Taming Monkey Number 6 – The “Forcing” Lesson

It’s that time of the month, again. I’m talking about my usual report on the tamed inner monkey. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read the introductory post. Basically, I replaced my yearly resolutions with a yearly challenge: each month I want to tame an inner monkey. Some underdeveloped part of myself, a promise made long time ago but never fulfilled. Read more about what an inner monkey is.

The Running Challenge

Last month monkey was “running”. I wanted to reinsert running into my life. The measurable part of this challenge was “14 days of running”. Two weeks ago I already had 10 days of running. With a detailed running report and all. But now, 14 days after that report, I can only add 2 more days to those 10. So, technically, I didn’t meet my own expectations.

But realistically speaking, the monkey was tamed. I did reinsert running into my life and the benefits are as expected. Namely, amazing. I lost weight, I sleep less and better, my metabolism accelerated (I know because I can eat more but I’m not putting on). To make a long story short, the monkey was tamed.

But, as always, there’s a lesson.

The “Forcing” Lesson

I didn’t run 14 days and only 12 because my ankle got injured. Like seriously injured. For a week or so I could barely walk. It was swollen and hurting big time. I tried to run one day but I only managed to do it for like 10 meters before those ten thousand needles started to hit me all at the same time from the inside of my swollen ankle. So I had to take care of that ankle until I became “usable” again.

Took me around 9 days until I was able to restart my running. Technically, the first workout wasn’t really a run, but just a power walk of a few kilometers. Nevertheless, it put me on track again. Two days after I did another workoout, with 1.5 kilometers of running. I decided to run every two days from now on and not every day, because the strain was too big. I also decided to alternate running with other types of exercising, and I’m thinking at biking.

So, the lesson was quite simple: if you force it beyond your limits, you may damage something. It’s a pretty simple lesson but it’s very often ignored. Partly because there is this “go beyond your own limits” discourse that each and every self improvement guru will sell you in a nice candy coat. And we tend to really listen to it, like really going over what we can reasonably achieve. And partly because I have a real difficulty in identifying my own limits.

I don’t always listen to my “sensors“. I keep pushing until it’s either me or the wall. One of us must go down. No matter the price I have to pay for it. And, more often than not, I found out that the price I paid is not worth the result. Coming back to my running, if I would have run every other day, instead of each and every day, I wouldn’t have those ankle problems. My running reinsertion would have been much smoother. It’s still ok, the monkey was tamed, but I also suffered a completely unnecessary injury.

Trying to go ”over your own limits“, at the price of actually damaging your system is not a sign of a strong personality. It’s a sign of stupidity.

I guess it’s the same in business or in relationships. There is a point from where, no matter what you do, no matter how much time or resources are you going to invest, nothing will change. That’s a sign you have to find another approach. It’s time to stop and think things over. And focus on what CAN be achieved versus of what it CAN’T.

So, that was the most important lesson from the sixth month monkey.

Monkey Number Seven

I already had a monkey for July, but due to some unexpected changes, I couldn’t commit to it. Of course, I could’ve somehow push further and try to overcome those limitations and still try to do my initial monkey, but, as I just said, sometimes you gotta know when to change course. And that’s exactly what I did (with a little help from a friend, of course).

My July monkey will be astrological service. I know it sounds completely unexpected, and to some extent it was unexpected to me too. But, as each and every other monkey I had, it’s a thing that wasn’t taken care of. Let me get into details a bit.

I studied astrology and use it on a daily basis. I don’t make a lot of fuss about it. It’s just a thing I do. Sometimes, when we go out, I like to entertain my friends for hours just by reading their charts. In the last two or three years, I accumulated many unfulfilled promises I made about those charts. From the top of my head, I think there are at least 10 charts that are promised to be written and delivered to my friends but I never lived up to those promises.

So, for the month of July, I will try to browse through my collection of astrological charts promises and deliver. It may sound like a much easier task than running, and it may even be so. It’s not the “difficulty” that matter in this “taming monkeys” approach. It’s mainly the “live up to your promises, man” part that counts. The “promise” and the “deliver” part of it. So, if you’re one of the guys that I promised a chart reading from me, time to enjoy. It will finally be done.

Of course, the other parts of my life will continue untouched, or even with more energy. And I’m thinking specifically at iAdd, my iPhone / iPad productivity app (which was ported to iCloud and just waiting for the release of iOS5) and WPSumo, the youngest project I took over (and one of the most promising I had in the last few years, I have to tell you that).

How To Get Successful Astrological Readings

Although I practice astrology myself I sometimes find the need for a external advice or guidance. I know my chart by heart and still I can find useful and fresh chart interpretations from another professional astrologer, or even from a friend who’s practicing astrology.

Recently I had one of those insightful readings from a professional astrologer and I realized most of the people searching for astrological advice don’t get the full package when having astrological readings. Maybe it’s time for me to share some thoughts on this matter. Oh, and if you’re in the “I don’t give even two recession cents on this astrology nonsense” league, I recommend you to start by understanding astrology. And if it’s still doesn’t ring any bell to you, that’s highly ok, feel free to skip this post.

Important: this post will not teach you how to chose your astrologer, instead it will focus on how to work with it. We will assume that you already have / know / work with an established astrologer.

Why Would You Have An Astrological Reading

Let’s start with the reasons. Why you would need astrological advice? As a rule of thumb, you will turn to alternative answers when everything else fails. The vast majority of people are asking for astrological advice only when their life path is a complete mess. They chose astrology as a final resort and this is why the answers they receive are largely negative. When you spend all your time wasting your resources on a wrong path, the simple fact that you have to acknowledge that – and an astrological reading will shed a powerful light on this – will upset you.

It would be so much simpler to just include this way of getting answers for your questions in your current bag of life tools. Astrology is just a symbolic way of seeing reality and it should be treated like this. Is just a way of understanding the world in an alternative way, that’s all. And using it at the same level with your other, more earthy approaches, would just give you a balanced view of your life. You don’t have to believe it first hand, but it would be so interesting and challenging to take it into account.

So, try to integrate it as a secondary tool for all your decision making processes. I always try to raise a chart of some important moments in my life or at least to know where exaclty the planets are at that specific moment. I get a lot of information about the poential of that moment, and several times I even switched decisions based on some unfriendly astrological contexts. And it turned out I was right. Also, in some cases I ignored the astrological warnings and I had to face the consequences. (more…)

Practical Astrology: The Moon In Signs

As some of you may know, I use astrology for personal development. Among some other stuff, of course. And by that I mean I use it constantly as a symbolic model of reality. The position of the planets on the sky is having some kind of influence on our lives and I learned how to understand that. Today I’ll share a little experiment which lasted for more than a month. It’s about the Moon and its position on the sky during a complete cycle from New Moon to Full Moon. If you still think astrology is only a horoscope in the morning paper, with no value whatsoever, I recommend you to read more about understanding astrology. And if you still think this is just new age garbage, feel free to skip this post, it’s ok.

I guess you already know the Moon is having a complete cycle in around 28 days around the Earth. During this cycle the Moon is staying between 2 and 3 days in each astrological sign. The nature of the sign in which Moon is at some moment is affecting that part of our being which is ruled by Moon. There are many interpretations of what Moon “is” in our lives. For the sake of simplicity I chose to understand Moon as the ruler of our emotions. It has a number of other interpretations but staying only at the emotional level will just be enough for this experiement. Just remember that the Moon represent the things that can hurt us and the things which we need healing from. The Moon is the unconscious pulse of our emotional field. From joy to sorrow, from compassion to anger, everything that is in your emotional filed has something to do with the Moon and its position on the sky.

The Experiment

During a complete cycle of the Moon I monitored my emotions. I also monitored the position of the Moon on the sky and noted my impressions and reflections of what the Moon in the sky could be. I did this in a kind of geeky way by using, of course, an iPhone. There are two apps on the iPhone that I used during this, none of them directly related to astrology, but more on that later on after the experiment description.  For now, let’s just focus on what I felt during a complete cycle of the Moon on the zodiac, from Aries to Pisces.

Moon in Aries

My emotions were extremely intense, like powered with high energy. On the whole, I felt an intense drive to action. Anything I started was out of enthusiasm, was powered by my own choices, not by external circumstances. I also felt an interesting silence on the emotional level, not too much noise, everything seemed extremely pure. It seemed that Moon in Aries favors clean emotions focused on achieving immediate results. Moon in Aries is also accident prone, during this interval I had a small driving accident (no consequences, but the burst of energy was almost physical around me). (more…)