by Esther Andras, Stuttgart, Germany 

When I first came to Universal Medicine I felt the way Harry Potter must have felt when he first came to Hogwarts. I didn’t feel abnormal any more and life started to make sense.

I always (had):

• felt that there is more to life than meets the eye
• sensed that we feel a lot and do not only rely on our five senses
• had a deep yearning of loving everyone, and equally so
• had a distant knowing within me that life is about harmony, not fighting and competition
• felt that we are in fact one big brotherhood, not billions of individuals fighting for their own cause.

But only when I came to Universal Medicine did I start to allow myself to pay closer attention to this part of me.

The more I let this part of me open up, the more I could see that we are all longing for a more harmonious and loving world: but I could also see that we do not acknowledge that, and thus do not live that way.

Instead I realised that we rather choose to drag, push and beat ourselves through life and have a million excuses why we have to live the way we do. Our overall assumption: the world is that way (hard, cruel, demanding, loveless…), hence we do not have a choice but to follow the rules expected of us.

But then the question strikes me – “isn’t the world made up of us living in it and making it the way it is?”

As I have observed, it is definitely not the animal or plant kingdom asking us to live the way we do. Quite the contrary, they patiently endure our irresponsible way of living and consistently continue on their evolutionary path despite the havoc we, the human race, create around them.

Or have you ever encountered a tree lashing out at you because you are entering its space or because it dislikes what you are doing? I haven’t. Whenever I go for a walk I find every single tree just standing there in its own beauty reflecting back our beauty, regardless of the weather conditions or the mood I am in.

So to me it seems it comes back to us. It is us who make the world as it is. Thus we can make a world to our liking. And why not make it a world that is full of love, joy and harmony, something we are all longing for?

I know that it is not that easy as the world is as it is and we often get caught up in it, falling back into our familiar patterns. But the fact is, if we don’t make more loving choices the world will stay as it is… and most likely only get worse.

As for me, I have over the past years focused on the quality I am in everything I do: with people, with things, with myself. And I have learned the more loving I am with myself, the more loving I will be with others, and in everything I do.

And the most beautiful thing I discovered is that there is a true beauty and loveliness in all of us, despite the rough and often tall walls we have build around us in order to protect us from the world.

And I can see now that the harshness I see in the world is only an outer layer – and that I tended to just see that outer layer instead of focusing on the true beauty in each of us.