I cannot remember ever being as joyful in my life as I feel now. Living in a vital body, having amazing, deeply loving relationships with my wife, my family and friends and enjoying my work throughout the day to the best of my ability in full conscious presence.

The joy that is felt from feeling an inner warmth in my body is so precious, and through my honouring that inner feeling thus expands and becomes more. This all started from the moment I met Serge Benhayon some 9 years ago and went to the Universal Medicine presentations, courses and retreats that he presents every year in the UK.

But my life has not always been like this as it was completely different before I met Serge and listened to the Ancient Wisdom he presents. I grew up in a family as the middle of three boys where my father was the provider of income and my mother took care of the household and all that came with that. It felt to me to be a functional family but lacking intimacy and true connection with one another.

I have learned from that upbringing that life is about working hard and trying your best to make something of it – but not loving and appreciating each other for the beautiful people that we are, or about enjoying life. All that was simply not there.

My voicing this is not to blame my parents or my brothers as it was what it was and it was a situation I equally was part of and contributed to. Nobody in our family had ever been told that life could be different and nowhere in our circle of acquaintances did we know people who lived this sort of joyful and appreciative life. We were a normal family, participating in a society where the belief was that life is hard and that “you have to do your best to make it work.”

I can now see what this growing up brought to me for my adult life. There was always an inner dissatisfaction and internal struggle between what life presented to me to be, and what I could feel inside of me. However, there was no reflection of that ‘other true life’ I innately felt, so I chose to work hard to maybe one day achieve that ‘other way of life.’

That lack of inner connection with the love I now know lives in all of us, made me go into the working hard as this brought me positive attention and from this, I built a certain level of self-respect and self-acceptance. Firstly, I put this working hard into my studies and into sports but was never able to sustain it. I always had to improve myself and it was never enough and so this pattern continued to permeate all aspects of my life.

In my professional life, this pattern of not feeling my inner self-worth made me strive to do my job as best as I could, and with that I tried to make everything perfect to the tiniest detail, never considering how much effort this required, nor how much strain I was putting on my body.

Although I was good at my job, I myself was not appreciative of that fact and because of that I did not value what I brought to my work, so I continued in “trying to do it better.” It was never enough and I was still insecure about any decision I made. I doubted myself by letting others advise me about what to do or to choose, although I had all the wisdom, knowledge and experience to know all of this myself.

This pattern also played a role in being a husband, a father and a friend, where I always came from this same lack of self-worth, constantly striving to do it better. These feelings of insecurity meant that I could never appreciate all the beautiful and loving connections I had with my wife, children, colleagues and friends and what I was already bringing to my relationships just by being me.

Thanks to Serge Benhayon, Universal Medicine, the Universal Medicine Student Body and not least, my lovely wife and children, I am, without perfection, on the way to fully living that lovely, sensitive, tender and wise man I naturally am. I am learning to surrender to the knowing that in my essence I am already everything and that I can bring all of this wherever I go in humanity.

I don’t have to prove myself anymore as I have rekindled that inner fire, the connection with Soul, the unwavering constant in my life and it will always be so. This reconnection has brought me the joy and vitality I knew was there, but had been looking outside of me to obtain it, while it was always there inside me, waiting for me to reconnect to.

Published with permission of my family.

By Nico van Haastrecht

Further Reading:
Returning to our essence
Learning to Find Me and Live My Life
Appreciation of Life and Ourselves