11 Jun The Sun King Louis XIV

Until now, I had pictured the Sun King Louis XIV as a ostentatious monarch who lived in a secluded Versailles and strode from feast to feast, surrounded by all the important nobles of the time, who wanted to curry favor with him. What I did not know was that this Louis also presided over the meeting of his ministers every day and was, in doing so, the active ultimate responsible party for policy regarding French territory.

I love history and am reading Luc Panhuysen’s wonderful book ‘Oranje tegen de Zonnekoning’ (Orange Against the Sun King). The nice thing about Panhuysen’s narrative style is that he portrays the greats of that era as flesh-and-blood people, with their passions and strategic choices, but also their ailments and quirks.

Clever tricks
Louis and his ministers decide that the Rhine should be the border of France, and so Strasbourg must be annexed. This is not done by force, but by clever tricks. Long-forgotten contracts are found that supposedly justify small pieces of land belonging to France, and in this way, the entire Alsace is taken over without a fight in a short time.

Who does that remind us of?

I zoom out and see how Trump conducts politics in Greenland, Cuba, and the Middle East. It all seems to fall under the banner of: eat or be eaten. Time and again, I am amazed at the extent to which man, besides being a compassionate being, is also a predator. The compassionate part is therefore often occupied with absorbing and mitigating the damage inflicted by the predator.

How do you resolve the damage within yourself?
How can you tame the predator? How do you resolve the damage within yourself? The remarkable thing is that nature has equipped us to resolve our emotional damage ourselves and also to live in harmony with our environment.

It is also helpful to know the manual on how to do this. You will receive this manual in the workshop ‘The Inner Metamorphosis’. These are life lessons that participants say you should actually receive back in high school.

The principles of this method are:

• Live from trust rather than from unfounded fears.
• If you want to change, start by fully accepting yourself as you are now.
• Emotional wounds heal when you physically feel the emotions and let them flow through you, rather than by overthinking them.
• Beneath aggression and anger lies hurt and fear. If you focus on these latter emotions, the anger will calm down on its own.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch