You might not realize it, but per move you squeeze an amount of energy in your whole body.

You can distribute this evenly, from your brain to your fingertips to your toes.

Or

you can unevenly distribute it, for instance by rotating the starting position or squeezing it beat by beat.

If you start in the center of your body, you have a choice. You can hold some energy. You can immediately squeeze everything in your whole body. You can overjam your brain and then go organ by organ. The tone, the sound, is what you get in between.

Try it. People operate the inside of their bodies completely differently.

Thoughts work in two directions:

1. A thought is a reflection of the state of your whole body.
2. A thought can also be an idea about what you want your whole body to become.

People who have a lot of thoughts do this (if you look at it in beats):

1. Use their body at 100% intensity.
2. Get a busy mind.
3. Use their body at 100% intensity.
4. Get a busy mind.

People who have a calmer mind use their body differently. They operate at a lower average level of intensity. Then you get this:

1. Use their body at 60% intensity.
2. Use their body at 60% intensity.
3. Get a limited number of thoughts in their head.
4. Use their body at 60% intensity.

If you see this for what it is, and you look at what happens in psychiatry, you sometimes scratch your head about what kind of field it actually is. If these kinds of little puzzles are already too difficult.

So it also makes sense that people with ADHD spend a large part of their time doing nothing and being distracted, because you need to recharge. If you look at it in terms of time, somebody with ADHD literally squeezes more energy into some seconds.

Tips if you have ADHD

1. Celebrate that you have a busy mind. It is fantastic.
2. Go for whole-body strategies (exercise) and make sure you process your emotions in some way (for example through drawing or writing, especially whatever you enjoy).
3. Take a short moment of silence every now and then. This interrupts your intense rhythm, especially when you are going hard.

Why this universe is temporary, and everything else is too

The most remarkable thing about this universe is how encrypted it is by time.

Thoughts are temporary. When I say something to you, it automatically dissolves afterwards. Making somebody pregnant is something that can only happen a given period in time as a female, and as a man very short times every time. That doesn't mean it's not important. But it's not forever there. For me, the whole beauty is that it doesn't last forever. This gives a great relief. Is looking this way a strategy something that works when somebody else is in crippling pain? Of course not. But during light days, I like to think about how well everything works and that things can actually be playful. Like thoughts for instance. You can make short bursts of thoughts, or long ones. I would be so destructive if everything would be around forever.

I made this mistake: by not taking care of my emotional needs, I became mentally ill. So, in a sense, I became physically ill.

I was in a relationship I shouldn’t have been in. I did not stand up for myself, and I ended up in a psychiatric ward.

I was already an adult, so can you imagine how many people there are in psychiatric institutions who simply never learned to stand up for themselves when they were younger?

It literally put me into psychosis.

“ If I could take over your body for a moment, I would have found the problem within three seconds. You have pushed certain emotions away for too long.”

Your nervous system is releasing the tension. You can also keep the tension inside and learn from it.

For me, gloomy emotions are also beautiful in a certain way. There is something melancholic about them, like a feeling of “it will never be okay again.” It gives a certain color to your days.

Maybe try looking at it this way: What color does this day have? For me, there is a certain darkness hanging over it. As if it will never be okay again.

I like to sit and listen to the music within myself.

I draw a lot of inspiration from the individual energy states of my organs, and from my emotions.

Why religious principles are extremely powerful

Note: I am not really religious myself. But I think a lot of ideas in religion are brilliant.

If you see yourself as perfectly crafted, you being exactly as you should be, this changes your whole perspective on life. Take psychological diagnoses, for example. Now, your attention goes from “I have ADHD” to what I, with my attention span of three seconds, actually do at the table. Assuming that I am perfect as I am, exactly as I should be, you are going to see a lot of beautiful sides of yourself. You are going to see the uniqueness of you in you. You see the creativity and the unlimited energy. It's like shining a different light on the same thing.

Or: I am an anxious and paranoid person. I can get lost in worlds that I can hardly ever find the way back from.

When you do this, you get to the you who was already there. The one who was perfect as it was.

I can't describe in words what that is. That, for me, is paradise.

If you take a Buddhist stance on things, you are still judgmental toward thoughts, even if you don't want to be. Even when you are non-judgmental toward thoughts, you are still judgmental toward thoughts, because you declassify them by unidentifying. You still take a stance.

I like to see thoughts as things that show different sides of you. Each thought reflects how you look at things, with you being the middle. And since everybody is different, this gives fantastic outcomes.

If you don’t know where to start, always start with your own voice. Begin by being extremely vocal about every part; this is always the first step. If there is something you don’t like happening in your own body, you are vocal about it, whether it’s just to yourself or out loud. There is immense power in being vocal.

This has nothing to do with being selfish. It’s your right to name everything you don’t like happening in your own body, whether it’s self-inflicted or not. Name the beast. Say exactly what it is.

I am worried for people who don’t naturally do that, who are not vocal about what really happens in their bodies. Admitting that you are in pain is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Mirrors

You are made of one big circle of energy. Which is you. No one else.

Within your circle, there are small circles of energy.

When you do things a certain way, these circles get blocked.

When an emotion comes up, and you push it down with your own brain, you get a blockade in the middle. This middle can be in your brain.

Emotion comes up → brain gets sick → pushes emotions back down with thoughts

Or another example:

You hear something → brain gets sick → you want to speak out, but you swallow your words every time

A lot of what we consider to be psychiatric diseases have nothing to do with problems in the brain. They build up pressure in the middle. So if you don’t take out the initial problem, you can treat any brain disease you want, but you have to take out the problem.

The thing with bodies is this: bodies work in a very simple and elegant way, because if they wouldn’t, kids wouldn’t understand how to use them. Having a body and not being able to figure out for myself how it works is not acceptable.

That’s why a mirror view works well from time to time. You write down everything that happens at the geographical locations in your body that you do and don’t like. This gives incredible insight into changing it, including thoughts.

‘’I am not my thoughts,’’ says a man walking by.

‘A thought is a small part of you,’’ Mary says. ‘If I stack all your thoughts and feelings and organs together, I get one you.’

‘There is no me,’ the man says.

‘You sure are yapping a lot for somebody that doesn’t exist,’ Mary says.

‘I once had a thought about how unhappy I was, and then I separated myself from the thought. Who is the self and who is me?’

‘You thought that because you actually were unhappy,’ Mary says. ‘You guys play a very dangerous game. The tone of your thoughts really matters. If my whole body is in a state of happiness, I have more happy thoughts than when I am not.’

‘You don’t understand that there is no permanent self. It changes all the time,’ the man says.

‘Sure,’ Mary says. ‘That is something normal people figure out in three seconds. It’s not very relevant. And it’s also not true in the way you think it is. You need some continuity on the other side to actually recognize the moving parts as changing. If everything is changing, what exactly is doing the observing?’

‘You’re still in a state of attachment.’

‘If my desire is to have a sandwich, and I ditch that desire and then I die, is that actually a good idea?’ Mary asks.

‘I let everything go and enter a state of “no thought.”’

‘We call that laziness here,’ Mary says. ‘And if you stay there too long, you’re going to get less sharp. Trust me.’

One of the biggest ‘violations’ in nature is wanting to start a new thought, wanting to speak out, and then not doing it. Because our thinking and speech are at the core of what we are. The energy you spend suppressing your own voice will eventually bite you.

Mother Nature is incredibly defensive about the privacy of our thoughts and inner world, and our voices. That is so beautiful in itself; there are no words for it.

How to access your subconscious

Yes, this is possible. You can access all these actions you do automatically, like suppressing an emotion or your voice very quickly. Just go there.

Do you know that at the heart of a lot of psychiatric diseases?

Learned behaviour.

You want to speak out, but you don’t finish your sentence because you grew up in the wrong household. You may not realize that, but it’s possible you are still doing that, sitting and reading right now.

Or you have an emotion, but you cut it off prematurely because you grew up in a household where feelings were not allowed. Or where everything needed to be ‘manly’.

This goes blazing fast. Emotion is there and then ‘snap’—you immediately suppress it. Or you want to say something and then ‘boom, rather not’.

A message from backstage

There are 2 groups of people: people who study the brain and body from the outside, and people who do it from their own inside. I am in the latter group.

Yes, this is possible. This dance with yourself you call consciousness.

Right now, nobody knows how the brain works. Let’s say in a few years we do. And then we have a solution for every ‘problem’ in the brain. Then we’ll arrive at some very fundamental problems.

I personally think that something like ADHD is at the core of what somebody is, in that person’s whole body, and having a chaotic mind is a reflection of that.

So every fiber of that person’s whole body is first, and the mind shows that via the reflection of thoughts. Treating that with medicine would threaten the core of life itself.

On the other hand, there are people who have a chaotic mind because they didn’t feel safe in their own bodies when they were younger. They may have the exact same symptoms and get diagnosed with ADHD, but they don’t have the same ‘ADHD’, if that makes sense.

Emotions, for example, are at the core of everything. So if you neglect emotional states long enough, you get depressed or anxious. Emotions are ‘whole-body things’. What happens in the brain is therefore rarely ever a problem, because thoughts are very important for nature, just like privacy, so they work very, very well. Thoughts work so well that I have never found a mistake in them, and I am somebody who was in psychosis, depression, had a GAD diagnosis, and ADHD and autism. And I never found any problem with thoughts themselves.

Another specific example:

• I have a fast and chaotic mind. So my whole body is a reflection of that, in everything I do. I am proud of that. I am fast and often chaotic in the eyes of others. But again, I am proud of that.
• There are also people who do not feel safe in their whole bodies, and therefore their minds become chaotic. This is the same thing reversed. This happens when you compress your emotion onto a very small surface in your body. Now everything starts speeding up. So your mind becomes complete chaos.

From the outside, they look the same. You can diagnose both with ADHD. But they have nothing to do with each other.