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I’d rather be crazy….

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and happy, than being normal and boring.

That was the thought that crossed my mind while I passed by a bus stop and observed how people were looking at me in a sort of disbelief: It was snowing, minus two degrees, very early in the morning and this lady is running and smiling like crazy in her jogger pants, with just a small sweater and no wearing any hand-gloves, no mask, no scarf. I passed them, feeling like a flake of snow, all light and easy, while they were all heavily covered up, from head to toes, umbrella included, mask on, all squeezed under the small glass ceiling of the bus stop cabinet.

I know, maybe I am a little crazy. But I am a hard-core jogger and I love to go out for a jog regardless of the weather. It just makes my heart sing.

The whole experience made me reflect of how blessed crazy people is. They are beyond any sort of judgment. They freely express themselves; they dance in the rain, scream in the forest, laugh until it hurts, display the life latent inside of them.

“Normal” people follow rules. They are afraid of getting wet. They don’t smile to strangers. They prefer to be quiet and behave well. Seems like you need to shake them to take out a bit of life. … “hey life, are you there??”

Normal nowadays is the life sentence of boredom.

In our attempt to be civilized, we forget to enjoy.

I sometimes wonder, how would this world look like, if everybody would just be themselves, plain and simple? No wannabes or wannahaves. No titles to defend; no image to protect.

I think it would be a fantastic world. A world worth living.

We think we are a free society, but maybe we don´t have any idea of what real freedom is.

I don´t remember having a single day where I do not have to think about being myself without breaking any “rule”. Here in Europe, the word “forbidden” is the most common you see on the streets. Oh boy, how governments love that phrase.

“Forbidden to pass this street. Forbidden to smoke here. Forbidden to sit there. Forbidden to not wear a mask. Forbidden the access to pets. Forbidden to…. breathe? I think we are close to that.

Civilization and it’s obsession with law and order had converted people in domesticated pets.

Don’t get me wrong; I do believe a civilized behavior is necessary to keep peace; but not at the expense of suppressing the joy of the self; the joy of living.

We call people “crazy” when they behave “not in line” with an expected behavior. Maybe that person does not follow the rules; shows too much emotion in public; maybe they act more euphorically, they do not follow any expectations. Crazy people live in their own world; their happiness is generated in the inside.

Many people confuse “crazy” with mentally “ill”. Mentally-ill people cannot control their emotions. They act in a “primitive” fashion. They are dangerous for society. Or so they claim.

I think we do not have yet an understanding of what makes people “mentally-ill”. Researchers, doctors and the medical institutions often refer the mentally illness problem as a “genetical disorder”- a failure of your genes. An error of nature.

Wait a minute… can nature be mistaken? Can nature have errors?

I’m not so sure about that. I think we “humans” create the errors. We produce all sorts of trash like synthetic chemicals, all sorts of pollutants and alter nature modifying our food and our genes in our attempt to “understand” and “improve” nature, and our arrogance makes us believe that nature can be wrong and we can correct it.

Maybe the genetical malfunctions have anything to do with it?

Call me crazy, but I believe that nature is perfect, is marvelous, sublime and supreme beyond our comprehension. God is a perfect designer.

I recognize the technological and scientific advances that have enabled our civilizations to flourish, but do we really understand at the extent of what? What is the price we are paying?

Are we happier, healthier, and mentally stronger?

If a small viral flu created such a worldwide drama, shutting down our life as we knew it, for the sake of saving a few lives…. I don´t think so.

Just look at this world statistics: as of today:

Ca. 137,000 people died of a seasonal flu this year

Ca. 780,485,000 people are obese and ca. 1.8 billion people have overweight

Ca, 3,000,000 tons of toxic chemicals are released this year

Ca. 12 billion cigarretes are being smoked (today!)

Ca. 3,000,000 people died of cancer this year

(…)

Source: https://www.worldometers.info

I’m not a fan of statistics because I don’t believe, as a scientist myself, that there is a trustable base to count with clear rules. But at least statistics help us a little bit to put the world into context, parting from the belief that the rules are defined with the best possible knowledge we have.

We have for sure far bigger problems to solve as humanity than a seasonal flu pandemic, but we, the “normal people”, either decide to consciously ignore it and go with the flow, or maybe is just plain and simple ignorance?

I wonder who is really mentally ill now…

In a world full of normal people, I prefer to be the crazy one. I prefer to question, to challenge the status quo, to go out there and live fully.

I chose to trust nature, to trust my body and it’s self-healing capabilities… to trust LIFE.

This is the only chance we have to live it… so why to deny it’s right?

What is the big deal about habits?

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Photo by Plush Design Studio from Pexels

Habits are a trending topic nowadays. Everywhere you look, you get confronted by a lot of advertising encouraging you to get the “good habits” and to stop the “bad habits”.

You can find hundreds of books in the bookstores or Amazon: “Habits for success”, “Atomic habits”, “Every single day, get smarter, better and faster by changing your habits”… the list is endless.

I can feel the obsession, the promise behind. We are longing for efficiency in our lives. We want to achieve more and better. We don´t want to deal with chaos, and uncertainty. We like the orderly World that habits create for us.

But, what is really behind developing habits?

When we look at the definition of habit according to the Cambridge dictionary, it says: “Habit is a settled or regular tendency to practice, especially one that is hard to give up; Something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing that you are doing it”.

Doesn’t matter if we consider the habit to be a good one, or a bad one. We are conditioning ourselves to follow a pattern; to put a system in place, so we can just play it out during the day, and so that at the end of it, we can run the to do list in our heads and say: “Checked, checked, checked”.

It rings an alarm inside me. Why do we want to become more unconscious of our activities?

I cannot deny it. I personally loved to plan and create schedules of my days. I have been a fan of creating routines to make easier my life. I liked to listen for advice and implement routine habits that experts, doctors, neighbors, and best seller authors recommend for a “Successful, healthy and longing life”, although I cannot really say it really worked for me. There was always this feeling of something missing. My days looked perfectly in order, but I am still longing for something else.

One of my most precious activities is to take a walk in the forest regularly. One day, while I was walking, I stopped for a moment to observe the forest itself: So wildly beautiful. Trees from all highs and shapes, forming together a beautiful green scenery; Birds signing and passing by, the sound of the water flowing from the river. The smells of the wet soil. The whole thing looked chaotic in a way, every element of the nature just doing it´s thing, with no apparent order; But somehow it looked all to be in harmony, and extremely beautiful. Suddenly, a thought came back to me: Am I creating a prison for myself?

We humans like structures, and we like to have a logical explanation for all the things we cannot understand. But at the same time, we love freedom. We suffer immensely, the moment we feel our freedom has been taken away. It is a funny paradox: We long for happiness and freedom, but at the same time, we create a little prison of our own, by attaching ourselves to imposing patterns to live our lives.

We set up our alarms to wake up everyday at the same time. We impose ourselves an exercise and meal routine, to remain healthy. We go to work at the same time, taking the same way every single day. We set a schedule even for enjoyment, to make sure we have time in our calendar to experience some sort of pleasure: Have a dinner with friends, travel, go for yoga, go for a walk… it might feel at the beginning like by establishing habitual patterns, we are getting more efficient with our time and with our energy and achieving more. But looking closely, on the longer term it looks more like imprisonment.

Whether is going to the gym, or smoking that cigarrete every morning; It has the same effect in our minds: It is an unconscious act. We stopped listening to our body and our inner senses. Our body, is no longer self-sufficient, it needs to be told what to do and when. We became slaves of our own logic.

I love a quote from a famous Indian guru, that I heard some time ago, and still remains in my mind everytime I reflect about this topic. In his talk, he asked to the audience: “What is more efficient, a manicure garden, where everything is perfectly taken care of, or a forest, which no one takes care of, and that looks like a mess?” If the manicure garden stops getting taken care of, after one month it is finished. But the forest, it stays alive forever; Million years can pass and it will still be there, so it is at the end far more efficient because it is self-sustained. Maybe to our eyes, it looks like a chaos, but is it really?

What if it´s the other way around? What if we have been wrong, thinking that we need structures and systems in place, our little prisons where life works perfectly and orderly, and this will lead us to happiness? What if there is another way to live? What if we could just be conscious to our own body and mind, and just do what it is necessary?

Life is for expansion, not for imprisonment. What we call “chaos” out there is nothing more than happenings in the world that we just don´t understand, because we cannot find any logical definition to it. Maybe, chaos is not inefficiency, but just a lack of understanding.

I felt like getting a hit in my head with a brick, looking at my own life. This new way of looking at life, made me question: What is the kind of life I want? Do I need to become more efficient? Or to become more free? What makes me more happy?

Being conscious, is being really alive. We know we are alive, because there is certain consciousness of this life, we feel it and see it. Why should we try to automatize ourselves with unconscious habits, so that we can get more things done, if we will not experience life consciously and intensely, like it should be? Are we here to act as a robots, achieving and accumulating stuff? Aren´t we here for living in the most conscious, intense and beautiful way as we can? If our life is limited and just last a brief moment compared to the life time span of the planet, and the cosmos, then why do we want to miss it?

My resolution is simple: Aim for a life self-sufficient. Aim for freedom, by listening the authentic needs of body and soul. Live the life as more conscious as you can possibly be, intensely, joyfully, and in the present moment. Because this is all there is, and will be. The rest, may be just an illusion. If you are conscious, there will be no such things as “habits”. You will do what is right for you, here and now.

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Photo by Pexels

Decisions…Decisions…Love vs. Fear

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“May your choices reflect your Hopes, not your Fears”- Nelson Mandela

One of our most valuable and unique capabilities as humans, is our ability to make decisions. It is a well- known fact that we make on average 35,000 decisions per day . We might or might not be fully conscious about it, but actually, our life is an accumulation of all those tiny decisions we are making in our daily affairs.

Knowing that, isn´t it of most relevance to question ourselves where is the source of our decision-making process and to which extent, our decisions are serving our true desires and purposes or actually, if our own decisions are playing against us?

According to Ramón Samsó (2019) we are never alone when we take decisions. We are always influenced by two main aspects of our lives: Our internal experience and our external experience. For most people, the external experience actually defines to a great extent the way they make decisions. As we were Children, our parents decided for us, at School, our Teachers decided for us, the Educational System decides what it is what is relevant and meaningful to learn and which methodology we should use; Society decides which type of citizens we should become. Everyone seems to have an opinion about what is a good decision or a bad decision and wants make it for us.

On the other side, our internal experience is our own interpretation of the World: Our thoughts, feelings and reactions to all the information and impressions we accumulate in our lives. Driven by those emotions towards what happens to us, is how we decide to move forward. However, there are fundamental forces behind every action and decision: Every minute of our lives, we are deciding based on Love or based on Fear. 

Decisions based on Fear

What is the meaning of Fear?

According to the Cambridge Dictionary (2019), Fear is “an unpleasant emotion or thought that you have when you are frightened or worried by something dangerous, painful or bad, that it´s happening of might happen”.

We are social beings that want to feel accepted and to have a sense of belonging in our society. We all have craved for attention and recognition in one way or another. So, it is not a surprise that as the years pass by and we accumulate life experiences, we tend to make decisions that are “fitting” with our family, culture, religion and geographical place we are living in. Over time, we adopt those external expectations as if they were our own, and shape our Personality in a way that fits those expectations. However, when we make decisions based on adopted beliefs rather than based in our authentic desire, we develop a sense of anxiety and insecurity. To depend on external approval becomes the norm.

Since we cannot really control all the external situations that surround our life, we become afraid and try to overprotect ourselves by covering up, either by the urge of gathering more things to feel more secure (e.g. money, relationships, food, power, etc.) or by trying to gain influence through people. As the Indian Mystic Sadhguru (2018) says “The whole need to conquer comes from the fear of losing yourself. The very need to conquer something or somebody has come to you because there is a deep fear of losing yourself on many levels (…) You feel so inadequate that you feel that the very way you were created is not enough(…)”.

One of the most common ways to express inadequacy is by saying to ourselves that we have many “Problems”. What constitutes a problem? If you ask a person on the street: Could you tell me what are your problems? It will be very likely that the list will be enormous- “Now that you ask, actually, I have so many problems. The weather is not good, I have so much stress at work, my husband does not listen to me, my children are not doing their housework…” and so the list will be endless. In the eyes of the person, all his/her “Problems” come from the outside. Everyone else is creating a problem for him/her. The size of the problem, is directly proportional to the degree of emotional attachment with the external persons and situations. By feeling that the “Problem” is not in their own control as they attribute it to the external happenings, the “Problems” tend to look bigger than themselves, thus enhancing this feeling of “I´m not enough, I´m a little person in this vast world”.

Now, the million-dollar question: How to overcome this feeling sensation of not being enough? How many times you have wanted to do something, but you were unable to act?

When we talk about desire, we talk about that need we have, an anxiety to acquire or achieve something in particular. It is at the end, a way to enhance ourselves. The problem is when this desire has sprung up from the wrong identifications, which are our limited beliefs. 

Still, there is another way to express desire. There is a more positive and powerful energy, that does not have the boundaries that the fear has. Its energy has no limits and no preconditions. It is so powerful that it is the vital presence that holds everything alive. That force of energy is called Love.

Decisions based on Love

What would it feel like if you would base your decisions on Love?

What means actually Love for you? If we try to find a definition of Love in the dictionary, we find that no definition is really complete. How can you define a force with no boundaries, with our human language, which has many boundaries?

As the American Cosmologist Carl Sagan said: “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through Love.” Love is the force that drives life and which is basically present in anything and anywhere. Love is the very essence of our beings. Therefore, when we say we take decisions based on Love, we are listening to our inner intuition. Our inner Nature which tell us in whispers what is Real for us. Another interesting definition used by Gerald Jampolsy: “Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. It´s natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement”.

How do you know when you have made a decision based on Love?

When you take decisions based on Love, you don´t fear any outcome. You don´t judge beforehand if the consequences are good or bad. You trust and enjoy the process, even if the result might be unknown. This might sound strange and even unrealistic to some people, especially if you have grown up in a Culture that values results over process, or experiences. However, if we think about it: To which extent this kind of belief has helped us move forward in our aspirations? When we just value results, and not the process, the fear of failure becomes a great player in the game.

We want results, quick and with the less margin of errors as possible. This is not only unrealistic, but also very stressful. So many people prefer and decide to play small. Think conventionally, make few mistakes, and follow the most transited path. Love is still there, because Love it´s the very source of your existence, although it´s not flowing on it´s full and beautiful expression through you when you are unaware of it, being busy thinking about fear. In a place where fear exist, Love has less space to manifest. To Love is to Trust. To Trust everything: life, situations, other people and more importantly, yourself. Trust is to open yourself to life, to the outside and to everything. Show your vulnerability and embrace it. There is a popular saying that summarizes this beautifully: “To love at all is to be vulnerable”.

So, how do we know that we have made a decision based on Love?

  • It felt like an intuition that came from the inside, and not from the outside (i.e. family, friends, an expert, the news, etc.)
  • It feels right for you
  • It´s something meaningful for you
  • You feel happy when you think about it (even if it scares you a bit)
  • It shakes your world, by stretching your boundaries and making you grow
  • You don’t care about the result or the end, and you are more excited about the journey
  • You enjoy doing it
  • What matters is the effect the decision will have in other people/in the world and not only about getting benefits for yourself.

A thoughtful reflection by the great author Brené Brown (2018), which challenges our course of choice when done over fear and not over Love : “We fail the minute we let someone else define success for us. Like many of you, I spent too many years taking on projects and even positions, to prove I could do it. I was driven by a definition of success that didn´t reflect who I am, what I want or what brings me Joy. It was simply accomplish, acquire, collapse, repeat. There was little Joy, very little meaning (…) lots of exhaustion and resentment”.

At the end, the biggest gift of life when we are on the path of deciding every moment of our lives with Love rather than fear, is the amazing realization of the kind of person we are becoming: Strong, resilient, courageous, full of Love. Nelson Mandela said it very wisely: “In my life, I became to the realization that the real courage is not about not having fear, but in being able to overcome it when acting in the name of Justice, Generosity and Love”.

And you, what do you choose?

Reflections

  1. Do you make decisions based on the “must” or in the “want”?
  2. How do you feel at the end of your day?
  3. How often do you choose your intuition over your rationality?
  4. What is the worst and the best that can happen, if you decide do what you Love the most?
  5. When you take a decision, do you think of yourself as the only beneficiary?
  6. If you had no limits, what would you be doing with your Life right now?