What makes us human

By the time I was 36 years old, I had moved houses 11 times. I lived in five different countries, every time immersing myself in a different city, language, habits, and climate. I climbed through the ranks of multinational companies, traveled extensively, and built a successful career.

Back in those days, my internal GPS always pointed me to yet another luxurious hotel, expensive restaurant, and to an agenda overflowing with meetings. From Rome to Helsinki, then Paris, Dubai, Los Angeles, and Bangkok, wherever I was, the world was my oyster.

Everything seemed perfect at first – at least on the surface. But then I started getting this nagging feeling that I was building myself a life that was a bit too safe and too comfortable. I sensed a fear creeping up on me.

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Our society has developed very effective ways to condition the human mind. Our behaviors get reinforced by our environment and turn into self-reinforcing patterns. Our interests and consumption are controlled by that social programming.

Experiencing something that enables the human mind to break free, nourishing our awareness and empowering free choice can be life-changing.

For me, it was yoga.

If you have never tried hot yoga, I suggest you do. Especially if you keep asking yourself how is it possible that some people live happily and others don’t.

When I first tried yoga, I realized that my mind was perfectly capable of deceiving me, but my body wasn’t. It spoke loud and clear. I couldn’t touch my toes, I had shoulder and neck pain, slow metabolism, digestion issues, and trouble sleeping. While I was focusing on developing my business career, I completely ignored my energy, health, and vitality.

Here is a thing about yoga: it’s 99% practice and 1% theory. No bullshit.

People often think that yoga is about being flexible or physically fit.

But yoga is a science that deals with the body, breath, mind, soul, and ultimately, with the universe itself. It is a path, both practical and theoretical.

When I started practicing yoga and meditation, I stepped onto that path. It helped me move from a place of fear to a place of love.
When you are able to act out of love, you are automatically guided towards self-realization.

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I sold my 911 Porsche Carrera, after three years of driving it. The two lanes motorway behind me was moving so fast through the rear mirror, 300km/hour is an unimaginable speed. But the speed with which everything accelerates when you make up your mind and focus on self-realization is even greater.

Lacking self-realization is one of the most dangerous experiences you can learn from when you are in midlife. I embraced that learning.

Up until then, going through life, I would worry about problems and challenges, most of never really materialized. I wasn’t alone: research shows that 85% of what we worry about never actually happens. And what about the 15% that does happen?

But life helped me discover that I can handle any situation better than expected and that the 15% always teaches me a lesson worth learning.

I learned that we all have a heart full of love and compassion. And that we all have a mind that can be trained.

It’s possible to train our minds and manage the ups and downs and the overwhelming roller coaster of our lives that so often turns us inside out. We can train ourselves to free our minds from attachments and all the staff that doesn’t serve us.

The most valuable skill for the third millennium is learning how to let go, relax, and take it with ease, free from dis-ease.

I established daily rituals to train my mind. They consisted of simple practices. I implemented them from early morning throughout the day until just before going to bed at night. It became a 24/7 practice.

During my practice, I noticed that sometimes I would get stuck on a problem, and what helped me move forward was quieting the mind. I came to realize what’s real and what’s not, what’s essential and what isn’t, what’s only in my mind, and what’s real.

Often “the problem” is not the problem. The problem, or better the opportunity, is the state you experience in the context in which the problem occurs.

The most significant benefit is not the experience of stillness or meditation itself, it’s what the experience of stillness teaches me every time I reach that psycho-physical emotional state. Fostering the state of calming the mind is just the beginning. The access to a portal of infinite possibilities.

Of course, we are all different. What worked for me might not work for you. So, find your own practice. Experiment with variations and build awareness of your own process. You don’t do it for your master, your teacher, your leader, or your boss. You do it for yourself.

I’ll talk more about the practice that helped me change my life in the next blog post. Stay tuned…