No U-turn allowed

This blog is analyzing the origins of specific points of which I am walking the consequences right now in my day to day life. A U-turn to go back in time to correct or change my decisions is no option, so I will have to investigate specific moments in my past to be able to understand and correct myself here and now. Only so I will be able to stop ever returning patterns.

Today a new fact popped up that is adding to the list of consequences that have manifested since we as a family are back in society so to say. Already for a certain time I am seeing that since we moved to Italy, or maybe better, since we decided to move to Italy we started to plant a series of ‘things’ (I can’t figure out right now what should be a proper name) that grew over the years and which we are harvesting now, without having kept track of everything we have planted. I speak in we to indicate me and my partner as we are partners in crime in this, both having thought/created and accepted and allowed.

If I look back at the motivations we had for wanting to move to Italy I see now clearly it was a wish to escape. But to escape from what? Over the years, starting somewhere in my youth, I developed a view of the world that at first was very naive since I was raised in a family that had enough wealth to live a comfortable life. Later in life I experienced more and more how the real world was working. Where at first I was frustrated by the fact I was not able to grasp how things worked because they did not seem to work as I imagined, I slowly started to see that a lot of things were fucked up and started slowly but surely to distantiate myself from the ‘real’ world, at least I tried to do so. I was not willing to accept the world I was living in and started to make plans to escape the sick society in order to create my own micro world somewhere far away from everything.

If I look back at the period that preceded our ‘escape’ to a life on the edge of society I see a series of things that have not been managed properly. Most of these things are money related, and since life is money that shouldn’t be too surprising. There are several factors playing a role here. I will try to find a beginning here in my relation to money working backwards in time.

- Still paying the consequences of the loans I had to take a few years ago

- Issues with bank accounts that have not been properly closed down resulting in bank not willing to give us a mortgage for a new house

- No income due to work opportunities that dried up and forcing me to stop being self employed and to look for a new job

- Forced to get a loan to be able to pay my taxes

- Sold our house for less money than expected

- No money from the fine the first buyer of our house had to pay after he signed but could not pay for the house

- Extra expenses for lawyers and cleaning after a non successful sale and rent of our house

- Irregular income as self-employed consultant leading to a not so clear picture of what my financial situation was

- Lost job after not having a contract renewed due to lack of money within that company

- Changed job because I was looking for new challenges (From HP to a small company)

- Changed job because I felt I was doing work below my capabilities (From Ikea to HP)

So, where did it go wrong? Maybe my motivations or starting points. Why did I decide to swap job? When I decided to leave Ikea I did not have a new job. I decided to dive into a multi level marketing business where I was supposed to sell water filters. It did take a few months and some money to understand that this was not something for me. I was not a sales person and I was not prepared to sell to my friends and family trying to convince them to get into the business too. It was in the period right after this that I met my partner. In the first months of our relationship I settled and managed to get a job at HP.

Looking back the only motivation to leave a secure job was the fact I wanted a more challenging job and did not see any opportunities. Looking deeper, and this is a pattern that will come back more often, I see that I was looking for inspiration in order to do my day to day job. In other words, based on the feeling that my job was no fun anymore and did not give me the challenges I was looking for I decided to look for something else. The fact I looked for another job is not the point here, it is the motivation that lead to the fact of leaving my job. I have not been honest with myself (and to others) about this point and the fact I left one job without having another one. Why did I lie to myself? What was so important to achieve that I decided to lie and be blind for the real facts? Was it the hope to get rich? Was it the urge to get out of a boring day to day routine? Was it the idea to be free and do whatever I liked?

At last I managed to get back to earth and stopped participating in this idea of making money with a promising story overlooking all kind of important points. And finally I popped back into my place in the matrix and started working for a new employer. Not surprisingly this whole pattern popped up again. It took a little bit more than the previous time since I was settling more and more in the matrix of life, I got married, had children and all this was ok with a day to day routine of gong to the office doing slave work, every day again the same thing.

Also here I started to feel the burden of this much too static working environment. As soon as I saw the opportunity to leave for a more challenging job I left. I choose for a small company that was still tied (read entangled) to the corporate I was working for before. The only thing I did not foresee was that the crisis already started in these years (2002) and that Corporate HP was already taking measures. This trend of reducing costs, canceling training programs (I was working as a trainer) led to the fact that a couple of years later I ran out of business (by that time I was self-employed). I could have seen that, but I was blinded by the pictures of living in a remote area in the countryside somewhere in Italy.

And here I am touching another point. Italy! Ever since I finished school and moved from Italy, where I lived most of my youth, to the Netherlands I wanted to go back to Italy. The first year in my supposed country of origin had been a hell, at least that was the way I experienced it. I had a hard time in fitting in into the Dutch society. Not because people did not allow me, I was not allowing myself to fit in. I cherished the idea of being special, I was different, the ‘Italian’ and so giving myself a identity, something I apparently thought not to have.

I carried this identity with me for a long time, actually for the whole period I was living in the Netherlands, 22 years long. When I moved to Italy in 2006 with my family I had the idea I was back in my mother country. I son discovered a lot had changed in all these years. I also discovered that it was not the same life I had back then. I had to make my own money and that was quite difficult since plan A was to work as a trainer for HP in Italy, I only overlooked the fact that due to cost reduction HP canceled more and more trainings until almost nothing. Not willing to leave the Italian Dream and see that I chose the wrong horse to bet on I adapted and managed to get part time jobs. Together with other small projects I managed to earn a modest living, but not for long.

A factor that plays an important role in my motivation to go ‘back’ to Italy, besides the idea of leaving a rotten society to live on my own in a self (almost) supporting house with veggie garden, wood for the stove and so on, was the fact I could maintain my feeling special character. For 22 years I had been the Italian guy in the Netherlands, now I was the Dutch guy in Italy! That was feeding my specialty character with a lot of energy. I topped living this character when I was getting in more and more trouble and needed to change the situation I was living in since it was not acceptable anymore.

Having been confronted with the situation of having barely to no money to live I experienced a kind of resetting of myself. When we decided I had to go to the Netherlands to look for a job I kind of started as a new born child. This was the first time I actually did live in a country with no mask on of a special character. If ever I am recalling the old times in Italy is when talking to a colleague and old classmate of mine about the good old times (lol).

Having said this I can do a step further back. The being special character started somewhere of course. It might have started at the age of 5 when, while living in Italy as a very bond child among all other children with dark hair, I was seen as special. When strolling in the city with my mother and brother we had regularly people stopping to have a look at the blonde twins and had to touch that curious fair colored hair. My mother recalls that she had to wash our hair after each visit to the city.

Although the first years on the primary school seemed quite normal and being fully integrated into the community there were still a couple of ‘anomalies’. First the fact I am a twin and that my brother and I sat in the same class for the first three years until my parents decided it was better to split us (after having changed school from a small village school to a larger suburb school).

Later we moved as a family to another place and I and my brother were together again at the European School together with Dutch classmates on a school with lots of different nationalities. A nice feeding ground for feeling special. So, having looked back this way I see that during most of my life I have been living in my special character. Not to mention I have been always proud of the fact I never smoked of felt attracted to trends without seeing I was living a character myself with the real me hiding behind this mask.

The following self forgiveness sentences are focussing on the ‘being special’ character.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to feel special because of having a different background compared to the people I was living/dealing with.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself not to see that all those years I allowed myself to hide behind a mask of feeling special instead of not trusting that my true self was good ‘enough’ to stand in my day to day life.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to believe that I needed to be seen as special in order to achieve something in live/work.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to feel proud when people recognized the fact I was special by acknowledging I was as an Italian with wooden shoes (typical Dutch) using the best of both cultures.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to abuse the fact of not being a real Italian or Dutch person using this point as an excuse for (not) having to do specific things, thus not willing to take full responsibility for my role within society.

I commit myself to stop participating in the feeling special character as I see it is leading to deception and a false impression of comfort and safety within a non existing identity instead of just being myself in Self Honesty all the time, breath by breath.

The following self forgiveness sentences are about the fact I did not want to see the situation I maneuvered myself and my family in by moving to Italy.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to have ignored all kind of signals while pursuing my dream without realizing that my goal was not real but just an idea in my mind.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to not having taken full responsibility for the consequences of my choices related to my desire to go back to Italy and the desire to live on the edge of society.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to have delayed the decision of making a change in my life until I really had to deal with the harsh consequences instead of having seen and accepted I needed to change the way I was making a living in order to avoid nasty consequences for myself and my family.

I commit myself to stop in participating in pursuing a dream and to take full responsibility for everything I do in every moment, breath after breath.

Today a new fact popped up that is adding to the list of consequences that have manifested since we as a family are back in society so to say. Already for a certain time I am seeing that since we moved to Italy, or maybe better, since we decided to move to Italy we started to plant a series of ‘things’ (I can’t figure out right now what should be a proper name) that grew over the years and which we are harvesting now, without having kept track of everything we have planted. I speak in we to indicate me and my partner as we are partners in crime in this, both having thought/created and accepted and allowed.

If I look back at the motivations we had for wanting to move to Italy I see now clearly it was a wish to escape. But to escape from what? Over the years, starting somewhere in my youth, I developed a view of the world that at first was very naive since I was raised in a family that had enough wealth to live a comfortable life. Later in life I experienced more and more how the real world was working. Where at first I was frustrated by the fact I was not able to grasp how things worked because they did not seem to work as I imagined, I slowly started to see that a lot of things were fucked up and started slowly but surely to distantiate myself from the ‘real’ world, at least I tried to do so. I was not willing to accept the world I was living in and started to make plans to escape the sick society in order to create my own micro world somewhere far away from everything.

If I look back at the period that preceded our ‘escape’ to a life on the edge of society I see a series of things that have not been managed properly. Most of these things are money related, and since life is money that shouldn’t be too surprising. There are several factors playing a role here. I will try to find a beginning here in my relation to money working backwards in time.

- Still paying the consequences of the loans I had to take a few years ago
- Issues with bank accounts that have not been properly closed down resulting in bank not willing to give us a mortgage for a new house
- No income due to work opportunities that dried up and forcing me to stop being self employed and to look for a new job
- Forced to get a loan to be able to pay my taxes
- Sold our house for less money than expected
- No money from the fine the first buyer of our house had to pay after he signed but could not pay for the house
- Extra expenses for lawyers and cleaning after a non successful sale and rent of our house
- Irregular income as self-employed consultant leading to a not so clear picture of what my financial situation was
- Lost job after not having a contract renewed due to lack of money within that company
- Changed job because I was looking for new challenges (From HP to a small company)
- Changed job because I felt I was doing work below my capabilities (From Ikea to HP)

So, where did it go wrong? Maybe my motivations or starting points. Why did I decide to swap job? When I decided to leave Ikea I did not have a new job. I decided to dive into a multi level marketing business where I was supposed to sell water filters. It did take a few months and some money to understand that this was not something for me. I was not a sales person and I was not prepared to sell to my friends and family trying to convince them to get into the business too. It was in the period right after this that I met my partner. In the first months of our relationship I settled and managed to get a job at HP.

Looking back the only motivation to leave a secure job was the fact I wanted a more challenging job and did not see any opportunities. Looking deeper, and this is a pattern that will come back more often, I see that I was looking for inspiration in order to do my day to day job. In other words, based on the feeling that my job was no fun anymore and did not give me the challenges I was looking for I decided to look for something else. The fact I looked for another job is not the point here, it is the motivation that lead to the fact of leaving my job. I have not been honest with myself (and to others) about this point and the fact I left one job without having another one. Why did I lie to myself? What was so important to achieve that I decided to lie and be blind for the real facts? Was it the hope to get rich? Was it the urge to get out of a boring day to day routine? Was it the idea to be free and do whatever I liked?

At last I managed to get back to earth and stopped participating in this idea of making money with a promising story overlooking all kind of important points. And finally I popped back into my place in the matrix and started working for a new employer. Not surprisingly this whole pattern popped up again. It took a little bit more than the previous time since I was settling more and more in the matrix of life, I got married, had children and all this was ok with a day to day routine of gong to the office doing slave work, every day again the same thing.

Also here I started to feel the burden of this much too static working environment. As soon as I saw the opportunity to leave for a more challenging job I left. I choose for a small company that was still tied (read entangled) to the corporate I was working for before. The only thing I did not foresee was that the crisis already started in these years (2002) and that Corporate HP was already taking measures. This trend of reducing costs, canceling training programs (I was working as a trainer) led to the fact that a couple of years later I ran out of business (by that time I was self-employed). I could have seen that, but I was blinded by the pictures of living in a remote area in the countryside somewhere in Italy.

And here I am touching another point. Italy! Ever since I finished school and moved from Italy, where I lived most of my youth, to the Netherlands I wanted to go back to Italy. The first year in my supposed country of origin had been a hell, at least that was the way I experienced it. I had a hard time in fitting in into the Dutch society. Not because people did not allow me, I was not allowing myself to fit in. I cherished the idea of being special, I was different, the ‘Italian’ and so giving myself a identity, something I apparently thought not to have.

I carried this identity with me for a long time, actually for the whole period I was living in the Netherlands, 22 years long. When I moved to Italy in 2006 with my family I had the idea I was back in my mother country. I son discovered a lot had changed in all these years. I also discovered that it was not the same life I had back then. I had to make my own money and that was quite difficult since plan A was to work as a trainer for HP in Italy, I only overlooked the fact that due to cost reduction HP canceled more and more trainings until almost nothing. Not willing to leave the Italian Dream and see that I chose the wrong horse to bet on I adapted and managed to get part time jobs. Together with other small projects I managed to earn a modest living, but not for long.

A factor that plays an important role in my motivation to go ‘back’ to Italy, besides the idea of leaving a rotten society to live on my own in a self (almost) supporting house with veggie garden, wood for the stove and so on, was the fact I could maintain my feeling special character. For 22 years I had been the Italian guy in the Netherlands, now I was the Dutch guy in Italy! That was feeding my specialty character with a lot of energy. I topped living this character when I was getting in more and more trouble and needed to change the situation I was living in since it was not acceptable anymore.

Having been confronted with the situation of having barely to no money to live I experienced a kind of resetting of myself. When we decided I had to go to the Netherlands to look for a job I kind of started as a new born child. This was the first time I actually did live in a country with no mask on of a special character. If ever I am recalling the old times in Italy is when talking to a colleague and old classmate of mine about the good old times (lol).

Having said this I can do a step further back. The being special character started somewhere of course. It might have started at the age of 5 when, while living in Italy as a very bond child among all other children with dark hair, I was seen as special. When strolling in the city with my mother and brother we had regularly people stopping to have a look at the blonde twins and had to touch that curious fair colored hair. My mother recalls that she had to wash our hair after each visit to the city.

Although the first years on the primary school seemed quite normal and being fully integrated into the community there were still a couple of ‘anomalies’. First the fact I am a twin and that my brother and I sat in the same class for the first three years until my parents decided it was better to split us (after having changed school from a small village school to a larger suburb school).

Later we moved as a family to another place and I and my brother were together again at the European School together with Dutch classmates on a school with lots of different nationalities. A nice feeding ground for feeling special. So, having looked back this way I see that during most of my life I have been living in my special character. Not to mention I have been always proud of the fact I never smoked of felt attracted to trends without seeing I was living a character myself with the real me hiding behind this mask.

The following self forgiveness sentences are focussing on the ‘being special’ character.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to feel special because of having a different background compared to the people I was living/dealing with.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself not to see that all those years I allowed myself to hide behind a mask of feeling special instead of not trusting that my true self was good ‘enough’ to stand in my day to day life.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to believe that I needed to be seen as special in order to achieve something in live/work.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to feel proud when people recognized the fact I was special by acknowledging I was as an Italian with wooden shoes (typical Dutch) using the best of both cultures.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to abuse the fact of not being a real Italian or Dutch person using this point as an excuse for (not) having to do specific things, thus not willing to take full responsibility for my role within society.

I commit myself to stop participating in the feeling special character as I see it is leading to deception and a false impression of comfort and safety within a non existing identity instead of just being myself in Self Honesty all the time, breath by breath.

The following self forgiveness sentences are about the fact I did not want to see the situation I maneuvered myself and my family in by moving to Italy.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to have ignored all kind of signals while pursuing my dream without realizing that my goal was not real but just an idea in my mind.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to not having taken full responsibility for the consequences of my choices related to my desire to go back to Italy and the desire to live on the edge of society.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to have delayed the decision of making a change in my life until I really had to deal with the harsh consequences instead of having seen and accepted I needed to change the way I was making a living in order to avoid nasty consequences for myself and my family.

I commit myself to stop in participating in pursuing a dream and to take full responsibility for everything I do in every moment, breath after breath.

Self esteem

The main focus I have right now in my life is to find a job as quickly as possible. That is quite a task, especially if you are already 45 years old and people around you tell you there is very little interest for people my age. A couple of days ago I met someone that was able to provide me with some contacts and give me an update of how things are going in the specific business I am focussing at. He told me that in the many companies he’s seen he noticed that there is a strong reluctance in hiring people of a certain age because managers are afraid these ‘older’ people are not so influenceable and flexible as their younger counterparts. He even said companies prefer to hire younger, unexperienced people than more experienced, older people just for the sake of avoiding resistance or strong influence in case of decision making processes.

Although I know I am not very young anymore, I tend to see my age as an added value, and this story was not very nice to hear but certainly reflecting the truth. The result of this is that the normal way of applying for a job will probably not lead to success very rapidly, what I need is to be recommended by someone who trusts me to be a right candidate for a specific job. Although age discrimination is forbidden by law, the reality is just showing that if you when you apply for a job when are over 40 you will hardly even get an answer or not even a confirmation they received your message.

I experienced that these reality checks tend to shake me, to swing me between being confident in finding a decent jog again and not being able to earn a living. On top of this there is some pressure caused by the fact I have practically no income while I am working full time on finding a job, a situation that is causing me and my family to depend on others financially until I can take care of myself again. So, on one side I try to as less of a burden as possible for those that are facilitating my searching activities and on the other hand I need to express as a self confident person when contacting possible recruiters.

I am am getting a lot of help from old friends and family, which is very reassuring and comforting but at the end I will be the one that need to do it and take the opportunities that are given to me. I see that on this point I have changed compared to the past. I was much more picky on what people tended to offer me as nice opportunities. Now I am able to evaluate in common sense the offer and give immediate feedback in order to avoid false hope for the me and the others involved.

Another experience I had recently was while editing my resumé. I decided to insert the recommendations on the resumé I am sending around to people helping me in making connections. While inserting these recommendations I started reading them and was almost overwhelmed by a feeling of happiness, as if I was longing for these positive comments about me in a working context with others. Although I know very well what my skills are, I clearly longed for confirmation. As if I needed to boost my self esteem in order to feel good about myself and get energy from it to go on.

Thanks to the fact I am in my Desteni I Process I know this is a swing between polarities and I am definitely aware of this mechanism and managing to avoid these swings since they are not real but only happening in my mind. It seems very boring but there is no need to feed my self esteem positively in order to feel better and be able to do things I might not have done while being in a state of low self esteem and feeling powerless. Although very tempting it is in my own interest to remain stable in all ways. In being stable I will be able to be productive and ready for any situation all the time.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to take energy from the positive feeling I got when reading the recommendations of former colleagues and employers.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to look at others that have a job wondering why it is possible they have a job and I do not. This is self pity and jealousy that is not helping me, therefore I stop this and bring myself back to self, here and now.

 

The fear of facing my fears

Until not long ago I was convinced that I had very few fears if not any fear at all. Well. I had to redefine the word fear for myself to find out I have fears. Interesting about this part of my process is that I found out there are many things I suppress very successfully probably all along my life. The consequences of this general suppression of emotions, feelings and memories is that I think to have lived a youth without big issues since I have not many vivid memories about it, especially negative ones. Now that I think of it, it is an inherited ‘feature’ I have. I remember that also my father tended to forget negative experiences.

By walking my process of freeing myself from the Mind this is a very important step. It took me almost half a year to continue with my assignment about fears just because I always had something more important to do. Bullshit of course, but I managed to delay it for many months until I recently stopped it and found out that is was not difficult at all to face my fears if done in self honesty.

Now I’ve managed to come over this point, that apparently was not only linked to my assignment but to many other issues, I start to see a lot of things more clearly. One of those is my frustration about the fact others always seem to have so many memories about the past. The same applied to the fact they were feeling strong emotions in many cases were I in comparable cases did not recall any emotion or feeling worth to remember. As if a physical obstruction has been taken away full memories of events and the connected emotions and feelings are coming back. It is fascinating to see how everything interconnects. The fact I was blocked on the assignment had to do with a much larger point I had to face and it took me several months to come to the point of seeing it. I’ve made a new step in cleaning up the mess I made in my life until now.

Coming back to fears, my main fear is related to money, a lack of money that every time comes to a climax and settles again for a while but never seems to get away. It is all a consequence of decisions made in the past that were not made in  a self honest way. Not being honest with myself caused me to accept and allow situations with a specific consequential outflow, the consequences I am living through now. The nice thing is that I have been the one accepting and allowing al of this and I am also the one that can stop it.

Facing my fears is facing myself, learning to know myself and forgiving myself for what I have accepted and allowed in my life. I feared facing my fears but I had to come to the conclusion that there is nothing scary about it. It is part of the process I am walking and it is giving me several topics I can use to write about in a process of writing it out in order to get insight and take my responsibilities on that point.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself not to face my fears preventing myself of doing a necessary step in my process of freeing myself.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to find excuses and motivations in order not to go on with my assignment and therefore delaying the process of taking self responsibility.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to ignore my memories, my feelings and my emotions and therefore convincing myself that I did not have memories which enabled me to live without the burden of these memories.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to suppress my feelings and emotions just by considering them as unnecessary and a nuisance and threatening the apparent harmony of the situation/moment.

I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to suppress my memories by convincing myself I had none so I was free from having to take responsibility for my actions in the past and my created experiences in the future, sabotaging the process of taking self responsibility.

 

Why isn’t equal money a violent revolution?

The first thing that pops up in my head when I hear the word ‘revolution’ is the “Prise de la Bastille”, an event that is remembered every year in France the 14th of July. If you have a look at history you see that mankind has known many revolutions. Apparently these revolutions were followed by a change, but was it the change the revolutionary people had in mind? At first sight and if you believe what the history books tell you, yes. But when you start analyzing any post revolutionary period you see clearly that either nothing changed or that it even got worse.

If we look at the Occupy movement we see that it is leading nowhere. Or actually it is and it is more scary than you would like. If you have a close look at the events you clearly see that Occupy and therefore many other revolutions are eventually starting as a peaceful way but always escalating to violence. Any kind of revolution attracts violent elements often with the help behind the scenes of powers that use these revolutions to get a better control over the masses. When a revolution is escalating specific measures need to be taken in order to suppress the revolutionary people. So every revolution will contribute to a society with less freedom of movement and expression.

That is why Equal Money will not be preceded with a revolution. It is about evolution, a different kind of evolution. A real evolution that is going to accelerate the process mankind is going through now. Evolution is becoming a kind of education that happens though a mechanism of resisting first what is best for all than embracing it and again resisting and embracing what is best for all. Building up the pressure will accelerate evolution and lead to a quicker change avoiding that humanity has to go through long periods of suffering.

We can clearly see that situations are escalating more rapidly over the last couple of years. Everything seems to happen at a faster pace. In this incrementing tempo we as humanity will go through our resistances and embracing of what is best for all until we finally will set ourselves free from our limitations. Look at how society is organized now and how it was also in the past. All our society models are limiting us dramatically wether it is capitalism, socialism, communism… all are limiting us by controlling us to ensure that only a few can benefit from the slavery of many others.

It is time to set us free from all our limitations and ideas within the narrow frameworks we have imposed to ourselves. It is time for joy and freedom. And since it will not be given to us we will give it to ourselves. Join us at Desteni and find out how you can give yourself joy and freedom in a world where there is only one rule: what is best for all.

Watch the related video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfsqPQxCjfE

Follow the blog books regularly http://store.desteni.org/products/freedom-blogs-the-birth-of-practivism-volume-1
which are available at the Desteni Store http://store.desteni.org along with many other self-supportive products.

Did I reach my goals in my life?

A friend of mine suggested me to write my blog about the question if I managed to reach the goals I had when I was age 18. My first reaction was that it did not sound as an interesting topic. But looking better at it I decided to have a try.

To be honest I do not recall very specific idea’ s I might have had at that age. I was actually in a kind of crisis. I just doubled the last year of my high school and was supposed to move from Italy to Holland to start a study at a Professional School.

The general idea I had was to study until I had a diploma and then look for a job that might give me a decent income, just like my father. I never had a real clue of what actually the work of my father consisted in. He was in management and at the time I had very little fantasies about being a manager. I wanted to do practical stuff and technical stuff.

The first years after high school in Holland were a nightmare. I started with the Horticultural School where I found out that the students were to my opinion very narrow minded on almost anything. They considered me as a “Mafioso” since I came from Italy. After two years I decided to stop. I started working and to finish my missing High School year doing a evening school. After one year I decided to use my own money to go to a private school for Hospitality Business. I managed to do two years in just one with very nice grades.

The ‘black years’ had a huge impact on me. I developed the “Colitis Ulcerosa” Illness that lasted for several of years. Funny enough the illness started within the first year I moved to the Netherlands and stopped in the year after I found a good job at IKEA. Stability in my life cased me to have a healthier body.

My inherited restlessness caused me to quit my job at IKEA since I started to get bored, at least that was what I gave myself as an excuse to quit and change, seeking for a more challenging job. I tasted the world of MLM for a while (see my  previous blog) and finally I found a nice job at a Hewlett Packard Call center. I was happy with the fact I could use my technical skills combined with my knowledge of several languages.

No surprise that after a while (it took seven years this time) I decided to work for a small company specializing in what I was already doing a lot for HP, Training people on printers, sales and technical. Here my career stopped because the small company could not afford me any longer and did not renew my contract. Since then I am self employed.

In all these years I was trying to picture a perfect career that would allow me to use my skills and allow me to earn a nice salary. I pretty soon found out that knowing several languages is not necessarily something that allows you to make a nice living. There is a bigger chance you can make money by knowing two languages and you did your studies on University as a translator than knowing at least 5 of them on a high level and doing a support agent job in a call center. I remember that I felt abused quite regularly because people not knowing languages very easily asked you for your services never understanding how intense and difficult translating can be, resulting in low rewards for the work you were doing.

I actually never stopped defining and redefining what my ideal job should be. Even if I have a clear idea about my skills it is still difficult to translate that into an ideal job. OK, there is no perfect job. Even after becoming self employed, a step that should have allowed me to pick the jobs that suited my skills best, I learned that making money was the first and the last criteria when accepting a job. Nothing else. Until today, every minute I am working on a project for a customer, the main drive is to satisfy the customer in order to get paid. I can put a lot of sills and creativity in my work, but always limited by money in some way (e.g. the customers budget limiting me to focus on basics with no added value that might benefit the whole).

Back to the question of my friend. She added if I was satisfied with what I managed to make of my goals. The question kind of embarrassed me. I am not very often asking myself if I am satisfied. Not on that level. I am still trying to make a living in a society I almost tried to escape from. I have still a hard time fitting in in the way many others do, performing their tasks within their jobs without asking themselves if the work they do (or try not to do or as little as possible) is contributing to something other than their monthly salary.

In a certain way I am satisfied if I look to what I have learned. I have become very flexible and able to quickly fit in in many different types of jobs, both technical, management, commercial, and even handcrafts. Although I tend to say that I am not drive by satisfaction, I must admit that it is not true. Looking back, at the completion of a job/task I am always trying to find the point of satisfaction for the work I did. But what is being satisfied doing with me? Nothing more than satisfying my EGO! There is nothing practical in being satisfied! It does not serve any other purpose than feeding your EGO.

So, lets’s skip this whole satisfaction thing and do our tasks, work, job with one simple goal: The best interest of all. So everybody benefits from it, you and me included.

My relationship with money

Since I am struggling with time without seeing real improvement in the way I manage to perform all the tasks I plan to do I started to look at the the causes.

The first cause is obvious, making a schedule that is too tight to be real. Why I am doing it? Because I wish I could do everything I plan. Why this drive to do as much work next to my other family and home related tasks? Money!

I am taking as much work as I possibly can (or hope to be able to manage) in order to make enough money to make a living out of it. Most jobs or projects I work on are time consuming because they need research, preparation or are just a lot of work for little money. And I do not feel I have the choice not to consider these ‘lesser’ jobs because of my need for money.

Apparently there is something structurally wrong here. I should make a MC on this since the money issue is teasing me for quite a while. Let’s go back in time. The first time I had to deal with a lack of money was when I decided to leave my job at IKEA in order to dive into the promising business of selling water filters for a Company called NSA. It was not a normal business, it was a MLM organization. After a couple of meetings I was convinced by my brother who got involved and managed to convince me to follow his example. Why did I decide to participate, to invest money first buying products I never managed to sell and to find myself jobless and broke after a couple of months? During the meetings of NSA the main topic was about making money, large amounts of money. So the answer is: Greed!

As I saw that I did not have the right living style to meet large numbers of people and talk them into MLM I was not able to grow my network, I started looking for another job that brought me back into a situation of stable income again.

Strangely enough and although I had a stable income, it seemed I never managed to have the money I needed to keep up with the facts of life. SInce I met my partner S. everything seemed to speed up and within a short time we got married, bought our first home. A couple of years later we bought a larger home since our second child was on it;s way, together with a larger (second hand) car. If I looked at others around me I always wondered how they managed to have a brand new car, all kind of equipment and could afford nice trips abroad at least twice a year. I was practically jealous without knowing it.

To make things even more complex and because of not wanting to see my real situation that was not very stable income wise (I was self employed by then) we decided to more to Italy to escape from a series of things we should have addressed properly instead of running away from them.

Financial misfortunes added up when we had a buyer for our house that was not able to pay even if he already signed, we started a lawsuit, won it but never got a single penny, we only spent a lot of money for the lawyer. In Italy the foreseen amount of work was quickly becoming less and less and I had to move myself into other area’s of activities in order to make some money.

I realize I am still in the process of stabilizing myself. I still do not manage to have a stable income and the economical situation is not making it easy to find a job that takes care of that. I am now in a better situation then last year when, for the second time in my working life my contract was suddenly terminated because the company had to decrease costs. Now again the company I do part time work for is not making that much money, leaving very little for the last one that joined the club: me.

I need to investigate the mechanisms behind these jobs that all tend to end prematurely. Sometimes there is a voice in my head that says: “What if you never quit your job at IKEA? Maybe you still worked for that company.” and again: “You decided to leave HP to join a small company in the hope to have a more challenging working life and make more money”.  Either it was an end of contract or a personal choice that caused me to change jobs. What has my real motivation been in the occasions I decided to quit and what did I manifest when I found myself without a job? Was it only money? At the time, for me the motivation was often that I got bored in a job and needed to change in order to stay ‘awake’.

A couple of years ago I would not have been able to even start considering these points. Now, with the tools of Desteni, I am able to face myself and to systematically work to the very starting point, the origin of thoughts and facts that lead to where I am now. Only by knowing yourself in complete honesty will allow me to become stable and expand myself  being here, now, breathing.

The solution to my money issues? An Equal money system!

My daughter’s messy room

Every time I walk into my daughter’s A. room I have feelings of disgust. Besides a narrow strip that is leading to her bed the whole floor is filled with a wide variety of objects like pencils, dolls, doll dresses, Playmobile, Lego, and tons of dust since the room has not been cleaned for months.

We helped A. to clean the mess on a couple of occasions but she never managed to keep it tidy. Here I have frustration popping in. Frustration because I see there is an issue pending with no apparent solution. Frustration because every time A. makes a progress in the way she is dealing with her life there is no change to the situation in her room.

We’ve been avoiding to put pressure on the issue in the previous months because of A’s middel school exams. Now summer holidays have started several weeks ago and the situation is still the same. We have had the whole story with D. and connected to it we’ve established A. had lived in fear and depression for a while. Now she’s working on the outflow of this experience but nothing leads to changes in her room. I was left speechless when asked about cleaning up her room A. answered with no hesitation that it was not something she planned to do during summer holidays.

When tonight again I entered her room to collect a cup to put in the dishwasher I was confronted with this messy room. I made a comment on something that was still dropped (to my opinion) on the floor and A. said she will take care of it later. “later” is for me the same as never, since she uses this word just to make me happy and make me leave.

I am possessed, obsessed by this room. I need to work on this and let it go. The physical situation in the room is not my problem, the reactions I have are indeed. I really need to work this out because I feel that a part is reflecting my own shit. On the other hand I know that A. is dealing with big time resistances and only when she has dealt with those she will be able to clean up the mess. Imposing or forcing A. into action might lead to a clean room, but it will return to a mess in no time if the source of the problem is not adressed.

Quite complex to separate the emotions from the facts. Besides feelings I also see my ego that tells me it is not fair A. can go on with this behavior without consequences. If in a specific situation the outcome is she was wrong in saying or doing something a simple “sorry” is all she gives before going on with her life as if nothing happened. Big time ego here that is suggesting revenge, punishment to make sure A. understands that she is not allowed to do that. A. needs to be more aware of the consequences of her actions but it is not up to me to judge what the consequences should be. They will be there anyway.

I am very allergic to the mess in A’s room and any kind of mess she leaves for days, weeks, months just laying somewhere in or around the house. You can ask A. repeatedly to collect the stuff and bring it to her room with no result for many times. A curious thing is again the frustration connected to the fact I can justify why I am not doing certain things, too busy with other more important stuff while A. is either watching a movie, sleeping in until late, making a drawing, playing with a girlfriend, doing nothing.

The toughest part of this is that it is a mirror to myself. I too have a lot of mess to clean up, not physically so visible as in A’s case but my resistances are equally tough. Meanwhile I am struggling with the question to what extent we can accept A’s behavior in the context of our small family community like leaving her stuff for days, weeks and sometimes months somewhere in the house with no apparent goal or motivation. Stripping as properly as I can this question from any feeling or ego related matter I still see a couple of points we need to agree on within our family context.

So, wrapping this up, I need to work on finding the starting point of all this shit so I can clean up my own mess. From the practical side I am going to propose an agreement between all of us about how we should deal with our stuff in the house and in our own rooms/studio’s, within the context of our small community. Meanwhile, the most effective thing I can do is being an example. This morning I started to clean up one of the tables in our garage! Immediately started to develop a feeling of hope this will influence A. immediately and motivate her into action… I have a lot of self forgiving to do here!

Paralyzed by fear and by possession

I feel fucked, fucked-up, betrayed, nervous, possessed. What is going on? A lot of things that are at the end all related to each other…

The fact: A couple of nights ago I decided to monitor the activities of my daughter and the YM (young man) who’s sleeping over regularly for practical reasons related to work. My decision was triggered by a sum up of the many signals mainly given by my daughter during the day. What I found out was confirming my darkest suspicions and as a father I can tell you it has a blowing impact. While hearing sounds of intensive kissing (and who knows what other activities that produce the same sounds) I felt paralyzed. I knew I had to go into the room next door to stop that what was going on. I could have woken my partner, but I did not. I only managed to listen while my heart was racing. I did it for hours apparently, because when finally my daughter left the room to go to sleep it was 4:30 in the morning.

It took me hours to calm down and with no effective sleep I got up in early morning to do my things and to have some distraction. Only much later I managed to concentrate on my work, but I could not go around the consequences of what I lived that night.

Looking back I see that I had been fighting with many thoughts. I asked myself if I could make it to interrupt what was going on. I heard A. giggling and that somehow reassured me that she was OK and apparently having fun. No need to brutally interfere there and to create a negative situation of something that might have been positive. This actually was a justification for not coming into action since I was not able to move.

While having breakfast with my partner S. we actually started together talking about the same thing. I told S. what I experienced and heard that night while shaking wildly with my arms. It was again clear to me that the whole thing had a huge impact on me and S.

In the previous days I started paying more and more attention to my daughter’s and the YM’s behavior . Every time I entered A’s room she was clicking something away on her laptop. I decided to check this out and was able to trace google search terms that were used within our home network environment. Besides searches like “the 10 strangest things you can do with a condom” the one that triggered my alarms was “how does it feel to have your pussy licked” in Dutch. Teenage curiosity or preparing for some action for the next time our young man was in the house?

I am not against experimenting on sex but with all necessary precautions. A girl aged 14 and a man aged 20 is not a very happy combination. I saw my daughter being pulled into a situation that was far beyond her real way of life which is to me still very childish. Also I never experienced A. trying to be attractive sexually with attitude or clothing.

Many questions however remained unanswered. Since we are not sure to what level the two manage to stay responsible for their actions or be aware of the consequences we do not know. When S. checked the sheet that was on the sleeping couch she found two big stains. Here again we wanted to know for sure there had not been a situation in which A. risked to get pregnant.

At the end we had the full story from A. One thing emerges very clearly, she was afraid of the YM already for some time. His behavior grew slowly to a more obsessive way of acting. Very subtly he managed to have A. sitting close to him, not because A. was liking this so much but because he managed to pull her towards him all the time. The same for the so called chasing games that gave him the opportunity to touch her inappropriately.

We are very aware of the fact that A. might have giving encouraging signals that unfortunately were generated out of fear. It is amazing to see how fear can lead to actions that seen from the outside seem to be perfectly normal or even giving the exact opposite signal. This, however, is not justifying the YM’s behavior. He has not been able to sense or understand he was dealing with a girl that was not ready to answer his sexual needs.

Having put this part back into a manageable perspective we prepare for a proper wrap up of the whole situation. With the help of the Desteni tools we will work things out so we understand the starting points and the consequential outflows of our actions and lack of action.

We will work out a practical way to deal with this new situation in which we decided that for the safety in our family the YM, at least for a while, might better not be our guest anymore. He will have to understand first what happened to him, what he accepted and allowed to happen and what the extent of the consequences of his behavior are. Until now, despite of intensive coaching, he has not really showed progress on his practical day to day behavior, he improved only technical related matters that nevertheless allowed him to produce some nice work.

Until we are ready working out our points we will reduce collaboration to the minimal necessary to finish ongoing projects. For the next month there are no big projects to work on so there should be plenty of time for hm to work on some points.

Why I moved to Italy – reviewed

Tonight, while chatting with my partner S. about several points we had a look at the reasons that finally led to  moving from The Netherlands to Italy. We both had our own motivations that, when looked at from where we stand now, were not built on common sense but on desires and fears.

If people ask me why I moved to Italy I still tell them that I feel more at ease among Italians than Dutch people. That is a strange statement for someone that also states that he considers everybody equal and that the interaction with the other is conditioned by the way I can interact with that person, without making a difference between sexes, nationalities, skin color, etc. For sure this is not true. I am more and more aware that I have prejudices when having to interact with people and that these prejudices are eventually influenced by someones nationality.

I am telling myself that I feel more at ease among Italians because I spent most of my youth in this country. Analyzing this point I see this is not the reality but, because I lived in this conviction I manifested a situation where I had more trouble socializing back in The Netherlands than I have here now in Italy. It is true that I know how Italian people are programmed and I am using this knowledge to my advantage. So the truth is that I can create a privileged situation here in Italy abusing a couple of flaws in the Italian genetics, one of them being the fact Italians believe that everything coming from abroad is better, they even have a word for it: Esterofilo (loving what comes from abroad). Funny enough I could not do the same with the fact I was a kind of Italianized Dutch person back in The Netherlands. In my first years it was even used against me and I had to deal with the fact I was called a ‘Mafioso’.

The other reason I already discussed. It was a process of seeking the ideal place to live an isolated life, far from society, but not too far, just in case. So I ended up being convinced that only in Italy I could start a new life, building my own house in the countryside, living from my own veggy garden, producing my own energy, filtering my own sewage waters, and so on. But, since my starting point was not completely honest, I had to live through a whole series of nasty situations like selling our house to someone not able to pay for it, bringing the whole matter to court, winning but getting no money since the buyer had no money to start with.

Now, 5 years after we moved to Italy, we are not living in our self built house in the hills of central Italy but in a rented house in a small village with no money to do anything different than working hard for a generally small amount of money. We, as a family, manage to live with little money and still remain acceptably healthy and we are making small steps towards an apparently more stable income situation that can nevertheless change from one moment to another into a situation with no money as we experienced a couple of times not so long ago. So, the situation we are in is far from the ideal and fake picture I had when moving. And, looking back to my real motivations, I see that I was not convinced to the bone that it was a good thing to do. Instead I convinced myself that it was the best thing to do in order to make a dream come through, a dream of a perfect life in harmony with nature and myself.

So, at the end I was trying to find a way to achieve something that is absolutely a sustainable way of living. I just missed a whole lot of steps in between needed to really be able to achieve my goal. Now that I am in my process of self realization I see I didn’t make a chance to succeed in creating this situation for myself without first cleaning up the mess in myself that has been left there by myself and all my ancestors. I also clearly see that there is no point in trying to create a perfect living situation just for myself if I am not taking into consideration all what is around me. That is why I support equality for all and an equal money system that will allow to create a world with equal chances for all living beings on earth.

The power of fear

This morning I was working in the garden and quite for some time I could hear an amplified voice somewhere far away that slowly made me aware of what was going on today. Normally I hear sounds from the sporting facility nearby, but this was different. A long monotone stream of words slowly produced a picture in my mind connecting this sound with a memory (fascinating mind process if you are aware of it). It was a procession with priests carrying a microphone and amplifier saying our loud one prayer after the other, meaningless, automatically spoken words with very little intonation. Not much later the wind carried these words spoken by a child: “…let’s pray”.

The church is a perfect example of how you can manipulate people with fear. For many centuries the church manages to do this fear management in an excellent way and today, as a culminating moment of traditions and power of fear we had the “Cresima” or Confirmation for all young people (age 14) in town. Especially in Italy, but I guess it is the same in many other Catholic countries, the Cresima is seen as an important step in a person’s life, but why? Just because parents see it as a necessary preparation to marriage (since a Catholic is not supposed to get married if he is not Confirmed)?

In the last couple of weeks the kids of my daughter’s age where quite tense. They were preparing for the big day and already anticipating on what this day would bring them. The only thing they needed to do was performing a ritual and as a reward they would get huge presents from not only their parents but also grand parents, aunts and uncles. Modern Italy uses this occasion to confirm these kids into the next religious step: consumerism! Since everybody does it (and I always wonder who started the trend) people tend to buy all kind of gadgets for these youngsters like cell-phones, music players, game consoles, laptops. If that is not enough consumer stimulation there is a trend in purchasing expensive clothes, shoes or sunglasses.

To make the consumer party even better the presents are just a small portion of the whole picture. For the ceremony you need to get dressed in a perfect way, new clothes of course! You need also to buy a present for the “Padrino” and “Madrina” (Godparents) who, as with the baptism, play an important role in the ceremony. Needless to say you need also the “Bomboniera“, or better many of them to give to family and friends attending the ceremony. It does not stop here, since it is a Sunday, in Italy… and around noon, you are as a parent supposed to invite everybody for a traditional lunch, or should I say LUNCH?

Searching the internet I find very little critical notes about this tradition. I know however that there are several people in a difficult situation. They have to spend huge amounts of money and sometimes they need to lend money in order to be able to comply with the expectations society is imposing to them. I also know that not everybody is happy (to say the least) about this kind of traditions. But only few people dare to stop it by not participating anymore. Especially in small villages as the one I am living in this is a huge issue. Not only you are supposed to participate, you are also valued on the presents you give, the food you supply, etc. Not participating in this tradition might cause others to exclude you from their social network, the priest will come over to convince you to reconsider your decision, your family will not be pleased at all.

Apparently there is no choice if you are not really prepared to stand and to say “stop” to all of this. Not participating in this tradition means not being in fear anymore. It means not fearing to be ejected by the society you are living in, not fearing for the consequences of leaving the church since we might get punished by God if we are not faithful anymore. But it is fear driving us to act against ourselves, against our own real interests and the interest of all. In fear we have no common sense and we cannot act in the interest for all.

How can we stop this abuse of ourselves? How can we become aware of what we allow to happen to ourselves and how can we change our own life and the life of all on earth into a better world for all of us? The answer is there but only if you dare!

Follow us at Desteni I Process and Equal Money and learn how to stand for a better life in a better world.