In our current world of snap lockdowns and isolation, many people are struggling. Being in a confined space without the distractions of everyday life can bring many demons to the surface, and it can be deeply uncomfortable.
Back in 2010, Sylvain Tesson found a radical solution to his need for freedom - one as ancient as the experiences of the hermits of old Russia. He decided to lock himself in a cabin on the shores of Baikal (Siberia) for six months.
From February to July 2010, he lived in silence, solitude, and cold. His cabin, built by Soviet geologists in the Brezhnev years, was a cube of logs three meters by three meters. It was heated by a cast iron skillet, and a six-day walk along hundreds of miles of track to the nearest village.
To live isolated from the world while retaining one's sanity requires a routine. In the morning, Tesson would read, write, smoke, or draw, and then devote hours to cutting wood, shovelling snow and fishing.
Emotionally, these months proved a challenge, and the loneliness was crippling. Tesson found in paper a valuable confidant, the notebook, a polite companion. In it, he noted carefully his impressions of the silence, his struggles to survive in a hostile nature, his despair, his doubts, but also his moments of ecstasy, inner peace and harmony with nature.
Today’s affirmations draw from his wisdom, as scribed
in his book “Consolations of the Forest”.
Now, all you need to do is to intuitively choose a number between 1 and 9, and see which inspirational message is choosing you today.
Sit with the message, and see what gifts it offers for your life. As a special treat, I’ve also included a Young Living oil to partner with your inspirational message:
1. Life should be nothing but this: giving constant thanks to fate for the slightest blessing.
Being happy is knowing that you are.
Oil Blend: Gratitude
2. To get the day off to a good start, it’s important to remember one’s duties, in order: greetings to the sun, the lake, and the little cedar growing in front of the cabin, on which, every evening, the moon hangs up its lantern.
Oil Blend: Luscious Lemon
3. When you organize your life around the idea of possessing nothing, then you have everything you need.
Oil Blend: Release
4. To love is not to celebrate one’s own reflection in the face of one’s double, but to recognize the value of what one can never know.
Oil Blend: Humility
5. Trees are princes of immobility. They prove that power is not defined by movement.
Single Oil: Northern Lights Black Spruce
6. The other side, always, is a promise. We glance at it as we cast a net: to anchor the certainty of going to see it one day.
Oil Blend: Dream Catcher
7. Solitude fosters thought, since the only conversation possible is with oneself. It sweeps away all chitchat, allowing the sounding of one’s self.
Oil Blend: Inner Child
8. Freedom is always there. Simply pay the price.
Oil Blend: Believe
9. Someday the sun will reveal to us where it gets the strength to rise in the morning.
Oil Blend: Magnify your Purpose
