Mundo Resink lives in Amsterdam and is the co-founder of an initiave called “HeartWorkers”. Mundo makes short films about people who do what they truly love and who have passion for their profession. HeartWorkers publish these videos online (in the Dutch language with English subtitles).

You will probably recognize many of Mundo’s feelings, thought patterns and responses to what happened around him. But do you also follow that little voice within? Are you also a heartworker? You can now read an inspiring interview with our Loving Soul Mundo Resink.

Why do you publish people’s stories?
It inspires us to tell them and we believe that they can make a difference. We believe that doing what you love is the biggest gift you can give, a gift to yourself and to the rest of the world. It brings quality into everything and everyone around you. When things come from love and passion, whatever you do, big or small, it creates positive change.

But this project isn’t going to tell you what you love. We share stories, through people’s own eyes about what they believe in. These people surprise us just as often as the people who watch the films – and even the people we interview will surprise themselves. You may decide for yourself, if the story below for example, touches you. If it does, you’re recognizing a quality that’s already yours. That, to us, is the power of inspiration.

What motivated you to start HeartWorkers?
In 2011 I had created a website that let people explore companies from the inside-out in order to help them find their dream job. Me and my partners were getting in touch with companies that inspired us or that we were curious about, to ask them if we could come over and shoot photos. There was no fixed business model, we let them decide how much – if anything – our work was worth.

One company on my list turned out to be a bulls eye, but not just for good photos. My meeting with director Pieter Hemels was incredibly inspiring. The way he and his company support their people in discovering and expressing their intrinsic drive, was something I’d only read about in my favorite management books and we both felt a real and personal click. So instead of coming up with a price tag for our work, he asked me “How can we help you?”

I’d been playing around with the idea of creating a channel for inspiring stories about special companies or people who do what they love. When I asked him if his company would sponsor a series of short films, he immediately said yes. But not to what I thought, because they weren’t just going to sponsor us: Pieter connected me with wonderful people in his company, who supported me creatively in making the films, who came up with the name “Hartwerkers” (HeartWorkers), who built the website and with whom I grew into much more than I’d bargained for.

More than a year into the project, I had a sleepless night that led me to step out of my other company. I had woken up, in every sense of the word, by a desire to really start living for what I truly believe in. Shortly after, Pieter confessed something to me: from the start, HeartWorkers was more to him than just a way to express what we both believed in; he saw it as a way for me to discover myself.

Back in 2011, he saw in me what I couldn’t see until earlier this year – an innate gift to connect with people, create room for them to be real, to tell their true story, see the world anew through their own eyes and to surprise themselves. HeartWorkers helped me to discover this gift and to nurture it. So in a way, I’m one of the project’s most successful results!

What fuels you to do everything that you do?
I used to work, pull, tug and cling hard to all the things I wanted to see happen. But now it’s more like I’m being guided by a different force, one that’s me and bigger than me at the same time. I can’t rationalize it, but it feels right and it seems to bring me exactly to where I want and need to be. It also comes out as a drive to contribute to a world in which people are truly alive. I’m convinced that coming home to who we are, discovering what we’re here for, big and small, is all we need. Love, peace, sustainability, harmony… all those things are a natural consequence. Seeing it happen in people and in myself, brings a huge smile to my face.

HeartWorkers is an expression of this fuel and so is writing, teaching qigong and tai chi and organizing workshops where people can literally feel who they are, where they can connect with themselves and start moving from there. These are all different ways of pointing to the same wisdom: we already have everything we need, we are already who we should be and we only need to give ourselves a little room to flourish.

All I ‘do’ is listen, share what I see and what inspires me, reflect what I’m letting go of myself and what I’ve discovered inside. This cosmic joke is my talent.

On your blog I read the words “Nothing I do adds anything to who I am”. Can you explain what you mean by that?
I wrote those words about two weeks after I came back from a trip to Namibia with photographer Thijs Heslenfeld, a trip that was literally given to me. While I was there, I experienced a vast stilness, showered with half a glass of water, met people who live in the middle of nowhere because “here I don’t need money to survive” and I saw ancient tribes walking with cattle that serves no purpose other than status.

It again made me realize the nonsense of all our running around, taking ourselves so seriously. But this time it wasn’t just an intellectual game. I could actually feel that nothing I run after, create, build, make or do is going to make me more complete than who I already am. I am full and complete right now. This feeling is extremely liberating and instead of turning me into a happy vegetable, it’s rousing a different kind of force in me – a natural urge to create from inside, without the hurry and the hassle I’ve known so well, to move with effortless flow. I continue to unlearn of course, falling and getting up as old patterns try to hold on, but that’s part of the fun for me.

What does happiness mean to you?
The first word that comes up is gratitude. I feel this growing sense of gratefulness for who and where I am right now. It creates more peace within me. It turns life into a magical and totally natural unfolding of people, events and things. Everything seems to come together in a wonderful play of synchronicity. The more I surrender myself to whatever this life brings, inside and out, the more I feel connected to myself and to my surroundings. I do less and allow more to happen. This richness doesn’t depend on external factors and to me and this is what happiness means to me. Right now anyway. Ask me again later and I might pop out a completely different answer.

If there’s one thing that you could change in this world, what would it be and why?
I’m starting to understand this huge mistake that has us spellbound. I’ve seen for a while that, underneath all the bullshit, we’re all beautiful, peaceful, loving beings. But now I am really starting to see what motivates the bullshit, why we always strive for more, bigger, faster and why this thing called growth has become an ideal that takes on a monstrous size, literally eating us away.

We’ve come to perceive the world, with everything and everyone in it, as something separate from us – a hostile environment in which “more for you” means “less for me”. So we run, work and buy to fill the gaping hole created by this feeling of “wanting to belong” and to be secure. Yet it never fills and it never satisfies. Just like eating more food will only make us hungrier, so will running for more only leave us wanting more.

But it’s coming to an end. More and more people are realizing the mistake. We’re not separate and we don’t need more to feel whole. A walk in the forest brings us more fulfillment than driving a big car, a smile from a stranger makes us feel more loved than a new set of clothes, showing our vulnerable self makes us feel more alive than holding up the cool mask. Life is a gift, literally, and it becomes so much more easy, more friendly and more loving when we let go of the need to own and control it and when we drop the urge to make everything ours and ours alone and holding on to fixed ideas of what’s important.

I haven’t been immune to this mistake and I’m by no means totally free of it. But I do know what happens when this sense of separation disappears – there’s a phenomenal feeling of being free. It fills me with joy when I see this happen in others too. So that’s the thing I would love to see changing. But it’s already happening and if I can play my part, by being who I am, well then Bob’s your uncle!

INTERVIEW BY: DIRK TERPSTRA – SOUL LOVE FOUNDER

For more information, please visit: www.heartworkers.org

Watch more HeartWorkers-videos on YouTube.

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