the black and white of our feelings

“fear is bad and love is good!” – why taking our feeling out of the boxes could improve our understanding of life.

Go to a forest. Pick up a random piece of wood and look at it carefully. You will observe a unique texture, shaped by nature which is the result of a complex process in growing and adapting to a specific environment. This individual piece of wood does not exist a second time. Once you zoom out your micro perspective, you will be able to see an entire forest, composed by millions of individual pieces of woods and plants. This observation always taught me to understand how complex the world we live in actually is and how much energy it requires us to understand and listen to our environment.

In order to organize all the information in our brains, humans developed a strategy to simplify everything around us. We put our perception in categories. Therefore: a tree remains a tree, but seldom a tree which grows towards the sun, hiding smaller trees in his shadow or hosting a bird.

Putting things into categories helps us to simplify our lives, but it also makes us loose our focus and our awareness to allow individualism. A tree is a tree, but many of us would not take their time to carefully identify the uniqueness of a certain tree. Nowadays this is what we call ‘mindfulness’.

Beside nature there is something else most people would describe as “fuzzy” or sometimes hard to understand: feelings and emotions. All of us sometimes struggle with the outcomes of our inner processes and therefore book shops are packed with books teaching us on certain emotions and people go therapists in order to approach the unknown inside of their souls. The complexity of our emotions brings us to the point also to sort our feelings into categories. We usually use two different ones: good feelings and bad feelings.   

I learned about good and bad feelings in my early childhood. Education consisted concept of “you should not be angry” or “always be happy, otherwise no one will like you”. This kind of education is also gender based – men are supposed to hide sadness while girls should not deal with aggression. Our way of conceptualizing emotion provides the foundation for generations of humans who are taught to ignore one of their key instincts: basic emotion, such as sadness, anger or aggression. 

I observed the dissolving of the “bad feelings” becoming a trending movement in the past years. 

People attend classes in order to leave anger or sadness behind and there is a huge industry growing in order to promote infinite happiness and the distance from anger and grief. Many times I am confronted with people who try to tell me: “Look, I joined this course and then I lost all my aggression and my hate. And yes, I do love everybody.” Listening to these kinds of thoughts, I have the impression of talking to a robotic version of a human prototype, but not to a real person.

But imagine a world, in which no one would have any impact on someone else. You might be telling your best friend how someone fooled you and she would respond with a friendly smile. Are these the moments which create boundaries? Instead, I remember evenings after break-ups and failures, in which we sat together, drinking wine and gossiped endlessly about every boyfriend we ever had and will have. I remember situations in which I allowed my emotions of jealousy, aggression or sadness to take part of my actions – and my surrounding responded with compassion and openness towards my weaknesses. It is an amazing experience to be loved for your ‘bad parts’. If I would live in a world in which I could never have an impact on anyone with my feelings – I would feel useless. Feelings and emotion is a tool to communicate the insights of our heart, which is more honest than expressing our ratio.

We also have the tendency to work against feelings we judge as “bad”. These could be aggression or anger. I met people who take this challenge very serious which leads them to a point to ignore all the bad feelings someone ever experienced. I have one friend who truly says that he never practiced failure. According to him, his life was filled with happiness, loving parents, friends, health and a good education. All of this sounds lovely and should be everyone’s dream. Nevertheless – if I ask this person if he is happy about his life, he always mentions that there is something missing. This helped me to understand, that the ‘bad’ is a caring pathway towards reflection and learning.

I love to compare the feeling of my friend to the illusion of a life-long holiday. Imagine your life would only consist of free days, in which you always decide what to do. Sounds like a dream? Yes, but most of us would conclude, that we typically enjoy our free time, if we have worked before. That shows us – we need the bad in order to understand about the good and vice versa. Sometimes love needs to be taken away to show us how important it is. Sometimes we need to fail in order to change our perspective. Everything we judge as “bad feelings” can actually have a very positive impact on us. Our saddest moment allows us to learn about vulnerability. Moments of anger can guide us towards our wishes.

However we need to distinguish between actually having the feeling and about how much we allow them to take over our decisions. Dealing with controversial emotions in a compassionate way doesn’t mean that we are open and allowed to express them. Our fear of communicating ‘bad’ emotions also results from our bad experiences we have observing others expressing them in an inappropriate way. 

Most of us witnessed someone getting very aggressive and expressing himself by shouting or using any kind of violence. And these examples are always mentioned to teach us to delete aggression from our list of emotions. Still, most of the people who express aggression belong to those with the biggest troubles of accepting it. Aggression is a tool for many people to hide the current feeling of sadness or loneliness and therefore is not used correctly. Compared to that, someone who really feels angry and still is able to communicate his perception straight but not hurting, allows his environment to understand and correlate to him. 

In the end we all belong to the same species, able to express anger and love, grief and harmony. All of these are part of us and tools to orientate ourselves in this world. What would help us is to open up towards our so called bad sides and treat them with compassion and kindness. Maybe this is the pathway towards real happiness.

60 days in bed for science

Imagine tomorrow morning your alarm goes and – you just don’t get up, you stay in bed. Most people will be like: “awesome!!!” Imagine you do that for 60 days, and you’ll even get payed for that! Super awesome!!!!

This scenario is not a nerdy daydream, but real science - if you participate on a so called ‘bedrest study’.

Regarding the current study at the German Aerospace center, we have 12 people, staying in bed for about 60 days, head tilt down in a 6 degree angle to simulate zero gravity and the impact on their muscles.

The most interesting aspect for me is the psychological one: who is the person laying in that bed for 60 days?

The thing is: We can learn a lot from people living in extreme environments, because they teach you about the most important aspects in life. If it comes back to basic, you learn about things, you might forget in your everyday life.

yes or no – the question of autonomy

„Imagine your house is like a public space. Everyone can walk through and you have no power to prevent someone from it. I was afraid, it would be like this.“

What was the first the first thing I realized during our study? The fact, that each participant’s room started to transfer into a small and unique universe. People would hang up posters and pictures, and start to organize themselves in the rooms. I learned how important it is for everyone, to have your own space, to define privacy and decide about connection to a group or solitude. The main factor is, whether you have the possibility to decide about this or not.

“I thought about the astronauts who are stuck in the Soyuz for about two days in a really confined position. Compared to them, I have many possibilities to move.”

being bored!

Once I asked my participants what would motivate them to continue the study.  They said two things: 

First: the support of our team, conversations, consolations and more. I learned that wherever we go, we need people to join and go with us. 

Second: projects and small successes they would achieve every day, like conducting an experiment, learning a new language or designing a webpage. 

„Sometimes I feel bored.

  It‘s Saturday and you can‘t go out.  

  And whatever I do,

  I need much more time for it.

  Going to the bathroom

  becomes a planned action.

  On the other hand, I become

  aware about everything I do.“

perspective and hope

That brings us to our next point: every human being needs a perspective. One of my participants said:

“Being here, I imagined how life must be for someone who is really stuck in bed. Someone old, or sick. I mean, I can leave after two month. Knowing that, helps me a lot.”

We all live, because we have a hope, a dream or a goal we want to reach. What influences us, is our past, but what guides us, is our future. 

„I am looking forward to

  feel the rain on my skin.

  To enjoy the smell of

  fresh boiled coffee.

  To see colours and to listen to

  the sounds of the city.“

this is an outtake of a presentation @SpaceUpNL//october 2015

the photographer's movement

When talking about photography, we always reflect the photos as a result of the process. But we might forget one detail – the photographer. How does the existence of an observer affect the space, which requires invisibility?

Imagine you could take pictures with your eyes. One glimpse would be a snapshot. Your vision would contain an internal camera which you could use in moments filled with intimacy, unawareness or sensation. Think: what would be your motives? What would be the moments in which you would love to take a picture which allows the immortality of a second? Would it be the first kiss with your partner, the birth of your child or just random tiny second at the bus station in which the sun enters your day? These could be some moments, we want to remember, but our camera is at home, ready for the next vacation. Our daily life mostly is nothing we would declare special enough to take pictures of.

Yet, we have an internal camera to take pictures - our memory. When talking about important moments, we always have an image of the situation, which occurs when we think about it. But our 

memory is an instrument, which works with blurred filters and recreates the photos we might see from different perspectives, once we allow emotion to enter our consciousness.

Since smartphones became a part of our world, photography has transformed to a visual diary for everyone’s daily life. The food of our lunchbreak might appear on Instagram, while we snapchat our party dress to our best friend. Yes, smartphones create a possibility to save our daily life. But I additionally observed another tendency popping up: the fear of being photographed. In my childhood, when photography was correlated to thinking and getting a film developed, no one cared about cameras in the space. Today, once someone raises his smartphone, people fear being snapped and posted online. How does this affect our relation to photography? And how do photographers have to interact with this awareness?

photography is more than a 2D-medium. It is a multidimensional process, physically and emotionally.It is the result of an interaction, which aims to be unseen.

Photography itself is a movement. It requires empathy for the space. Once you move faster than the space you want to observe, the space will dedicate its attention to you. Once you slow down in a fast environment, the reaction will be a change in the system caused by yourself. This shows us, that a photographer, not being able to act invisible, always influences the space he wants to catch in his very natural sense. The first step of taking pictures therefore requires the attitude to adapt the given space, to coordinate your breathing to the present moment and become a part of it. The process of identification and integration shapes the possibility of an understanding and opens the door to picture something targeting reality.

Picturing environments made me realize that photography is a process which teaches us abilities such as listening, compassion and silence. But this also works the other way around: once you enter the space as a photographer, you will realize how your attention shifts towards the quotidian. People at tram station enter your perception while you follow the movement of a worker at the bakery. This experience invites us to focus on tiny aspects and enjoy the complexity our environment provides. A camera can be an add on towards mindfulness for the space.