7. Exercise

Hello again! We are getting closer to the last points on our list "what is happiness"
Point number 7 is exercise.

paris 2014 

With exercise I don't mean: go to a studio and run on the treadmill for an hour. That's just going to make your life dull and boring. No, for me there is a thing that is crucial for happiness that has to do with the reality of my own body and mind. First of all: we have muscles, so we might also just use them. They are awesome and our bodies can do many incredible things. And exercise should be chosen wisely to benefit with your whole being from it. Your whole being also contains a soul and a mind, so you might pick a sport that doesn't only refresh your body with new oxygen and fresh blood, but a kind of exercise that also challenges your mind and dances with your soul.
For me there are many options. My favorite kinds of sports:

Dance - It is so full of soul and mind, because you are making an interpretation of the music that you perceive and translate it directly into body movement without rethinking or judging it. Dancing is one of my favorite ways to move. It makes my soul free and happy, my movements become wild and spontaneous as I translate the feelings I create in tune with the music. Dance is also so good for your body and it motivates you and makes you happy. Just try it at home! Put on your favorite dance music and move. It will make you happier.



Martial Arts - I love kickboxing and also other martial arts. They make me feel powerful and strong and they really challenge the mind as well. The concentration has to be on the highest level in order to perform well at martial arts. If you get deeper into the philosophy of some styles you might as well find your soul deeply satisfied. In Karate for example meditation and deeper understanding of the human are a big part of the sport. They also get you very flexible and train every muscle you didn't even know you had. And you train a good endurance and general fitness.

Snowboarding - All of you who already do snowboarding know, there is no way to describe just how GOOD it makes you feel. It is a deep connection to the mountain and the landscape around you, a big exercise against your own fears and a great lesson in life to learn. It is meditative in the way you move smoothly in big curves through the snow and hear your own breath and the sound of the board swishing through the powdery white heaven. And it is exhausting as hell since you have to make very strong movements on a high speed against physical powers exercising your whole body in a high altitude.




Skateboarding - I haven't quite mastered it yet, but there was a skateboarding workshop for women in Berlin. It's called "suck my trucks" and it is rad. Skateboarding in the bowl or the big half pipe makes me feel like flying, because there is this little moment at the turning top, where you actually are flying and overcoming gravity. It is also super cool and has a lot of street credibility which can be a real boost for the ego.




Yoga - Now in the beginning of my relationship with yoga I didn't see it as a sport and I didn't really appreciate it as much as I do now. It was a journey, because apparently it really depends on the teacher. But when I found a teacher who was really good and into pushing me to try new things and do movements that seemed to be impossible at first, it started being fun and challenging. The biggest plus for me was the body awareness I learned from it and how much my lung volume expanded (which made me perform better at any other kind of sport).



Football - I mean the kind of football you play with your feet. It is probably the sport that will get you as fit as you possibly can be. You will have to do a lot of sprints and fast movements for 90 minutes and you will be motivated to give your best, because you have a whole team that you are trying to make proud. So with football it is really an emotional sport. For me the most emotional that I know. And on the other side it is a great stress reliever. And the team factor is special, it is almost like a relationship to have a football team.

Bouldering - It is the type of climbing that you do without the security rope. It is very challenging for the muscles of your whole body and you will develop a special kind of strength from it. It is also so tough for the mind because you need to be creative in order to succeed. Sometimes pure strength is not enough and you need to do a certain twist or another order of movements to make the next step possible. Also it teaches you fear management, because you will learn that there is the first kind of fear that will just paralyze you and make you sweat, and then there is the kind of fear that brings out super powers and make you look for creative solutions and motivate you to move up. And if you overcome the fears and actually get to the top, you will feel so good.

Surfing - The waves and the sea are already motivation enough to get into the water, but if you can actually use a board to ride waves it is the ultimate fun experience. Like the kind of experience where you become totally wrapped up in an activity that you feel like a child again that can totally forget the hours passing and just keep playing forever. It is also a nice sport because there is usually a great community around surfing. Most of the surfers are sharing a good spirit and being easy to hang out with.





There are so many other exercises and ways to move your body. Every one of them has it's own magic and you better go out and find your calling cause if you don't, you will miss out on a lot of fun and happiness. And exercise really improve so many things. Tonnes of studies show, what we already guessed anyway: Exercise make you much healthier, happier, prettier, smarter, more relaxed and stable. You can only benefit. Even from the injuries (I had quite a few), they usually put your life into a new perspective and you also learn to appreciate your daily health more.


so MOVE

6. Nature

Hello people who are striving for happiness ... We are going to take a closer look at nature and how it is connected to happiness.

paradise valley in morocco

First of all: What is nature?
The answer is not as easy as it seems at first. And actually the more you think about it, the less clear it seems. Nature is supposed to be the living environment, that was not formed by human culture. For some things that seems very clear. If you ask for example, is the landscape of Yosemite National Park nature? Yes. Are the Alps in Europe nature? Mostly yes. Are the forests in Germany nature? Hmmmmm. Historically? No. Few of the forests in Germany are actually originally formed by themselves. There used to be big old natural forests, before the Germans started to settle there and create farm land. They cleared most of the old forests. They reshaped most of the old riverbeds and replanted new forests with different kind of trees. They hunted a lot of animals and decreased most of the wild animal population in order to create fields, and to breed farm animals. So most of these relatively new forests and animals (like cows and pigs and chicken) are actually a product of culture. You won't run into a bear or a wolf in these new forests. You won't find a tearing rapid stream in these new riverbeds. It's all tamed.
Still, if we think about what we mean in our daily life with the word "nature", we see that we have lowered our standards a lot. In Berlin, if we seek nature, we go to a park. It's historically incorrect to call these parks and forests in and around Berlin "nature", but the grey concrete around us has made us desperate for some green.

gardens of the world in berlin

I've once read an article about a social study where researchers found out, that the more green areas are accessible to inhabitants of a certain area, the healthier the inhabitants are psychologically. There are other studies that looking at green plants and leaves and flowers reduces stress, calms you down and uplifts your mood. Who needs these studies? We can totally feel that ourselves. Chilling in a garden for a few hours does wonders. Every time that I take a walk in the park I wonder: Why am I not doing this much more? It's so nice!

Nature comes in all colors. Green is the obvious one. But to look at the blue water of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia makes my heart bounce every time. I am totally addicted to that blue blue water. It looks really juicy and tasty and inviting somehow. And seawater is almost a spiritual thing, because it is the material that we are mostly made of and the essence that we came from. Our cells are these little water bubbles with salt and minerals, our tears we cry taste like the sea, the sweat that runs down our bodies reveals what is under our skin. Saltwater. Eating soup makes so much sense in this circle of saltwater.
The sea has a strong healing power. I experienced that many times already in my early childhood. As a baby I used to suffer from neurodermatitis and my mother was bathing me regularly in sea salt baths to heal it. It totally worked. It was gone before I started having a conscious memory. But what I do remember is getting stung by a wasp in summer in Croatia. My mom told me to cool it off in the sea. I walked into the water and when I came out again, there was merely something like a little mosquito bite left. No more pain, no itching. A few years later my brother and me got into climbing the cliffs and rocks next to the sea and we got so bold and jaunty that I slipped into a gap between two rocks with sharp edges leaving a deep cut in my leg. I went to the water with it and within a few days only the white new skin was a like a trace on my brown legs.

The oceans of our planet are a powerful manifestation of nature. Recently going to Morocco a lot made me realize the difference between the gentle crystal and still blue of the Adria and the turbulent, wild and impermeably green waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Hearing the sound of the waves at night matches my breath and it's one of the rare sounds that makes me fall asleep instead of keeping me awake. When I started surfing I was totally clenched by how strong the ocean is. On our first day we had a surf teacher telling us to walk into the waves in a certain way to use the current in our favor. I followed him and thought I was doing something wrong cause I felt it was impossible to walk further without drowning. Over the loud noise of the masses of water falling down the waves I screamed to our teacher that I'm gonna go back out of the water and try again somewhere better. He shook his head and yelled that everywhere else would be much harder. I couldn't believe it but followed him freaking out inside but trying to stay cool on the outside. It was a day of the battle: Me against the waves. I lost in every single move that I tried, feeling my body being a ridiculously small snippet in these huge and powerful waves and currents washing me here and there. I swallowed a lot of water, got my limps and my body pulled and twisted in every direction and was fighting to keep control over this surfboard that was attached to me. It was so much fun! I know it sounds horrible, but it was fun. It kept me busy, I had a goal (to ride one of these stubborn waves) and I was surrounded by the essence of my own being. And in the end of the day I was really tired and felt like every pore of my body was washed so clean and my eyes were still watery from the salt and water still dripping out of my nose when I was already showered and sitting at the dinner table.

Nature means a lot to me personally. And I think it should to everyone. This might be dogmatic but it is the dogma that I grew up with. Our mom was teaching us from early childhood on that the environment is something to be saved because it is the basis that we live on. As children we had little Greenpeace stickers on all of our school notebooks and we knew that it was better to go everywhere by bike and to not buy things that are packed in too much plastic and that some animals and plants would become rare and in the end be extinct species. I'm glad we grew up with this consciousness, because now I am a person who highly appreciates nature and tries to live in a peaceful symbiotic relationship with it, instead of abusing and destroying it.

The happiness-factor of nature is almost inexpressible in words. So I'll just let these videos speak for me:





pure happiness

5. Friendly and inspiring people

So here we go and take a closer look at point 5 on my list "what is happiness"...

people can have a huge impact

As humans we are social beings. That lies deep in our nature. It makes a big difference who the people are, that surround you. The influence of our family and friends, of the society we grow up in, of the culture that we identify with goes way beyond the obvious and easily perceptible. Of course we can often sense the influence. For example if our mother told us to do a certain thing, we often keep some of the learned behavior for the rest of our lives. In the first year of elementary school my mom walked me to school. We had to turn around a corner that was on a little hill and there she sometimes stopped and told me to turn my face and the palm of my hand to the morning sun to pick up energy. So we stood there for a few minutes, absorbing sunlight with our skin, eyes closed in total silence. I will never forget the feeling of the sunlight actually entering my skin and filling me with energy and joy. Now as an adult I still turn to the sun sometimes and remember these happy moments of early morning sun.
Other influence is less direct. We are not explicitly told what to wear as teenagers. Still it has an impact, what the cool kids around us wear. As a teenager I started to wear the looser and straight cut jeans from the male section in the same moment that my best friend started to wear them. We both agreed they were more swag and soon it became a normal thing to do for some of the girls around us. These influences are trends and they are not explicit, but still easily traceable.

And yet there are less obvious influences. Things that we see every day, but we are not even aware we see them and we consider them normal and don't even think about them until a person from another culture comes and tells us how strange these things are for her. For me that was the case with the daily interaction with the passengers on the subway. Born and raised in Berlin, I was riding the subway frequently for all my life. And I thought it was totally normal to get on the train, sit or stand somewhere and look down or at some posters, sink deep into your own thoughts and get off at your station. But I was told that it was the weirdest thing for people from other places. They said it was so awkward how everyone on the subway put so much effort into not looking into each others eyes. I was shocked. Did we all really sit on the subway trying to not look at each other? I studied it and found that there was some silent common agreement between all passengers to mind your own business. I never consciously agreed to that, I had never even thought about that before. But now I know how much I am a child of this city that I live in.




There are studies about certain phenomenons that occur to influence the people around the phenomenon a lot. For example suicides. It shows that every suicide in a community raises the risk of another suicide for all the members that are in the same community of the committer. Same with obesity. If you are surrounded by obese people, you are more likely to be obese yourself.
Now we can take this knowledge and turn it into something positive for our own happiness and the happiness around us. In the beginning of our lives we have not so much choice of whom to surround ourselves with. Our parents are a given thing. But already in kindergarten we can pick our little best friend. We can chose who we want to play with. And later we can chose the school we want to go to or the afternoon activities. Do I want to hang out with the skaters after school or am I going to be a member of a poetry club? Do I want to sit next to the loud and funny Danish girl or am I going to sit next to the quiet Turkish boy who is always sticking his nose into his Manga? Do I go to a school that mostly privileged and rich children go to or do I go to a school where everyone has some street experience?
And later in life we see that it is everything! The friends that surround us are so much of our lives. Our family and our neighborhood is what we interact with daily. It is huge. So be wise and choose thoughtfully. If you feel like the people around you are making you laugh, inspiring you with new thoughts and ideas, bringing you up when you are down, criticizing you when you are ignorant, and make your life worth living: you found the right people. If the people around you don't know your true wishes, don't share your passions and try to keep you on the ground when you want to fly: think about finding new people to hang out with.

Also it can be so good to find inspiring people online. I am so happy about all these women sharing many contents about their interesting lives. It gives me a more clear idea of what I want to do and how I want to be. Take Chimamamanda Ngozi Adichie for example. She is a superhero for me and makes me feel really good.





And if I ever want to have a child, how cool would it be to be an outdoor mom like Morgan Brechler for example? She gives me hope cause she delivers another picture of momhood. The picture that I see around me is not inspiring, maybe my own mom who stayed active and worked and had many friends was a good picture too, but a lot of moms around me are homely sad milk machines that can't pay attention to anything else than their child for more than 5 seconds. Scary. I don't want to be like that. So I needed another picture of a mom that I can identify with.

Also it is really good remedy to your own gender stereotypes to also watch females represent the sports and hobbies that you are interested in. Especially when they for once are not sexualised, but actually doing something. How awesome is that? Check out the nice daily life of this prosurfer.





Or these crazy women on their skateboards in Sweden...



Ishtar X Tussilago from Maceo Frost on Vimeo.


So which people in your life are inspiring you and part of the happiness you live?

4. Love

The Number 4 on my list "what is happiness" is love.

I took care of them and they showed me the simplicity of love

First of all, what means love for you?

For me it's a warm feeling that I feel when I care about someone. There are different types of love. Erich Fromm describes them best in his book "Die Kunst des Liebens" (The Art of Love). He also writes that for being able to love someone, we have to love ourselves. So I want to talk about self-love first.

I learned that, if I don't truly love myself, I will always feel some lack of love and keep searching for it outside of myself. That only creates tragedy. I would depend on other's acknowledgment and feel week in their hands. It's like giving your own voice to someone else and giving them the full authority to speak the judgement: Am I love-worthy or not?
If we don't learn how to find the positive answer deep in ourselves we become manipulable. People can tell us all kinds of things that make us more love-worthy. To a woman, who doesn't love herself, people can say:
You need to be prettier, skinnier, whiter, harder to get, nicer, easy going, submissive, hot, "girlfriend-material" and so on. They can tell her to be a good wife, to give her best, to avoid conflict, to smile and laugh a lot, to have wavy long hair, to have no pubic hair, to be a good mother, to be a virgin, to always want sex... and many other things. But in fact, all these things don't make that woman more love-worthy. They can't. Cause she is, like every other human, from birth already love-worthy. She just needs to find that herself.
People who don't love themselves usually fall into that trap. They let others abuse their weakness and let others dictate how they should be in order to get loved. People who don't truly love themselves will end up being so busy trying to fit into this ideal picture of themselves that they will hardly have time and strength to focus on what they actually want in life. They will also have a hard time truly loving another person, because they will feel so fragile and always wonder if they are loved back enough.
Women who don't love themselves will listen to advertisement that tells them "This product will make you a love-worthy woman. This bra will make you the person, that others will love. This lipstick will make you a woman to fall in love with. These jeans will make you a loved woman. This hair-relaxer will make you loved by everyone. These shoes will make you a love-worthy woman. ..." and they will keep shopping and buying to fill the lack of self love, their wardrobes so full and half of their salaries evaporated in expensive toxic perfume and technologies to remove their natural body hair. They will keep searching for inspirational pictures of photoshopped flawless skinny girls, keeping alive the industry for insecure women.

a poster on my best friends door

A woman who loves herself on the other hand is strong. Nobody can tell her what she needs to do in order to be loved. She already knows she is loved and she is sure she will be loved, because why wouldn't she be loved? She is perfect in her own way and she loves that way. She wakes up and loves herself. She has a relaxing shower and loves herself. She slips into her favorite comfortable clothes and she loves herself. She treats herself with her favorite tasty breakfast and she loves herself. She fills her day with the things she actually wants to do and she loves herself. She only meets the people she wants to see because they are lovely in their own way and they also love her the way she is, purely for being herself. She nourishes herself with only the best food she can get and she loves herself. She puts herself to sleep and she loves herself. No regrets.
Now this woman is strong and in harmony with herself. She has enough time and strength to actually change the world around her to a better world. She has enough time to think about big important things like what is going on globally and how she can contribute to being a human who doesn't harm others. She is aware of the world around her and she has the power to influence her environment in a good way. If a guy (or another woman) would dare to tell her to shave her legs in order to be more love-worthy she would break out in laughter and shake her head and tell the guy that he should shave his own legs if he cares about that and leave her legs being hers. She would only shave her legs if she feels pleasure in touching them or looking at them hairless, but she would not feel unloved if she didn't shave them. She is unstoppable because she loves herself.

Self-love is energizing and empowering, it is fun and liberating, it makes you see things more clearly. It makes you treat yourself much better. It makes you happy.

a rainbow-smile from the sky in berlin

Now women suffer a lot these days from the lack of self-love and it is only on behalf of the big big beauty industry to keep them from loving themselves too much. Women are the big target customer group, because they are buying the most. Much more than men. And guess who is sitting in the top positions of this industry. Right: White men. They are like beauty dictators trying to keep the women insecure and addicted to shopping. On the other side women are earning far less in their jobs. So think about that inequality next time you are about to buy things. Is all of this really necessary? Should I keep running in that hamster's wheel? And go to work and go shopping and go to work and go shopping? And you are not the only one who is harmed here. Think about where all these clothes and things are produced. By humans who don't even earn one bug per day making thousands and thousands of t-shirts each day. Think about it.

When it comes to men, self-love is a little bit different. With testosterone comes a dose of self-confidence so it becomes harder to tell guys to shave their legs in order to be loved. But of course also in the men's world there are stereotypes dictating masculinity. Things like status, job, full hair, a car, a certain music playlist and the lack of weakness and emotions are required so being a good man. These stereotypes are harmful too and create some problems with the identity of men. Nevertheless I think that a man's self-love is not targeted so much and usually is quite stable. Men usually live their lives feeling like it's o.k. to be how they are, and they presume that someone else will love them. There is a reason why the poster of the beach body above is made for women. Men usually just go to the beach and care less about if everything on them looks flawless. Of course there are always exceptions.

So if we manage to love ourselves, the rest becomes easy. The love we feel for every other creature is pure empathy. We can imagine ourselves being that creature and how it must feel and here we are already beginning to love that creature. This kind of love is universal and comes naturally. We treat ourselves the best so we wish the same for everyone else around us. If I nourish myself with good food, I will also naturally want to give the same pleasure to my friends and the people I love. I deserve the best, so does everybody else. An easy analogy.

And as soon as we understand and live this kind of basic love, it will also be a good foundation for any kind of romantic love. If I deserve honesty, so does the person I love. If I need someone to be patient with me, so does my partner need me to be patient sometimes. If I need a monogamous relationship with only one person, I will also only be with a person who needs the same. If I need many partners, I will only be with a person who understands that because she needs the same. If I truly love myself I am not depending on the love of my partner. I am myself and my partner can love me or not, it is nothing I can change. I love myself so I will let the other person love me too. And if anyone tries to abuse me or tells me to change or treats me bad, I understand that it is not my fault and I can go away.
And here we go, suddenly the woman who loves herself will only stay in healthy relationships that are good for her. And also she will not see herself as a deficit if she is not in a relationship. She is already love-worthy by her own nature. No need for a relationship status. And so it is easy to be free and go, if the partner is not good for her. And it is easy and natural for her to stay if the partner loves her as much as she loves herself, because she understands his love. A woman who loves herself will not feel ashamed of falling in love with a woman or a man or any kind of other gender. She will allow herself to explore what she wants and needs in order to be happy.

i love being loved by and loving this person