Life Is Like an Onion—And Yes, You’re Meant to Cry

I was sitting in Gothenburg Airport’s arrival zone, crying like a baby. My tears were creating little pools of water and ink on the final pages of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.

The free flow of water from my eyes reminded me of cutting onions, and that’s when it first hit me—the connection between Siddhartha, Gautama the Buddha, my own life, and onions.

Sweet Wrappers and Soup Pots

We treat life like candy, expecting to find chocolate every time we remove the wrapper, and throwing tantrums when there is none. Eventually, we come to figure out that life is not so much a candy store, but more the chopping board of a French chef preparing onion soup.

I believe that life is like an onion—in the most positive way.

Onion Slices: The Many Layers of Being

The onion has 12 different layers covering a central core.

Imagine you divide an onion into various parts, where each part represents an area of your life.

Each area has a varying thickness—layers of ideas, concepts, thoughts, feelings, images, and associations; personal, societal, generational layers of abstraction that keep you from the truth.

These layers have been formed by your own life experiences so far, from your parents, family, literature, culture, and society.

One area might be profession - where your layers could be among others:

• Status (How I am seen)

• Pay (What I earn)

• Skills (What I can do)

• Meaning (Why I do it)

• Security (How safe or stable is my job?)

• Identity (Who am I through my work?)

• Relationships (Who do I connect with at work?)

• Growth (How do I develop—personally or professionally?)

• Autonomy (How much control do I have?)

• Contribution (Am I giving something back, making a difference?)

• Recognition (Am I acknowledged or rewarded?)

• Alignment (Does my work reflect my values and beliefs?)

• Burnout (How much energy or vitality is work costing me?)

• Work-life boundary (Where does work end, and life begin?)

• Fear (What am I afraid to lose or reveal in my work?)

These examples are more meant as inspiration and an invitation to you to ask yourself:

Am I currently peeling on one of these layers?

Should I maybe peeling on one of these layers?

Wisdom Passed Down: Universes of Peeling

Ancient philosophers of nearly all cultures—as well as religions—have been providing guidance over the ages about how to peel that onion, how to remove these layers for each area, to get to the truth.

Fortunately or unfortunately for us, that truth requires a 360° view for grasping and understanding. That means, just because you have been able to remove all the layers in one area, it doesn't mean you are done, or that peeling away the other areas becomes easier.

If you are aware and awake, you spend your lifetime slowly peeling away one layer after the other until you reach the innermost layer of each area. If you follow the scripture, you will realize that once you remove the last layer, there is nothing left and nothing there.

Once you have achieved that for every area of your life, you can come to that point of nothingness and realization that has many different names in different cultures, but is commonly referred to as enlightenment.

Most people never begin the process of removal, because removing layers of an onion can make you cry.

The Courage to Peel

It's not always fun and doesn't necessarily feel good, but we want fun and feeling good more than anything else. We spend time, money, and energy in coloring and dressing the onion up into something seemingly nicer—an apple, a giant cherry—but are unable to enjoy it, because it is just painted on.

Here are the steps to approach your own onion:

1. Realize that there is an onion that wants to be peeled.

This is life. We all have that inner urge or force that yearns exploration and expression. And if it's just man's search for meaning.

1. Accept that it is your onion, nobody else's.

At times we might not like the onion we have been dealt at birth. Maybe we don't like the outer layer or parts thereof. Or there are some inner layers we don't like or that we are maybe even afraid of.

I have been there: I tried to trade my onion for someone else's. I tried to put it in a dark pantry to forget it. It didn't work. Only when I accepted it as my own onion things were beginning to change.

1. Accept that it is you who has to peel it. You can get help, but you have to peel.

This one was a hard one. It is fine to accept that I have an onion and it needs peeling - but why does it have to be me that has to cry during that process? Is it not possible to outsource it? Cannot someone else do it for me?

I tried - without success. But the good thing is, you can get help, you can get tools, that make it easier and even fun. This whole newsletters idea is to share ideas and tools to help us with the peeling and build a supportive group of peelers.

1. Realize that one area is not enough, that you don’t know how many areas there are, how thick they are, or how long it will take.

After I went through many many layers in my love life, I thought I had figured the entire peeling process out. Only to fall flat and start crying again when consciously beginning to peel on my professional area. There are some concepts that can be transferred, some you forget along the way and have to rediscover and most you have to figure out from scratch.

1. Accept that and keep peeling anyway.

I can't say that I don't rebel and complain when I realize that I just found a new area to peel away and am starting to cry again. But the intervals between resistance and acceptance have become much shorter - especially since I now have the experience of all the great things that can happen when you begin peeling. And that is motivation enough to go through and with that process again and again.

Old Layers, New Lifetimes

There are some areas that are easy to peel—where there is no resistance, no trigger, no fear, no cave you need to enter to find the treasure you seek.

I like the idea of reincarnation in this context—as if that onion is yours for the ages.

There is a belief system, where the soul upon dying forgets everything factual about the previous life and get's incarnated again into a newborn being. This cycel continues forever - unless you break free from it - so the theory.

Back to our onion - some parts you partially or completely peeled away in other lifetimes. And if you didn’t manage to remove all layers in one lifetime, you get born again with a new chance to keep peeling that onion in your next life.

Journeys of Power, Love, and Loss

I like to look at the “biographies” of Gautama the Buddha and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha from this onion perspective. Both went through the experiences of all the highs and lows in the major areas of life:

• The accumulation and loss of power

• The accumulation and loss of love

• The accumulation and loss of family

• The accumulation and loss of money

Gautama the Buddha who started as a spoiled prince and had all the riches of life, was shocked when he first saw an old, a sick and a dying man upon which he revoked his heritage and become a wandering monk. Sitting under a tree in deep meditation - peeling away the last layers of his onion - he achieved enlightenment.

Only after they mastered the earthly desires and lived through them were they able to let them go and ultimately achieve enlightenment.

You can live a life peeling them away through experience. You can also spend it in a monastery, focusing solely on peeling them away mentally. Both are equally hard in their own respective ways.

My Hands on the Knife

I felt drawn to pursue this spiritual path, consciously probably by the age of 26 for the first time. I used to be afraid of pursuing that spiritual path, because I thought, what will I do if I ever were to achieve that? Will I become indifferent to everybody and everything? What will happen to the people I love?

I—as so often—completely underestimated the time it takes to achieve success. After some 15 more years of continuing on that path, I believe there is nothing to be afraid of. It will only add to my life, not subtract. It is about equanimity, not indifference.

This quote helped me a lot:

What to do to achieve enlightenment? Carry water and chop wood.

What to do after achieving enlightenment? Carry water and chop wood.

Breaking Through: The Layers I've Faced

After I started to consciously look at my personal onion and after I decided to face the tears and begin to peel away the various layers, I can say that this concept has helped me a lot so far.

• I lost my virginity late and for many years had stark complexes about my relationship with women. I was literally the dork on every party, frozen and paralyzed by fear on the inside. I can't count the number of missed or fumbled dates or dates-to-be.

I even explored the option of homosexuality at one point just to be sure that it was not that I was missing.

Later I went full scale into the pickup scene. After dating four women at once and feeling like the king of the food chain it hit me hard and I emerged from that with the realization that countless women and sex are not the key to my problems. I couldn’t have figured that out without going through all of that, without the highs and lows, the accumulation and loss, the joy and the pain.

• The same for my professional career: I have achieved everything there is to achieve in my specialty of academic surgery by the age of 40.

The classical chase of the dangling carrot. From total humiliation because of my inability to draw blood to talks in front of hundreds of people and surgeries at the technical frontier of my profession.

It took the low lows and the high highs to peel away one (mis)conception about me and my professional life at at time. To see again that this doesn’t fulfill forever too. I suspected that realization would come because of the onion concept already, but still, I had to make sure.

• Currently, I am well aware of my need to go through the accumulation of money phase, only to come out and confirm that that was not it either. I know it mentally. I still have to go through the experience.

Tools for Tears: Yoga and Meditation

I have tried countless tools along the way to make that peeling process more "appealing"—think of it like using lab glasses, gloves, and sharper knives. I found them in the practice of yoga and meditation. I will write about this more extensively in the future.

You can go faster through those layers with a calmer mind. Today's world is, though, a full-frontal attack on your senses, trying to instill everything but a still mind.

In my experience, this is where the practice of yoga comes in helpfully.

• Yoga—the physical exercises that are most commonly associated with yoga in the Western world—is essentially just the preparation for the final pose: Shavasana, the dead corpse pose.

• In that pose, the aim is to just lie still and be—an entry point for following meditation. Technically, just this one asana—Shavasana—would be all we need.

• But because that is so hard to do for us, we use the physical exercises and breath work to quiet the mind and body enough for this final pose.

And all of this serves to come to a point where you can sit down and do meditation and explore those deeper spiritual realms.

The physical exercises of yoga helped me break through manifested ideas of how inflexible and unsporty I thought of myself. I remember that my first time in headstand was literally mind blowing.

Similarly was it my 10-day-meditation retreats that helped me actually see in reality the power of my mind - the ability to sit without movement for two hours let alone my transition to vegetarianism and goodbye to alcohol and other toxicants.

Meditation as it is sold to us in the West is nice and helpful to a certain extent, but without the physical-mental quietness, you are not even beginning to scratch the surface of what meditation actually is and what it can do for you.

Similarly to the yoga exercises as a preparation for meditation, is the pursuit and transcendence of the desires of the different areas of your life a preparation for the ultimate realization of nothingness.

Beneath Every Onion: The Empty Core

The question is not whether this is true or not. You can believe it or not. But if you feel something of this speaks to you, then this can serve as a framework for how to go about your life—to seek and find lasting happiness.

As with many things in life, the answer is simple—but unfortunately not easy.

The Peeler’s Manual

Pick an area of your life and begin removing the layers, and be curious what you will find beneath.

Take it easy though, don't force it, reduce expectations as much as possible, don't expect crying, don't resist it either. It will be different than you think, it will be hard, it will be great.

More Than Tears

Don't misunderstand me:

The onion path is not all suffering —the tears released through peeling are cleansing , transformative. They can become tears of joy.

Each layer removed brings clarity and lightness. With each peeled layer, your vision becomes sharper, allowing you to discern what truly matters .

I 'm still in the middle of my peeling journey. Some days, the knife is sharp, and the layers come off easily . Other days, my eyes burn, and I put the onion down for a while. But I've developed a certain patience with the process, knowing that even the most stubborn layers will eventually yield to gentle persistence .

While I once feared what lay at the center —would I find nothing at all ? Would I lose my passion for life ? — I've come to understand that the peeling itself is the purpose. The insights and freedom gained along the way are not steps toward some final discovery but treasures in themselves.

If you want to dive deeper, get access to some of my tools, or just want to share some thoughts —reach out and reply . I'd love to hear about your own onion: Which layers have you peeled? Which ones are you struggling with? Where have you found unexpected sweetness beneath the sharpness? Did you find any great tools or chefs along the way?

Remember, we 're all sitting in our own kitchens, chopping away, eyes watering. There's something beautiful about that shared experience —even in our solitary peeling, we are not alone.

To more in life,

Nicco

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