Lapland- second time around

So I'm back in Lapland! In the winter wonderland. Where the snow turns everything to something so pure and beautiful, where the mystical Sámi culture is making life a bit more magical, where all the winter sports come to life and where the occasional northern lights light up your night. These all come with the package when coming to Lapland, even though us living here for a longer time might sometimes overlook them. In a way it's great to have so many tourists here who haven't seen those things before; seeing how purely excited they are about all of those, helps you remember to appreciate and enjoy fully of those things as well.

So my summer in Spain went fast. I was working a quite a lot, but also enjoying my time. Even though it's always a bit sad to leave a place and the people in it, it is very comforting to know that the memories will always last and that the people you've met will always in a way stay in your life. But that's how it is; the road we walk keeps changing all the time. Some cases it might change more radicle and some cases you might not notice the change until later on, but it still keeps changing and moving on. In my case the road changes literally from one place to another, but even if it wouldn't as we change on the way we might see the world around us differently everyday.

Between Spain and Lapland I had some time to spend in my hometown. I got to spent a lot of time with my friends and family and completely relax for a moment. I've been meditating for a while now already and in that time in home I found some more ways of doing that. It is a great way to empty your mind or detach yourself from your thoughts by thinking that they're just thoughts and that we shouldn't get overly attached to them. I also started to do a loving and kindness meditation which teaches you to give warm and loving thoughts to everybody. It is something we easily forget; we give those thoughts to our close ones all the time, but what about everybody else. People pass us when we go to a store, for a walk or when we're working and we often forget to acknowledge them. It's just a smile or warm word to acknowledge them and give them warm thoughts. And the thing is that when you give something good to others you will definitely get it back multiplied.

On the time I was back home I also went to try out this rose's method. It's a bit like massage and the point is to learn to listen your body and to open some memory locks we have in our muscles. I do find it very interesting how the memory of the muscles works. There's many things our muscles remember without us even realizing it. And the feelings like stress and nervousness can stay in the muscles if we don't release them.
To me the biggest thing it showed was to listen more my own body. I've noticed that it's not just our minds that reacts to all things happening, but it is body as well. When we have to face some kind of challenge our shoulders might get higher and our body gets tense, when we're scared our body seems to be on look out for everything, when we're happy our face brings the smile on it and we can feel our body relaxing and when we're excited about something we feel the big energy rushing to our body and our movements might be very fast and jumpy (or what I've noticed on myself is that I start clapping my hands together :D).
But to acknowledge these reactions in our body makes it also easier to control them. So in a hard time we can try and relax our body, take a deep breath and look the situation with a set of new eyes.


So that's some of the things I've been doing lately and I'm really excited (clapping my hands right now ;)) to see what this second season in Lapland will bring! What ever it is I'm sure it's going to be legendary and again something I can take with me where ever my road goes next :)