THE STORY. Part 2

But there is always a “BUT”: I had a huge burn out in the end of 2019 season. Why? Even though I did what I love, I was working nonstop for 6 months almost without days off. 6 months of surf camps every week, one after another, working with huge amount of people and managing crazy amount of things. When you love what you do and work is a pleasure you don't notice how you're getting tired and don't make any boundaries between your work and life. Yes, even your dream job can be a curse if you don’t manage it right and don’t take care of yourself. The season started in May – in July I was already tired as hell and after finishing the last week in the end of October I didn’t want to see people at all. Nice job, Daria.

Anyway that was needed experience to draw a finish line with that lifestyle and that way of work. That’s why I came up with a plan how to rearrange everything and expand at the same time – the plan that was not intended to become a reality. I went on vacation to Azores right after the season to recharge myself thinking that 1 week will save me. The trip was good but not enough to cure from a burn out. I couldn’t even think about work. Then I gave myself a month of doing nothing but living, surfing and enjoying the place I call home – Peniche. In January 2020 I started to prepare everything for the next season and plan trips but without any excitement that I usually had in the beginning of the year announcing my trips for upcoming year.

And then the pandemic comes… The whole world stops and everybody’s dreams are crashing down. Including mine. As my main field of activity was tourism and all plans for this year were around that I was completely immobilised. I had no back up plan, no savings, no work. At least living in Peniche allowed me to go out for daily walks to the ocean during the lockdown – for that I was thankful a lot, but living with a cat in a small apartment not knowing what to do and for how long it will last started to put me down even more than before. To cope with upcoming depression I started to meditate every day little by little – I already did it before and knew how useful meditations for our mental health.

When life outside became impossible there was only one way – inward. During these 2 years of pandemic I went full on this journey. Meditations, yoga, psychology, life coaching, self development and mindfulness practices – I was trying and exploring everything that I found interesting for me and the more I did it the more interesting it was becoming. I’ve found so many blind spots in myself that blocking me from living a better life without my notice. Yes, I already lived a life of my dreams and found my happiness but pandemic took this life away and I needed to find a new way of living in these circumstances.

That year of lockdown put many of us in front of the questions: “Who am I without my work? Who am I without my surroundings and eternal running around? What if it all finish now – did I live my life to the fullest? Did I fulfil all of my dreams?”. I have asked myself these questions more than once in my life and was starting everything from the scratch three times at least, because my life exhausted itself and came to a dead end already a few times before. But each time choosing the path of honesty with myself and dialogue with my heart, I was coming where my dreams lead me.

Also it is important to say here that life is not a frozen picture – it changes and evolves every day, just as people do too. Once you’ve chosen how you want to live your life and what to do doesn’t mean that tomorrow you won’t wake up with different thoughts. It is okay to change our dreams and priorities – what’s important is to stay in touch with yourself to notice the change and make a turn at the right time. Otherwise we risk to end up at the dead end crushing into the wall. On my journey I missed a few of those “turns” – I guess my lesson was to trust my inner compass and learn how to navigate in life according to desires of my heart. Not always it’s easy. Sometimes our comfort zone is too comfortable to make a change and we settle down giving up on our dreams. Sometimes fear is stronger than our desire to try something new. Sometimes our surroundings and close people make obstacles testing our determination to live how we want. And sometimes we just don’t want to hear what our heart tries to tell us because we’re living in our minds. Sometimes it’s all together.

In April of 2020 in one of the deep meditations after the exercise to write down my skills in order to find a new form of putting them together, I received a message about what I need to do in life. That was “to share my journey and my knowledge”. My Higher Self clearly showed me that my path of choosing my heart, my experience of connecting with myself can be very useful and helpful to others but when I finished the meditation in my mind was only one question: “Okay, but HOW?”. I could allow the possibility that my experience can be useful to someone on a journey to their dream life but I didn’t want to tech anyone how to live and what to do, I didn’t want to sell a course or a marathon “How to reach your dreams in 10 days” or anything like this. I had zero ideas on how to share my knowledge and -50 points of confidence that I have a right to share it and that it can be useful to somebody. Honestly, now I understand that I was just not ready and not in a resourceful state of life. I was lost – how could I inspire someone on a dream life if I’m not living it myself?

That year was just a survival. I put this message from my Higher Self on hold and first few months I was still working in a surf camp. We were doing everything we could to stay alive and keep the business on – I came up with an anti-crisis plan, we finally had time to relaunch the beach bar starting everything from the scratch – updating menu and renovating the space, and once the lockdown was lifted I came back to the water to teach people surfing again. That was one of the things that kept me going – to share my knowledge of surfing and see happiness in the eyes of people who just caught their first waves, forgetting all the uncertainty in the world, problems and fears. One of my discoveries of that period was how I could implement my little knowledge in psychology into surfing classes and how it helped me to find a better approach to the students, how it helped me to understand what they might struggle with and what might be the reason behind – therefore making their experience of learning the basics of surfing easier and more joyful. On the practice I saw that most of the times it’s only our mind limits us, not the body. And to find the right key to that lock in their minds was my favourite part of the classes.

I saw once again how therapeutical surfing can be for us and how it can help to free ourselves from the blockages we have in our minds. Just like it did to me when I first came to learn surfing in 2016 and it completely changed the point of view for my life, washed away all the trash I had in my mind implemented from the society and family. 4 years later I could understand how exactly it works and could support other people in this process, navigating the learning of surfing in the mindful way. And then my idea of surf camps just transformed from a careless fun vacation into a mindfulness surf trips that can help people to find a better connection with themselves.

There is no magic pill to change your life in 1 day, just as there is no magic button to change the way your mind works and your patterns in 1 click. All of this is a long way and lots of work on yourself (not to be confused with “violence on yourself”!). This is a path of exploring yourself, working on self development and improving your best qualities in order to reveal your inner potential to live your dream life in harmony and joy. We all have an idea of a perfect version of ourselves – more beautiful, more successful, more free, etc. Some people becoming their best versions and some leave it as an ideal mirage that they’ll never reach. The difference is only in the mindset and actions.

But how could I inspire anyone for a better living if I was lost again too? It feels like it was another personal crisis (or transformation) because I already couldn’t do what I did before (and actually didn’t want to anymore) – but I couldn’t let it go and didn’t know how to do what I want to do. Very typical situation, you probably have been there too. After surviving the summer of 2020 I came to another point of making an important decision: I’m leaving the surf camp where I was working for four years since moving to Portugal. The place that gave me an opportunity to start a new life by the ocean became my prison that I couldn’t bare anymore. This partnership was over.

For the next 2 years I was trying to make these mindful surf camps and retreats but all my attempts were not really successful. I believed in this idea, I knew it’s very much needed and makes all the sense, but for some reason the response was not the one I was hoping for. It was very frustrating to do something you believe in but don’t get the results – this frustration was accumulating and with each try my faith and my confidence were fading away. Yes, it was 2020-2021 when the whole world was under the lockdown and couldn’t travel, a lot of people lost their income and any confidence in the future. Obviously not the perfect time for realisation of this idea, but I let the world and circumstances crash my sincere desires and dreams once again and loose my sense of worth. Once again I let the world tell me what to do and impose its rules instead of stand on my truth and create my own rules.

Looking back to this period from now when a half of local surf camps transformed into what I did in 2018-2019 and the whole world started to do retreats and mindfulness trips – it makes me smile. I clearly see now that most of my ideas and visions are ahead of their time and each time I struggle with implementing them, then couple of years later or more everybody is doing the same. Now in 2023-2024 there are many of mindfulness surf camps around with exactly same ideology that I was trying to make during the pandemic, one of the retreats even has the same name. Well… Maybe it was just the wrong timing or I had to go the other way :)

Nevertheless those 2 years of pandemic with all those unsuccessful attempts to do something meaningful in recreation industry put me to a dead end again. And when in the beginning of 2022 a full scale war between Russia and Ukraine has begun – the last light and hope within me were destroyed. I was devastated, lost any interest to anything, and basically came to the same point again as in the beginning of pandemic: trying to keep my sanity, find a reason to move on and help others with what I can do. For a few first months of this madness I guess we all put ourselves into a exhaustion funnel, spinning down to a depression until at some point we learned what we had to learn in this situation: to take a responsibility for your own life and make your small steps towards great things we came here to do.

I didn’t know still what I came here to do but I was eager to find out. I knew how I don’t want and what I don’t want but I knew what I would like to do – and I was trying many different self knowledge instruments to understand how to fulfil my potential. And then after many interesting, but not very helpful attempts, Leela came into my life…