up:: Mindvalley University 2022
tags:: #output/essay

Lessons

Treat yourself like someone you truly love.

Your body and soul hear everything you say to them. They might just be what determines how you feel so maybe it’s a good idea to be kind to them. Speak kindly. Respect them. Negotiate for win-win situations: ask if doing something is okay, or thank them with a gift after they’ve done something difficult.

You don’t live in the real world, but the world created by your mental chatter. When you get shot by an arrow, why shoot yourself again by berating yourself?

Anything that is alive has basic rules of “hygiene,” including yourself. Fragility, insecurity and fear are symptoms of accumulated neglect of yourself. Take care of your inner garden, every day.

Connect with all the love and kindness you can muster.

A huge part of Mindvalley University is the connections you make with others. I set the intention to go into every connection here with all the love, attention and kindness I could muster. There was nothing to lose, only depth to gain.

And boy did that have an effect. I felt love break open from inside of me. It came out and deepened every second of eye contact, let me feel every bit of touch twice as much and created this tingling energy floating through the air.

Seeing and hearing someone say “I see you. I see you’ve been through so much and you’re trying so hard. Just know you are enough the way you are right now,” from the depths of their heart, is incredible.

Keep coming back to presence.

Being present is not something you get to and then “lose.” It’s a process of returning, over and over again.

To return to presence, you can feel for a connection to either your internal intuition (grounding) or a connection to others and feel love. Or just both at the same time.

When you walk around through life, create micromoments of love. See the life and inner beauty through the eyes of every person you pass by.

Practice letting go with gratitude and forgiveness.

In the end you don’t have control over anything. You never had and never will have. Striving for control focuses your attention on how your life is different from how you want it to be and thus creates dissatisfaction.

Regularly practicing gratitude and forgiveness help you let go of this and increase your positivity quotient (ratio of positive vs. negative thoughts).

In brain scans it was also found that forgiving is the most effective way to induce the same mental states as monks who have been meditating for 40 years.

Act from a deep grounding in your intuition.

Your subconscious has way more processing power than you can even think of, but we’ve lost being in touch with it. Practice listening to it. Open up and receive what comes up. Act from those impulses with conviction, as they are probably your truth. (Make sure you have studied ethics too, so you can trust yourself in that your ideas are good ones.)

When you say “no” to someone, don’t do so from a rebellious space. Say no from a deep connection with your sould and knowing what’s right for you.

The more you enjoy what you're doing, the more rocket fuel you have to do it better. Trusting your instinct and following it will make you feel like you’re doing the right thing.

Surrender to the energy that’s already flowing through you. It’s all about presence with that energy.

Believe in a higher guiding power.

Magic, serendipity and luck all seem to appear more when you try to experience them.

Is the universe friendly? Regardless or whether or not, believing that it is will greatly amplify your experience of life. Practice this by looking for reasons that show it. Keep a journal with proof that the universe is friendly.

You’re not a part of the universe; the universe is something that exists in your mind. You’ve got it the other way around—the universe is in us, we’re all made of the same energy that created everything there is. The only thing that is everywhere, and there is only one of, is consciousness. It keeps existing outside of each of our minds, even though it seems to come from there, like how a rock band seems to exist inside of a radio but their music actually lives in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Understand you might be wrong in what you want.

You don’t want to get rich, you want the feeling you’d get if you were rich. Actually, you want the feeling you think you would get if you were rich. Would you rather get what you want or outgrow your need for it?

Your life with all the problems you have, and all the problems you think you have, is just as perfect as those moments where you’re suddenly in awe and happy seeing a beautiful scenery in nature. What matters is whether you accept the universe exactly for what it is.

Consistently point your subconscious towards the future you want.

If your subconscious is not aligned with your goals, it will be a constant struggle. Our beliefs define the limits of what we can achieve.

Create multiple alignments. Big picture goals that break down into microgoals for months or weeks.

Becoming wildly successful with the serenity of a Zen monk doesn’t work if you do it transactionally. It only works when you’re on the spiritual path and let the material success happen organically as a byproduct.

The benefit of chasing goals is not the outcome, but rather our learning and growth as we do try our level best to achieve it. If we succeed, great. If we fail, great. Failure just means the growth is not fully embodied yet.

Apply constant gentle pressure to the world.

Love and embrace your masculine energy.

Masculine energy is still, solid, penetrating and immovable. It is structured and singularly focused. Feminine energy is everything that moves. It is wild, emotional, multi-focused and deeply sensual.

At the core of masculine energy is chasing a mission, and relentlessly focusing on that. It is more important than anything else in life.

The feminine wants masculine attention all the time but loses respect if it gives that. “If I can’t distract him I know he’s a provider. I want you to go fucking kill the world, and not let anything distract you from it—not even me.”

The work we need to do every day as men is creating our inner power. For life to flow through us we need to do the work. But once you open up with this energy it’s going to be amazing. Sex life, business life, 10x.

Are you holding space for me? I am space.

Know you’re not an asshole, then allow yourself to be a little bit of one.

Learn to hold useful paradoxes.

It seems like one of the crucial capacities for happiness is the ability to hold certain paradoxes in the mind.

Accept the universe exactly as it is, and simultaneously strive relentlessly to shape it into what you want it to be.

Enjoy the process instead of chasing the outcome. That will increase the likelihood of getting the outcome you want.

Know in your deepest sense that you control nothing, then act as if you can control everything. Take ultimate responsibility for everything in your life.

Repeat and embody this work.

What you repeat is what matters.
Excellence is not an act, it is a habit.
Don’t just do this, embody it: become someone for whom all of this comes naturally.

The six-phase meditation helps create a good habit of these two states of mind we need: being happy in the now, and having a vision for the future.

Walk the path, lead the way, and bring along them who are open to it.

Your problems are systemic and are also others’ problems.

Become the healthiest, wealthiest, happiest person in your neighborhood so the people around you know all of this can happen through love.

Do not settle. There is so much inside of you. You can still grow so much.

Once you taste the nectar of your genius, nothing is going to stop you from chasing it.

We need the good people to be louder in the group.

Use your dreams therapeutically.

Don’t throw away a third of your life that is your dreams.

Cutting a nightmare short means you necessarily have to do it again.

Lucid dreaming can be an incredible way of healing trauma. It’s a dream, there is nothing to fear.

The most important tool for lucid dreaming is creating a dream plan where you describe what will happen, draw it and create a sentence you will exclaim to start the dream.

Go big on your dream plan. You might have only one lucid dream. Choose something that makes you afraid.

Increase lucid dreaming probability: 2 hours of extra sleep, taking naps, don’t take it too seriuously, set affirmations in the hypnagogic state, write down dreams to remember them and start recognizing patterns.

I am a warrior of the dream state, I stay lucid and conscious while dreaming.

Learn to check for dream signs and do reality checks in the real world. Complex patterns like the palm of your hand are hard to dream about.

Keep your body happy.

Make your erotic energy flow.

Erotic energy is as natural as hunger and can be used all the time, everywhere. Connecting to your erotic energy synchronizes you with your essence.

Don’t have an orgasm, become an orgasmic being. Move the energy in and up yourself and enjoy the entire process.

Categories

Meta

Mastery is in the fundamentals.

Don’t do the work—embody the work.

Realizations about myself

Marcel, you need to trust your intuition a little bit more.

Probably the most healing meditation I did for myself: I am worthy, willing and capable. “Worthy” was difficult for me. I meditated on all the people who would tell me “yes you are worthy” and visualized them telling me.

Val: “It’s amazing how much you’re holding space. The presence you show when talking is so strong. You’re really there. It makes us feel so seen.”

Presence

The best way to bring mindfullness in our life is love. Create micromoments of love:

• See the inner beauty of all human beings. Meditate on where you showed greatness to yourself too.
• See with kindly eyes, you can see so much in the eyes of strangers.
• Practice Metta meditation

Alignment

Don’t say no from a rebellious space, say no from a deep connection with your sould and knowing what’s right for you.

Do breathwork. It pulls you into the presence, kills the brain and lets you touch your intuition.

Talk to yourself with kindness. Hey man, I love you. I know you want to take care of me and I want to take care of you too. Are you okay if we do this? Or let’s say we do that and then you can get x.

Would you rather get what you want or outgrow your need for it?

Resilience

Law of required variety: the system that’s most adaptive ends up winning.

Healthy identity is fluid—it’s only traumatized identity that’s fixed. That part of our identity is often something we identify ourselves too much with.

If someone else if 97% to blame, still take responsibility for the 3% that is you who trained them to behave that way.

Follow the Hypnotic Trance meditation for stress resilience in Paul McKennon’s program for 5 days.

In brain scans we found that forgiveness is the most effective feeling to induce calmer and monk-like brain states. 40 Years of Zen is a highly intensive program where you’re hooked up to a scanner and forgive all day for a week.

Your life with all the problems you have, and all the problems you think you have, is just as perfect as those moments where you’re suddenly in awe and happy seeing a beautiful scenery. The difference comes from when you accept the universe exactly as it is.

You don’t live in the real world, but the world created by your mental chatter. When you get shot by an arrow, why shoot a second time with your mental chatter?

Every single one of you is a control freak. You don’t have control, you never had control, you never will have control.

Good thing, bad thing—who knows?

Extreme resiliency is where you bounce back so fast that an external observer doesn't register that you had a bad thing happen.

Suffering comes from the belief of difference between you and the outer world. Awareness is the only thing that’s real, and there’s only one, and it transcends all humans.

Don’t identify with your mental chatter but pay attention, that’s how it loses energy.

Anything that is alive has basic rules of “hygiene,” including ourself. Fragility, insecurity, fear are symptoms of accumulated neglect of yourself. Learn to take care of your inner garden, every day.

The six-phase meditation helps you to elicit these two distinct senses of being we need: being happy in the now, and having a vision for the future.

The more you enjoy what you're doing the more rocket fuel you have to do it better.

Ask not if you are worthy of your dreams, ask if your dreams are worthy of you.

The Universe

These things appear when you set a goal to experience them:

• Magic
• Serendipidy
• Luck

Surrender to the energy that’s already flowing through you. It’s about presence, all of it.

Regardless or whether or not the universe is friendly, believing that it is will greatly amplify your experience of life. Practice to believe this by looking for reasons that prove it.

I have always been the cosmic energy that has always been there.

Connecting

I had the intention to bring joy and connection. I took every opportunity to connect and gave it all of my energy. When the instructor asks to tell someone you love them, say “I love you” with all the love you have in you. Just let it all out, there’s no reason to hold back here. There’s nothing to lose. You can only heal others and connect deeply with them.

Masculinity

At the core of masculine energy is chasing a mission, and relentlessly focusing on that. It is more important than anything else in life.

Masculine energy is still, solid, penetrating and immovable. It is structured and singularly focused. Feminine energy is everything that moves. It is wild, emotional, multi-focused and deeply sensual.

The feminine wants masculine attention all the fucking time but loses respect if it gives that. If I can’t distract him I know he’s a provider. I want you to go fucking kill the world.

The work we need to do every day as men is creating our inner power. For life to flow through us we need to do the work. But once you open up woh this energy it’s going to be amazing. Sex life, business life, 10x.

Are you holding space for me? I am space.

Know you’re not an asshole, then allow yourself to be a little bit of one.

You make me feel so, so safe that I feel like I can completely, fully open up, flow and be myself.

Fitness

There was a strong correlation between increased BMI and reduced net worth. Your intelligence is also decreased with fat around your belly.

Fitness is how much stress your body can endure and how quickly you can recover from it.

Ask your body: what do you need to do in order to heal?

Your mind and body are one. You can tell the body to heal.

Sungaze around sunrise and sunset.

Different people have a different optimal focus for their fitness. Aesthetics, nervous system balance, functionality,…

Achievement

If your subconscious is not aligned with your goals, it will be a constant struggle. It does so much more processing. Our beliefs define the limits of what we can achieve.

To become a conscious millionaire, be with that feeling really intensely for a long time. Learn that deep down you’re worthy of receiving this. Treat money like a worthy friend.

Create multiple alignments. Big picture goals that break down into microgoals for months or weeks.

Becoming wildly successful with the serenity of a Zen monk doesn’t work if you do it transactionally. It only works when you’re on the spiritual path and let the material success happen organizally as a byproduct.

You don’t want to get rich—you want the feeling you think you would have when you achieve that.

The benefit of chasing goals is our learning and growth as we do try our level best to achieve it. If we succeed, great. If we fail, great. Failure just means the growth is not fully embodied yet.

Deal with the world with constant gentle pressure.

Tim Ferriss’ Fear Setting exercise.

Make your first 10K in 10 days by asking people what their biggest challenge is, connect them with someone who has a solution, and take a cut from the sale. Faciliate this through social media video messages.

Erotic

Erotic energy is as natural as hunger and can be used all the time, everywhere. Connecting to your erotic energy synchronizes you with your essence.

Don’t have an orgasm, become an orgasmic being. Move the energy in and up yourself and enjoy the entire process.

Dreaming

Don’t throw away a third of your life that is your dreams.

Cutting a nightmare short means you necessarily have to do it again.

Lucid dreaming can be an incredible way of healing trauma. It’s a dream, there is nothing to fear.

The most important tool for lucid dreaming is creating a dream plan where you describe what will happen, draw it and create a sentence you will exclaim to start the dream.

Go big on your dream plan. You might have only one lucid dream. Choose something that makes you afraid.

Increase lucid dreaming probability: 2 hours of extra sleep, taking naps, don’t take it too seriuously, set affirmations in the hypnagogic state, write down dreams to remember them and start recognizing patterns.

I am a warrior of the dream state, I stay lucid and conscious while dreaming.

Learn to check for dream signs and do reality checks in the real world. Complex patterns like the palm of your hand are hard to dream about.

Habits

Gratitude makes you grow more through insight.
Forgiving makes you unfuckwithable.
Both of these as a practice increase your positivity quotient, the ratio of positive vs. negative thoughts.

Leadership

Your problems are systemic and are also others’ problems.

To go viral, research the context of what other creators do (editing, pacing, first three seconds). Then communicate in different ways to connect with all kinds of people (feelings, facts, fun, value commitment, imagination, action).

Become the healthiest, wealthiest, happiest person in your neighborhood so the people around you know all of this can happen through love.

Do not settle. There is so much inside of you. You can still grow so much.

Pattern for social engagement: hit, hit, surprise. You have 3 seconds to capture attention.

Create content with an extremely clear vision. Create three types of content: educational, funny, loving (that order for frequency).

Once you taste the nectar of your genius, nothing is going to stop you from chasing it.

We need good people to be louder in the group.

Consistency

Consistency. End article with that.

What you repeat is what matters. Excellence is not an act, it is a habit.