Heresy

Cyclic perfection

According to the Gregorian calendar - one of many calendars that establish the end of a cycle and the beginning of another - today, December 31, is the end of another year. The beauty of cycles becomes evident in every living creature in nature, the sun that rises every morning, dwindles as the hours go by to turn into a sunset of reflection, and hands over to the majestic moon that lullabies every night with the hope of a new dawn.   Cycles are perfectly harmonious. They're filled with changes, transformations, growth, learnings, work, and sowing and harvesting that enable them to perpetuate themselves.

We have the human need to create cycles which resemble our cyclic nature and essence; cycles which help us to remember that we have a new beginning every day and help us to make a halt on the road to evaluate and rethink our goals.

These times are only symbols.  Thus, my heresy is that every day we have an opportunity to generate a new beginning, to change life. Every day we can begin a new cycle. In fact, we actually do it every 24 hours.

I am making you an invitation to daily reflection and renewal. A year does not begin on January 1, but on the day we decide to start a new cycle to transform our present into the vision that we yearn for, to rethink our goals, and to analyze what has worked and where we haven't had good results. We should actually give our New Year's hugs every day with the hope that the cycle we begin will lead us to the success that we wish.

I wish all the friends of "Heresy" a happy new year. May you remember that we have an opportunity to begin a new cycle whenever we decide to do so. May you have a Happy New Year all these coming years. 

The formula to overcome stress

My heresies arise from life and the fantastic people that I share it with. A few days ago, I was enjoying myself with my awesome cousins. We talked about a lot of things, including stress, and how it affects, hits us, beats us, and tears us down. We were daring to come up with solutions to deal with this evil of this century, when one of my cousins brought up what has become my heresy today. The formula to heal stress is compassion.

Compassion is a feeling of infinite love which allows us to put ourselves into somebody else's shoes and look at the world through his/her eyes, understand his/her problems, and wishing from the bottom of our heart that things for that person would change and be resolved. Compassion does not mean pitty. It is empathy which emerges from altruistic transparent love.

Well, when we experience this kind of compassion, we immediately acquire a new perspective of life and understand not only that there are millions of people with much worse problems than our own, but also that we can be bigger than all our problems. From this perspective, stress loses its raison d'être.

Thus, when we face our problems, we should seek a bigger problem and experience the grace of compassion. Then we'll find the magic formula to heal stress. 

When silence is the best word

Our traditional communication approaches instinctively refer us to spoken or written words. We even structure our own thoughts based on language. It is a proven fact that thinking only takes place after children acquire their language. It's something magical. Words provide us with access to the universe, to a million universes through communication.

But there are times when words get in our way, limit us, or are not enough. There are times when all the words in the world would not be enough to describe our feelings, and we actually can't find the way to communicate what we feel. The heresy is that at these times of great depth in our soul, endless significance, huge pain, or unlimited extasis when words are really superfluous and the best way to communicate ourselves is through silence.

It is then that I start thiking about those monasteries from magical tales, embedded in the rocky mountains of Bhutan, where you arrive with your body falling apart and your soul soft from the sacrifice in order to continue to hone your spirit based on meditation and, of course, silence.

I believe we should cultivate the art of communicating without words.  We should let our souls connect and understand with each other in situations where energy would flow better without the contaminant we traditionally call communication. 

Love grows when you share it

It is general knowdge that one of the key formulas to professional success is "networking", i.e. being in contact with our contacts. Being visible to our customers, speaking to our colleagues on a regular basis, or attending industry meetings allows us to stay on the radar of opportunities. It allows our links to be strengthened, it creates times of inflection in our professional life when events happen which would not have occurred, had we not been part of that conversation.

For a sort of hermitage soul like mine it has been difficult to come to this heresy. Love only grows when you share it. Otherwise enthropy takes over and destroys any progress that we can make.

If you want your relations to grow, you have to foster them. If you want to strengthen a friendship, then you need to share more conversations, debates, e-mails, and smiles. For love to be stronger, generate and regenerate, there need to be spaces that entice you to share hugs. You have to come up with excuses for sharing new moments, and in those moments you have to open your souls, give from what we have, to give our philosophy, to give ourselves. 

That is how we take away some time to create love from our day-to-day lives, to the hastle, to disconnection, which is going to bring us closer to our friends, closer to our lovers, closer to our colleagues. In other words, we'll become better professionals, better friends, better lovers...by doing so, we'll create love from moments and smiles.

That is the simple formula of love: sharing it.

Poetic Heresy v.3

I'll continue this poetic heresy with another piece that came from my soul many years ago, but yet perfectly applies to Heresy, this magic space created by those who read, question, and question themselves every day; by friends of a lifetime whom I've only known because of the link established through Heresy. This poem is dedicated to all of you:

Take as much as

you want from me,

and turn it into a part of you... 

Pull your best deed,

give it all your love.

Then...

 

It will return to me,

and you will come too.

A magic wand called self-esteem

For several years now, I've been exploring and working on the subject of self-esteem, and I've come to the conclusion that self-love is the basis of everything that we're capable of doing in life. Rather than depending on luck, work, effort, talent, or circumstances, success  depends on planting a healthy solid level of self-esteem in our hearts. That is the main driver in our lives.

Without the right dose of self-esteem, we end up giving our power to elements that are external to us and, we gradually lose the faith in ourselves. Therefore, we engage in self-destructive vicious circles and further deplete our own love, thus falling in a spiral effect which doesn't seem to come to an end.

There are many things that we can and should do to cultivate our self-esteem, which should not be mistaken with feeding our ego. Today I want to propose an exercise intended to accomplish this objective. It is based on the following heresy: We fall in love with someone not so much because of what that person is, but rather for what we are when we're with him/her.

This exercise consists of three steps: 

1.  Identifying the qualities that we love about ourselves when we're with the person with love and experience huge happiness. Exploring to learn who we are when we are in that moment of love.

2.  Acknowledging that what we love comes from ourselves, from our own essence, that it's not something or someone external, but the magic that we can do. Understanding that we're spectacular individuals who are able to generate happiness.

3.  Experiencing that we're that person we know that we can be when we're with other people too, not only with our loved ones. Reproducing that individual we love so much in diverse circumstances until we become masters in the art of being the ones who love when we're with anyone anytime.

Once we have gained expertise in reproducing the experience of love, we will have developed the immense power of creating magic around us; the magic of sincere happiness that emerges from knowing that we're spectacular human beings; the profound happiness that is inseperable from good self-esteem. 

Microcharity

It was with great interest that I read a blog published by  John Borthwick and Keneth Lerer in the Huffington Post about microcharity. The new trend to resolve serious global issues continues to be that of microcredits (small loans granted to low-income individuals who have no access to financing from the banks), leveraged on socialization platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.  

It is an extremely easy idea. You select a cause and donate a small amount of money (USD $1 or $2). Then you publish your cause on your Facebook profile and invite your friends and your friends' friends to contribute too. The impact? It's as big as your power to "pass on" your  passion and bring transformation into the world.

My heresy: transformation doesn't necessarily imply giving a lot, but giving many times. The great potential we have to leave our mark in this world is based on our power to enroll. We can turn the impossible into possible if we're able to recruit one person to join us in our dream and then recruit someone else; if we're able to do this so strongly that our energy will multiply itself in an unstoppable miraculous way.

It took Muhammad Yunus 26 years to implement his microcredit model in Bangladesh, to build sufficient confidence based on his results, and to earn the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Microcharity has all the power to generate so much transformation on a short-term basis that a micro Nobel peace prize could be established to be awarded to those of us who are committed to generating transformation in every step we take, with small doses of love.  

Dying every day

This heresy arises from a comment I received about yesterday's heresy titled "Where does hope come from?". In his comment, Ernesto says that "in order to live, you have to die...you have to let go of your attachments, your  passions, your pride, and your selfishness every day to let the most important feeling be reborn...love."

This comment is closely linked with a conversation I had with a friend of mine last week when he told me that living is dying every day in the same way nature dies at night while we sleep in order to renew itself and begin another day. He mentioned that the only difference between dying every day and what we call "real death" is simply that we wake up somewhere else.

Another argument to support the heresy from a few days ago in "How to answer the questions about death" is death does not exist. We die every day to be born again, and we live every day to seek our growth and renewal in death. What we call death is simply renewal that will lead us to awaken on another road. Death is simply more life.

Thus, today, the a day when half the world is celebrating Christmas, is a good occasion to embrace the choice of death; to die on everything that we want to leave behind, to die to grow, to renew and reinvent ourselves, to generate life in our lives. 

Where does hope come from?

In an environment of generalized economic crisis such as the one in which we're living, we often hear conversations about the difficult situation and the expectations about the future. I also regularly read on Facebook about my friends' "mood" and phrases such as "taking a deep breath with the certainty that everything will be all right" or "I know that God has a plan" or "waiting to see the light at the end of the tunnel"...in one word: hope.

Waiting for a problem to be resolved, waiting for a crisis to be over, waiting for the situation to change, waiting for anything.  What has caught my attention is that hope inevitably arises from a situation that leads to hopelessness. It's a response of positive rebelliousness in the face of uncertainty when we decide to believe that, in some unknown and unexpected manner, our "evil" will go away. Hope is what we feel when we do not see the road clearly, but we need faith.  

And it draws my attention because love does not arise from lovelessness, passion is not born from coldness, happiness does not come from sadness, humility does not derive from arrogance, and so forth. There are thousands of feelings that do not generate from their opposites, but from similar feelings, and yet, hope emerges from hopelessness. Hope is a magical feeling that we're all able to bring to our hearts when we face a difficult, unlikely, or almost impossible situation. Hope is an expression of our power.

My heresy today is more like an invitation. If we're able to create such a great feeling as hope amidst an impossible desperate situation, then we're able to create whatever we want to create such as creating love from lovelessness, or passion from coldness.  We're able to bring any feeling that we want into our lives and into our hearts, even when everything around us encourages us to generate something completely opposite...

We're capable of turning a desert into an ocean.

We're magicians of hope.

So what are you going to create for you and your life?

Conformism and happiness

I may have more questions than answers in this heresy. Maybe this heresy is just one single question: how much longer should we keep asking ourselves questions about happiness? When should we stop and simply accept that nothing is perfect and that it's about time that we "settled ourselves for reality? To what extent can we find happiness in conformism alone? or is conformism actually a threat to our true happiness?

I have lived my whole life with the absolute conviction that conformism is what actually threats our own happiness. As I previously shared in another heresy, it is the magic of enthropy which leads us to continue to stir our soul, questioning and working, because death will come the day we stop. This has been my ceaseless heresy. There is no question that, besides being a heretic, I have also earned myself a well-deserved reputation as a rebel, and truth be told, I'm honored to be called either way. 

But, what if it's me who is mistaken? (it wouldn't be my first mistake and, of course, not my last one either). What if it was only in conformism that we were able to find the balance we need to be happy, to stop seeking, to make a halt, and take a break. What if it was all right for an employee to come to a time in life when he/she stopped wondering what his life would be like if he/she decided to put up his/he own company, and instead, he/she would decide to continue working until he/she received his/her long awaited retirement pension? What if stopping to asking ourselves would be the key to the success of a happy, stable, "peaceful" marriage? What if all this unconformism never leads to happiness? Or what if neither of these formulars is the road to that nirvana?

All I know is that enthropy is a law that we all have to follow. I also know that if we don't work, grow, question, and stir, then enthropy will lead us to chaos to such an extent that the system will reach death. Something I don't know, however, is whether death is a state of absolute happiness, whether death is the only road to that nirvana. I ignore whether not loving, not needing, not wanting is actually the need. If that is the case, then Buddhists would be entirely right....

On my part, I will keep exploring and asking myself. Maybe one day I will run out questions, but we'll see what happens when that day comes.