened my eyes, stood up and started walking again. Watching the sensation arise and yes also pass. Back in the apartment, I saw the blister, but it didn’t hurt.

It’s the weirdest experience. A technique that Vipassana taught me that I can now apply in everyday life. What a gift.

Let’s get real

But, I also want to be really honest with you. Learning to observe a sensation calmly is one thing.

Ten days of doing absolutely nothing else, without your phone, any books or the option to write and no way to talk about what you’re going through, does something else to a person. It turns out the hardest part of Vipassana wasn’t my body, and it wasn’t even the silence. It was my own mind, working overtime, several times a day, trying to talk me into leaving.

In part two, I’ll share all the very sneaky things my Ego did to get me to leave.

Subscribe so you get part 2 straight in your inbox. No need to remember to come back and look for it.

Love, Rianne

It took me more than 18 months to admit to myself that I’d outgrown my business.

By every measure of revenue and profit, it has been a success. A podcast host recently asked me the obvious question: why am I walking away from it?

Wasn’t I grateful for what I had created? The impact it made on people?

I was.

She interrupted me. That sentence hit her, I could see it in her body. She felt that.

I saw her place her hands over her heart and repeated: ‘you can be grateful for what you have and want more.’

Being raised in a Christian household, as a woman, she was taught somewhere along the way that those two things don’t really go together. Wanting more was almost a synonym for being ungrateful.

A few days after our interview, she shared this moment, with a video clip of it, on LinkedIn. In the comments, I saw that people recognized themselves in her reaction.

Well, wait a minute. Something that made complete sense to me clearly didn’t to everyone.

I was raised somewhat Christian too. I say somewhat, because as a kid I attended church weekly, and if I remember correctly, we prayed before meals. But that was about it.

By 16, my parents let me choose whether I wanted to keep going. Turns out, as a teenager who loved going to the pub on Saturday evenings (yes, as a GenX kid in The Netherlands, that was available to us 😁), getting up early on Sunday just wasn’t a priority.

I never really subscribed to organized religion. I am not a Bible scholar, nor do I desire to be. So I went looking for Bible verses that suggest gratitude and wanting more don’t go together.

Hebrews 13:5 - ‘Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have’

Luke 12:15 - ‘Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.’

I can see how ‘be content with what you have’ can slowly turn into ‘If I want something else, apparently I’m not content with what I have’.

But, I just don’t believe that wanting more is evidence that we’re failing to appreciate what life (or God) has already given us.

You do something. It teaches you something. You discover something about yourself you couldn’t have known before. Because you know that now, you start wanting things you couldn’t have wanted before.

Gratitude and desire exist in the same arena. They go together, but they answer two completely different questions.

They don’t cancel each other out.

This is how I look at my previous Human Design business. I’m not ‘just’ grateful for the outcome. I’m grateful for the entire experience of it:

• for saying yes to the irrational invitation of a 70-something slightly weird man to study Human Design with him.

• for the amazing people who trusted me to teach Human Design, even when no one knew what it was and many others who thought I was too woowoo.

• for the online marketing skills I learned and applied so that I could invite more people for my offers.

• for the hate I received in the DMs from dogmatic Human Design followers.

• for the money this business generated, which let me invest in masterminds and coaches who introduced me to so many amazing new entrepreneurial friends.

None of this is fake. I feel this gratitude in my bones. I got to discover new parts of me.

The experience expanded me. And… it created desires that I couldn’t even have had 6 years ago.

I find it hard to believe that life (or God) would give us all these experiences, let us grow and discover more of ourselves through them, and then expect us not to respond to the new desires those experiences awaken in us.

So, from the gratitude, I now also think and feel:

• I am ready to move on from the topic of Human Design.

• I want to do something new, even if I don’t know what that is yet.

• I want to feel stretched again.

• I want to find out what else is in me.

• I want to share ideas that are mine.

• I want to find out what happens when I start sharing my work in a language that isn’t my own.

• I want to walk into rooms I have never been in before.

I want to meet a version of me that my Dutch Human Design business never asked me to be.

A new desire does not have to be born because the old experience wasn’t enough. Sometimes it arises because the old experience gave you enough to discover what you want to experience next.

The same can be true for you.

Maybe you’re here right now. The thing you wanted worked. Your business grew. The life you once dreamed about is actually your life.

If you have been trying to silence that voice with lines like these (read this with your inner critic’s voice):

• be grateful for what you have

• look how lucky you are

• other people would kill to have this

What if you didn’t use gratitude to silence the desire?

What if you actually went into the gratitude?

• What has this experience given you?

• What has it taught you?

• What has it made possible for you?

• Who did you get to become because of it?

• What did you discover about yourself that you couldn’t have known before?

Feel that.

And then, only then, ask:

• What am I curious about experiencing next?

• What have I experienced so far that made this new desire possible?

Sit with these questions. In silence.

Whatever comes up doesn’t erase your gratitude for what came before.

Maybe it’s there because of what came before.

You’ve had an experience. It showed you something about yourself and from that, another desire became possible.

That’s the beautiful thing about experience. It doesn’t only give us memories to be grateful for. It gives us more of ourselves to discover.

Love, Rianne

PS. For me it was the best decision to walk away. But expansion doesn’t necessarily require that at all. There are multiple ways to follow your desire for expansion inside or alongside what you’ve created. Subscribe to read more in an upcoming article.