Lifestyle Design

Every house you see has a blueprint behind. Before it was built in real bricks and mortar, it existed in somebody’s mind. It was first a drawing on a drawing board. A wireframe. A scheme. A design.

Your life as you live it right now has a blueprint behind. A set of rules and values. Every day you live your life according to that blueprint. You’re building your life based on your own lifestyle design.

What’s Your Lifestyle Design?

From my experience there are at least 3 ways in which you can design your lifestyle (and more than 100 ways to improve your life, for what matters). Think at them as they are architectural styles. Different ways to build a house.

The first one is emotions driven. The second one is social rules driven. And the third is values driven.

Following Emotions

Your lifestyle design is based on joy, fear, enthusiasm, sorrow, thrill, or something in between. You appreciate people based on how they make you feel. Everything you do is a result of one of your emotions.

If somebody hurts you, you’re sad. If somebody makes you happy, you’re joyful.

In the middle of your world is your heart.

Being emotions driven is a little bit of a roller-coaster. It gets you up and down pretty fast.

Following Social Rules

Your lifestyle design is built on the most visible and secure path you can find and keep. You appreciate people for the social validation you receive from them. You hate rejection and obey rules.

If somebody hurts you, you focus on how the situation looks from “the outside” rather than honestly experiencing pain. If somebody makes you happy, you feel accepted and integrated.

In the middle of your world is your material security.

Being social rules driven is like driving a huge truck. Safe, difficult to change course, powerful and sometimes pretty boring.

Following Values

Your lifestyle design is based on discovery, learning and experimenting. You appreciate people for what they can teach you, rather than for how they make you feel or how much validation you receive from them. You respond to many situations with rationality and lucidity.

If somebody hurts you, you think what you have to learn out of this. If somebody makes you happy, you’re enjoying it and then move on.

In the middle of your world is your curiosity.

Being value driven is like being a world explorer. Traveling light, looking for unusual places, learning and sharing your discoveries.

Your Master Lifestyle Design

Of course, all of the above are just abstract architectural styles. You can’t build your house exclusively on one of these, it’s just impossible to isolate a pure emotions driven lifestyle design, or a pure values driven lifestyle design. Or if you can, that lifestyle design is a serious imbalance.

In real life we mix those styles in various amounts. We have a little bit of emotional response, a little bit of social complacency and a little bit of growth fueled by our curiosity. But we do have what I call a master lifestyle design. Our master lifestyle design is the dominance of one of those three styles.

If your master lifestyle design is emotion driven, you may have a little bit of difficulty to be socially integrated. Your roller-coaster will take you higher than a truck can drive. It could also be difficult to learn new things, because you’re addicted to your roller-coaster and backpacking the world would seem dull.

If your master lifestyle design is social rules driven, than you’re having a real hard time changing your life and growing. Your truck won’t get you far away from known roads. And it wouldn’t be able to offer you the thrills of a roller-coaster ride.

If your master lifestyle design is values driven, you can get a little bit disconnected. You’re backpacking the world, but don’t have the thrills of a roller-coaster. And you’re a little bit insecure, missing the protection of a big, solid and secure truck.

The Choice Of A Personal Path

I think my predominance right now is curiosity and learning. I do have emotional responses and some of them are shaping my life big time, but my master lifestyle design is rooted in values. I’m also pretty indifferent to social rules, and social rules seem to be pretty indifferent to me, as long as I’m not a threat to the system.

Truth is you can chose whatever response you want, as long as you don’t give in to it. And as long as you know the advantages and pitfalls of each design. If you’re overly emotional, then society might raise a bit of rejection around you. If you’re concerned too much with social complacency then you might lose a hell of a good time. And if you’re too obsessed with learning and sharing, then you might get emotionally disconnected.

The bottom line of this is you can build your house exactly as you want. You are the blueprint creator. A house is built on brick and mortar but your life is much more fluid than that. You can change it. Even more than change (which is more than often something forced from outside) you can start designing it from the inside. Lay out your life structure the same way you design a house. Start with the front door.

How do you want to enter in your life?

Balls Of Fire

What happens when you’re in a hatred environment? What happens when you’re threatened? How’s your reality changed by this? What is your first reaction in case of aggression?

The standard answer when you’re threatened is to respond in kind. To fight back. To protect yourself. Responding to hate by hate, to threat by threat, that’s what we’ve been taught to do for centuries. It’s like you’re receiving a hot ball and in order to avoid getting hurt, you’re passing back the ball, possibly with even more heat on it. That’s the standard answer.

The “smarter” answer (as opposed to standard) is to observe the ball thrown at you and do nothing. Yes, you will get burned if you touch it, that’s right. So, why touching it in the first place? Why letting it reach you? Instead of accepting it, switch your focus from the reaction state, to the witnessing state: just observe it, see where it goes, don’t interact. You’ll have the breakthrough of your life.

Because the ball doesn’t really get to you, if you don’t allow it. That’s amazing! I know it sounds pretty strange and voo-doo-ish, but it really works like this. Once you start to just observe the things, to witness with detachment, you will see them in a very different way. Even more, by observing things instead of accepting them into your reality, you reach some kind of power over them. You will be able to allow or disallow them to reach you.

This is something really difficult to perceive and even more difficult to accept. I confess it took me a lot to even understand that. Reading about this really helps, that’s true, and I read a lot about how witnessing, observing your reality, without interaction, can actually change it. But you have to do it, not to read about it, in the first place. And it’s the direct experience of this attitude which reveals this incredible mechanics. (By all means, do not consider I’m a master on this technique, I just know enough to write a blog post about it. All I know is it works.)

Observing versus Giving Attention

There’s a huge difference between observing something and giving attention to something. Since we’re going to use those terms a lot in this post, let’s make a quick round up.

Observing means witnessing something, without any involvement. Giving attention to something means acting on that thing somehow: reacting emotionally to it, rationalizing it, comparing it with past experiences, doing something about it, anything.

Observation is stillness. Attention is focused movement.

Observing is non-action, attention is always seconded by action.

Gravity and Reality

Now let’s get back to our balls of fire.

You can’t receive something you don’t want. Every time you’re receiving something is because you accepted it. Being it a present, a relationship, your job, money, health… Or anger, illness, scarcity… You let it into your life. If you step back and look at the world from an observer place you’ll have this image very close to the planets and satellites: all the stuff that surrounds you is kept together by your own personal gravity. And the gravity which keeps your world together is your attention. The stuff around you, what you call your reality is orbiting around only because you accepted it and focused on it. You make your world living by giving it your attention.

Now if you’re not giving any attention whatsoever to some stuff, you’ll actually observe it floating away. There’s no more gravity to keep it close to you. Just think at something you didn’t think for a long time and you’ll have this feeling of distance. That thing seems so far away. Yes, that thing really is far away, because you didn’t offer it your undivided attention. The moment your focus shifted towards it, the thing started to get close to you.

Without your attention, things are just floating around. You create your environment by attracting stuff into your life the same way planets are keeping things on their surface with gravity.

So, now you realize that the ball of fire doesn’t have any direction of all. It is just a meteorite wandering through space.The author of a threat doesn’t direct the ball at you. Yes, he may use your name, he may use his mental projection of what he thinks is you, but it cannot make the ball land on your planet. Unless you give him permission to do this. The ball doesn’t really have any direction, it floats around, like any other thing which doesn’t receive your attention. It’s you who’re giving it mass and shape, by shifting your focus towards it.

What Goes Up Must Go Down

Now, what really happens when you’re not accepting hate at all? When you’re just observing the balls of fire and not allowing them into your reality? They drop. Most of the time. Most of the hate you receive or you get exposed to is circumstantial. It’s a result of chaotic situations, confusions or misunderstandings. This type of hate will just drop off. It’s like interplanetary meteorites lost in space. Consequences of small accidents, debris of violent but short and blind interactions.

But when the hate or threat is calibrated, ignoring it creates a surprising consequence: the ball goes back to the sender. When a ball of fire is calibrated it gets an extra weight. It’s not incidental anymore. It’s like a volcano erupting from a planet with so much power, that the ball of fire actually lifts off from the atmosphere and is thrown away in space. It’s something way bigger than a meteorite. It’s not floating around like a light, circumstantial ball. And it’s exactly this weight which makes the ball finding its way back to the sender. The ball is attracted by gravity. If it doesn’t find a suitable place to land (meaning: you’re not giving it the benefit of having a physical mass by your attention, you’re just witnessing it) the ball will look for the closest planet. And of course, that’s the sender.

In real life, this is a somehow hidden process. Not always the threat one sends come back to him in its exact form. Most of the time, the hater goes through a painful process without any visible connection to his initial threat. It may be an accident, an illness, some bad incident or any other kind of difficulties. The sender doesn’t really knows what hit him. In his reality system, he got rid of the ball, or so he thinks. He eliminated something from his system, and the only form he’s expecting that thing came back to him is your version of a ball of fire. If you don’t throw nothing back, he’ll assume his threat finished its cycle. Only it didn’t.

I saw this process from both ends. I was both the hater and the hated. And it worked on both situations. While I was hating somebody, and that person either ignored me, either didn’t really pay any attention to me, I found myself in violent circumstances. Accidents, violent incidents that I didn’t deserve to be part of. Or so I thought.

And when I was hated and let the hate pass me by, the perpetrator faced the same situations: accidents, illness or pressuring surroundings. At the first sight there wasn’t any logical, rational connection between the ball of fire and the violent incident. Only at the first sight.

Love and Hate

An ignored ball of fire will always land of the sender. It may be in a different form, the energy of that meteorite has been somehow modified by circumstances, but it will always come back to the sender. If no one wants it, it will come to the source.

But if you really want something, if you put all your attention and love in that specific thing, it will finally be attracted. Your attention made that thing slowly come to you. Love is acting in the same way.

In fact, love and hate are the same force, only with different polarity.

Hate is what loves sees in a twisted mirror. Hate has the same power and it will change your life at the same level love will. Except hate is destructive and love is fulfilling. They both use the same energy. One is building, the other one destroys. They are both powerful gravitational fields around you. And they attract their kind.

Why Is This So Difficult?

If things are really as simple as described, then why is it so difficult to manage a violent situation? Why hate is still there? Why people are getting hurt every day?

Because pain is real. Being hurt is real. You can’t always avoid a ball of fire thrown at you. Hitting one every once in a while is part of the game. Accept it or not, believe it or not, you do have parts in yourself which are attracting balls of fire. Most of them are placed under the surface, in what we call “the unconscious mind”. This is why you’re not always aware of the cause. But just because you’re not aware at the moment, that doesn’t mean you didn’t attracted it.

This is why is important to observe yourself instead of act upon those balls of fire. In time, you’ll start to see some patterns. You’ll start to identify similar situations. You start to find continents on your planet which are attracting balls of fire. And the only way to avoid other balls of fire is to start working on those continents. Because this is all you have.

Your reality is the only thing you have control on. You can’t control other people’s realities. All you can do is to work your attraction fields. Understand why are you attracting those balls of fire and how you can manage them. You have total control of your planet. You are the one who built that ecosystem, and you can still modify it whenever you want.

Maybe you won’t be able to solve it instantly. It may take years. But if you accept that you do attract some balls of fire into your life, you’ll be at least aware of that. You’ll understand that pain may be unavoidable, but suffering is optional.

At some point, those balls of fire you used to receive day and night, burning your forests and drying your oceans will stop landing on your planet.

All you’ll see will be some trails on the sky. Maybe somebody just thrown a huge ball of fire at you. But since your focus is somewhere else, all you’ll see will be a trail on the sky.

A Raw Food Diet For Your Soul

By now it should be no secret for the readers of my blog that I am a raw vegan. At this specific moment I have more than 6 month of eating only raw, unprocessed and uncooked food. My health has improved dramatically over the last 6 months. I lost 14 kilos in the process and I sleep like a baby. I had a nail problem at my left hand, a tiny exfoliation that started to slowly aggravate in the last 3-4 years. Never knew the reason, just observed helplessly that my nail started to lose consistence. In the last 2 months this condition has been completely reversed, my nail is practically complete again. During May last year I had a horrible cold, with more than 5 days of high fever (40 degrees Celsius). I never had the tiniest cold since I started the diet, although I was exposed to viral contexts.

The main reason for that dramatic change in my “physical layer” is my diet, without any doubt. It’s the way I eat that improved my physical health in such an incredible way.

Overloaded With Toxins

After more than 6 months of observing my body reaction to my raw food, I can affirm that my main improvement area is in the toxins speed elimination. I can feel that my body is having less toxins than before, and when it happens to have more than normal, it eliminates the extra toxins much faster. I can’t explain exactly how it does, I can only tell you that I experience states of lightness and elasticity. I feel like I’m cleaner and more functional than before. It’s not only my weight and my body elasticity, it’s like my whole body mechanism is functioning at a better rate.

Our divine machine, the body, it’s a sublime project. We humans could only aim to create substances as complete or as functional as our human tissue. When we can create something good, we do it incompletely. Every food supplement out there, a part from providing you with a list of  allegedly needed ingredients, insert into your body loads of incomplete, toxic structures. Each thermal modification of our food (apart from allegedly making it available for more time) fundamentally affects its base molecular structure. Every “improved” food contains in fact much more harmful substances, making your body working extra hours to eliminate them. And this extra stress weakens your sublime machine that you call your body.

I guess there is some point from where we don’t feel this effort anymore. After this point we’re actually overloaded with toxins. Our body surrendered and it’s only a question of time until the weakest link will fall apart, creating an illness. I’m not a doctor nor do I intend to pose into one. I can only speak from my firsthand experience on this topic and this is what I do.

A Raw Food Diet For Your Soul

Well, the other day I had out of the blue this thought: what if my emotional layer would also be fed with only raw, unprocessed emotions? What if I impose a raw food diet on my soul? What does that actually could mean? What would be the obstacles? What would be the expected results?

Without claiming that I already started such a diet, I will try to write in this post my possible answers to all those questions from above. So, let’s start it: (more…)

Raw Food Update – Almost 6 Months Later

After a series of 6 articles about The Making Of An Online Business, I thought it would be wise to write about stuff that has been ignored for long time here on my blog, and also about something a little more personal than business advices. Although they seem to have quite an audience, these advices are not my primary goal for this blog. As I always said, this blog is a continuous search for a personal path.

And that personal path lead me almost 6 months ago on the raw food track. My loyal readers know already what does that mean, but for the new ones I will outline some of the raw food specifics. I don’t eat meat, not any animal food like milk, eggs or cheese. I don’t eat processed food, anything cooked is outside my view. I only eat fruits, vegetables and seeds. The only exception is honey, which is the product of… I don’t know if I can associate it with milk, but whatever, I eat honey.

Although this seems like a very limiting choice of foods, it is in fact a very pleasant one. I eat apples, pears, bananas, avocados and all kind of fruits I can find. I eat a lot of roots like celery, carrots and parsley. I incorporate garlic and onions any time I can and of course I eat a lot of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and capsicum. I discovered several months ago that pine buds are a fantastic food, along with almonds, nuts or pumpkin seeds. During winter I eat a lot of dried fruits like dates, prunes or raisins and of course oranges and mandarines. In fact, I do have a greater variety than before.

Raw Food And Health

I plan to have a complete medical test later this month and I will write in detail the differences from my last medical test. Please note that before going raw vegan I was a lacto-ovo-vegetarian for more than 3 years. I did have some cholesterol anomalies and I did had a colon sensitivity which was in fact pretty disturbing in the last 4-5 years. Before being a vegetarian I was a complete mess in terms of eating, I was also a regular drinker in my early twenties and I guess this can leave pretty powerful marks.

There are visible effects of my health even without the medical tests, which I guess they come clean this time. First of all, the weight loss is constantly at same level. I am 1,82 tall and my weight is between 79-81 kilos regardless of what, when and how I eat. During the first three months of being raw vegan I lost 14 kilos. This is a fantastic benefit and it will well worth a raw food diet even if it would be the only one.

My sleeping patterns are completely upgraded. I can go to sleep anytime now, have around 7 hours a sleep and then wake up relaxed and ready to go. Doesn’t matter if I go to bed at 23:45 or at 21:00, I do sleep 7 hours and feel ok. I had a lot of issues with my sleep before, I either overslept constantly, either made white nights every other week, in order to “win” some time. Not anymore. I literally sleep like a baby.

Oh, and one other thing to mention about my health, which I think it’s pretty important. During last month we were traveling for the holidays. While in Switzerland, Bianca caught a serious cold. She was feverish (around 39-40 degrees Celsius) for 2 nights in a row and had to have antibiotics. Usually, when somebody in the family has a bacterial infection like that one, all the family is picking it up. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t pick it up this time.

The other day, after 2 weeks of kindergarten, Bianca caught another infection (we were warned about that, every time a kid starts socializing like this, there will be an adaptation and immunization period). Didn’t caught this either. While Bianca’s immune system is starting to build up seems like my immune system is already better than before. It’s important to know that last year during May – just two months before starting to eat raw – I had a horrible illness in which I had almost a week of high fever, and it was a bacterial infection. So, it’s definitely a big improvement here.

I’m sure that my body is now in better shape and all its functions are better than 6 months ago thanks to this raw food habit. I also think that there are some better protection processes taking places in my body, but it’s too early now to write about this. I will monitor these patterns closer and see how it’s going. It’s basically about how my body reacts to a serious increase on stress (being it a fitness session, or a bacterial infection). I’m sure there is something much better going on, but without more details I can’t be sure and I really don’t want to go delusional here, keeping it only to the facts for now. (more…)

Understanding Emotions

Taking the plunge on such a complicated topic as emotions is something that I wanted to do long time ago. In fact, this post is staying as a draft in my MacJournal for more than 2 months now. I always wanted to start writing about it, but also felt a little uncomfortable with it. It was like something was not still clear. I had the overall idea but there was some inconsistency in my approach.

Today I’ll go for it because I simply feel like doing it. Noticed the reason? “I simply feel like doing it”. The trigger for starting to write this was an emotion. A feeling.

Being A Prisoner Of Your Own Emotions

I always was quite an emotional person. I am a Scorpio sign, which is a Water sign, and Water signs are well known to be extremely emotional. My rising sign is Capricorn, an Earth sign. Among all the Earth signs, Capricorn is known to be the most sensitive. Quite an emotional super mix here, right?

When I was younger I was always emotions driven. My emotions were so intense that I often mistaken them for thoughts. I often acted out of impulse instead of reason. I was so immersed in my own emotional field that I was convinced that I’m thinking when I was in fact only reacting to some stimulus, same way as the Pavlov’s dog.

Needless to say that when you act only and only by emotions you get hurt . Sometimes you get hurt big time. But your acting pattern is already set and even if you promise to yourself not to repeat the same mistake again, you’ll do it. You say you won’t do that thing that caused you pain, but you go straight to it. And get hurt again.

I’m sure many of you experienced the same pattern. You get emotional on some situation, act, do something wrong because you acted only as a result of that emotion, and then get hurt. And then do the exact situation again. You get hit by the same emotion, do the exact same thing and get hurt again.

Sooner or later you start to feel embarrassed by your own emotional system. You start to actually feel bad on a whole different level, by being able to predict how you will act on a certain circumstance. I won’t see this movie because it will make me cry. I won’t meet those people because I’m shy and I’ll do something stupid. I won’t talk to my parents because I always felt like they wanted to control me.

You don’t do a rational assessment of the situation, you just remember you acted in a hurting way, and start to avoid the whole situation, regardless of the potential. Each and every circumstance has a potential. Most of the time is about a learning potential. But if your actions are emotions driven, you won’t see that potential.

Acting only by emotion is the easiest way toward manipulation. The more emotional you get, and the less assessment you put into your life, the easier for you to be manipulated. You will attract people or situations in which you will be the puppet, and they will be the puppeteer. You won’t even realize that, of course, you will just notice how your life becomes more and more miserable. (more…)

How To Deal With Negative Opinions About Yourself

Not everybody will talk nicely about you, you know. You will face some negative opinions about yourself, regardless of the amount of value you provide or how nice you behave to others. And that is a thing you must cope with, because sooner or later it will rush into your life. The sooner you have a successful and visible career the sooner you’ll have to face more and more powerful negations to your activity. In itself, this manifestation of resistance to what you do is not that big or important as people tend to make it. To some degree it is a very natural and almost necessary thing. But there is an inner feeling of security and comfort that is being challenged by every negative opinion, and that is creating in turn a flow of negative emotions.  Let’s see how you can deal with that.

Accept Them

The first and the most difficult thing to do about that, is to accept the simple fact that they can exist. It’s difficult because you link success to popularity, and popularity means recognition from an increasing number of people. Every negative opinion will feel like a decrease in popularity and you’ll be incline to take it as a lack of success. In fact, negative opinions about you have nothing to do with your success, because you should have your own definition about being successful.

A negative opinion is no better than a positive one in terms of popularity either, because it will still be about you. It will still make you popular, only in a negative way. They say “there is no such thing as bad advertising” for a reason, you know. Because there is no bad advertising, there is only advertising. So every time somebody is talking badly about you, remember that they’re still taking about you.

Acceptance of negative opinions is also a good exercise of sympathy. People have the right to have and stand for different opinions, other than yours. It’s a fundamental right and you should be happy every time somebody is exercising that right. It’s a good thing even if it comes up with something negative about yourself. (more…)

Is Water A Super Computer?

This is a movie I saw two weeks ago. It’s about one hour and 20 minutes long and it talks about unusual things about water. I got the link from one of my astrology groups where I’m subscribed, so I expected something beyond scientific. But most of the time in this movie, it’s the scientists that are speaking. And they’re speaking about stuff that we don’t know yet about water, even if we did walk on the moon or discover the atomic bomb (yes, they are talking about “heavy water” too, several times).

I’ll let you see the movie for now, and if you think like commenting upon it afterwards, you’re welcome. But if you don’t want to see it, I’ll outline what surprised me the most, and try to comment a little about it. So, without further ado, these are the key points in the movie: (more…)