Stef Sifandos

Relational Alchemist, Community Builder & Changemaker

We love, we live, we laugh, we cry, we feel the fullness of life. Life only passes us when we live in states where we do not appreciate what we have. Life passes us by so quickly, because rather than being present to the wonder of the moment, our mind is fast forwarding to a perceived to be more desirable place.

What happens to us, our perceptions, our perspectives, our vantage points and values when we reach this ‘future place’? Resentment, guilt, disenchantment, disconnection and deeply fuelled regret. We have allowed life to pass us by and we have not lived, but rather died more everyday until whatever death actually is greets us with open arms.

Death is necessary. Death is beautiful. Death is contrast and perspective as to how we wish to live our lives, but we forget. We get caught in the cultural clutter that is living in this world and we forget to live, because we forget death.

Death (if connected to, acknowledged and revered) provides us with an opportunity to live, if we embrace the present moment and learn to appreciate deeply what we have in our lives we are honouring death and life simultaneously.

Connection is a fundamental human need. We often achieve this through sacred union with a beloved in some capacity or expression. We ‘fall in love’, we begin to build, create, and connect a life together.

Complacency is a killer. In complacency, we forget and disconnect. We forget what is important, what we need to thrive and what we need to be the grandest version of ourselves. Presence and appreciation.

To openly and authentically appreciate the teachings, learnings, wisdoms and attributes others bring in to our lives is to live presently. To forget this is to be concerned with potential events, experiences and ‘things’ that have not occurred as yet. We miss the worth in the now. It passes our consciousness and we create distance.

In this distance we lose connection, we lose love and we keep on losing until we are left with disconnected, disassociated nothingness, emptiness and sorrow. Then we are alive but we are dead inside.

Death comes in many forms and at times we experience metaphorical, psychological, emotional and spiritual deaths within the self and when we experience these types of deaths we are bestowed a gift, an opportunity to grow, to appreciate, to rebuild, to reframe what matters and to reframe our relationship to ourselves.

It is here in these mini wakeup calls that we can cultivate sacred union within the self. This will directly remedy our distraction from what matters and our inability to be present. The most beautiful feeling is being present to what is arising in our sphere of awareness in the now.

The saddest moments of our lives are when we forget what it is to love (receive and give), to merge in wholeness, to connect to what matters, to be focused on what is true for us and we cannot connect for we have lost our ability to be in deep reverence and appreciation for what we have in the palm of our hands.

When we miss that kiss, that embrace, that sacred moment of intimacy because our mind is incessantly elsewhere we have truly forgotten the shortness of this life. We have not surrendered, nor humbled to the immense nature of death.

This varies for everybody. The importance here is to respect death in order to live to our highest values. In doing so we learn to appreciate, be humble to life, open to love and feel the power of what it means to here and now. Love as if tomorrow does not exist. This is presence.

One is always glad to be of service.

Stef Sifandos

Relational Alchemist, Community Builder & Changemaker