The 100 Day Warrior is designed to unveil a version of yourself you weren’t acquainted with before. And there is an element of deception: the one who signs up for the course might think the program is about polishing up one’s armour and coming out bright and shiny after 100 days. But the 100 Day Warrior is not about building an armour, it is about stripping. In a way you have joined a strip club
New Light On The Conflict: An Israeli Soldier’s Story – Eran Efrati
Eran Efrati, 28, was born and raised in Jerusalem. After graduating high school he enlisted in the IDF, where he served as a combat soldier and company sergeant in Battalion 50 of the Nachal Division. He spent most of his service in Hebron and throughout the West Bank. In 2009, he was discharged and joined Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers working to raise awareness about the daily reality in the Occupied Territories.
A Remedy Against A World On fire
The world is on fire. Three days ago a plane filled with primarily Dutch tourists was shot out of the sky by pro-Russian rebels in the Ukraine, a week or so ago Hamas and the IDF went to mini-war against each other and ISIS is doing their best to cause death and destruction in Syria and Iraq. Due to the new function on Facebook to play videos without clicking on them in combination with the many contacts I have in the Arab world and their habit to show death from close up I can now see beheadings and executions first thing in the morning, today combined with dead Palestinian children and the bodies and body parts of my countrymen in a desolate field somewhere in the Ukraine.
Brave Woman From Ukraine Deserves To Be Heard
This is Yulia Marushevska. She is filmed by Graham Mitchell in front of Maidan Square in Kyiv, captital of Ukraine. The video was posted on February 10th and went viral. Yulia is a warrior, risking her safety to contribute to the freedom of her people, the people of the Ukraine.
My mission in this life is to contribute to the awakening of the warrior heart that is in all of us. Most of us live quite cowardly most of the time. We rather feel safe than vulnerable. It is not easy to overcome our fear of vulnerability.
But sometimes something happens in life that is so unjust that the decision is made for you. You become courageous overnight. I don’t know Yulia but to me it feels that her Warrior spirit has taken over. Perhaps she had always been brave or perhaps it were the circumstances that pushed her through.
Nelson Mandela said: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” When you watch Yulia and hear her voice you can hear she is terrified but determined and angry. It is hard not to feel touched and spoken to. And that’s when it becomes inconvenient. I invite you to watch the video and to mindful of the way your body and mind responds. Observe 2 moments especially: the moment when your heart opens and you want to reach out and the moment when it closes and you go back to business as usual.
How to fail at meeting the girl of your dreams
For some reason I felt I had a good chance. She looked like a girl that is so pretty that she doesn’t care that much about looks anymore. I felt I only had to prove to be able to overcome the obstacles. I felt as if she was waiting. She didn’t make it hard on me. I only had to figure out how to get to her. But I did not pass the test.
Since we haven’t spoken a word my image of her is still untainted. By now she has grown in my mind into this warm, loving, sexy, smart and sensual woman who is a wise and funny conversation partner, a great lover and cooks as good as she dances. Now that I think of it: she probably would be a great mother for our children too.
My Ego Pissed Somebody Off (And That’s Ok)
“Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions or decisions. It’s inevitable, if you are honorable. Trying to get everybody to like you is a sign of mediocrity: you’ll avoid the tough decisions, you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset.”
When I read the article it resonated with me. If I don’t at least try to manifest what I feel needs manifesting I will definitely be criticized by my Inner Critic. And if I give myself wholeheartedly to what I feel is my purpose others will criticize me.
Thoughts on happiness and fear
I quite often notice rushes of happiness though. They come and go. When I am riding my bicycle to the morning meditation for example. I cross bridges and ride along side canals, the sun is rising, the city is still quiet and the water is like glass. I feel love or joy coming up. It is really as if a bubble comes up from deep down, and is rising upwards, at one point crossing the borders of my consciousness and entering my body, spreading a warm feeling from my lower belly upwards. I sigh and smile. It is a feeling similar to looking into beautiful loving eyes.
Ready for transformation?
Apparently I am carb intolerant. I knew that a ‘low carb diet’ was good for me but it seems to be going in the direction of a ‘no carb diet’. That will be just eggs, meat, fish, nuts, seeds and veggies for me. No pasta, no bread, no sugar, not even a bit of brown rice. Look, I love my buddies at Evolve and I really respect the vast knowledge of the human body of the founders Mike and Sander. But I hate the casualness with which they squeeze in my back, look at each other and say ‘yup, carb intolerant’. ‘With your body type you can’t eat any carbs for nine months. That way you can completely wean of carbs and then perhaps slowly reintroduce them into your diet.’ What? Nine months! That feels like receiving a prison sentence! It is not that I am such a sweet tooth but it requires a lot of discipline. And I just love breaking rules.
“We Steal Secrets” – How The Shadows Of Julian Assange & Bradley Manning Change The World
Bradley Manning is a brilliant intelligence analyst in Iraq. He is also an utterly lonely, isolated and misunderstood human being. Not only is he lonely in the army or in the outpost in Iraq where he is stationed, he is lonely inside himself. He doesn’t have a sense of his true identity; he feels he is living in the wrong body.
Manning uploaded hundreds of thousands of files onto a CD labelled ‘Lady Gaga’. In one particularly gleeful digital sequence, soundwaves of Lady Gaga’s voice transform into lines of code and then into text from secret documents.
These thousands of glowing secrets are a fuse that ignited the Arab Spring, pushed Iceland’s banking system to collapse and put American diplomacy on the backfoot around the world.
How I make difficult decisions
On the 20th of April I intend to give another Noble Warrior workshop. Just like in New York I am not receiving much response. But I decided to do my best and had my friend and designer this website and logo Boris Thorbecke quickly design a flyer for me. I have been spreading the flyer around organic food shops, healing centers and other places. I hate it. I rather go unsafe Baghdad to teach meditation with machine gunfire in the background then promote myself. Of course many people respond friendly, cooperative and interested and it is all in my mind but boy, do I find that hard. Probably because it is so up close and personal and because I feel.. vulnerable, afraid of rejection, at the mercy of the one who I am asking for permission to leave my flyers behind, ashamed of the modest scale that I operate on (although I am the only one who seems to think that). Phew.. that is a lot.