still alive and kicking, boxing, dancing, studying....

Wowsers...one and a half months since my last posting...oops! Well guess in a way it is a good sign that lots of things have been happening :)

* I celebrated my birthday with thousands of my closest friends on the beaches and streets of Rio de Janeiro...could also possibly have had something to do with the Carnaval celebrations, but not sure ;) Had a great time there with friends from São Paulo and Rio as well and while we didnt get a close up look at the spectacular costumes and floats of the desfile (parade), I was so impressed by the costumes of the people at the block parties....a bit like Queens Day in Amsterdam but with much less orange and more originality and diversity.

* After some tough personal moments here, I reflected on the types of activities that make me happy and what personal development I want to explore right now...and so I got myself into a lot of different activities because I know I am happier when I am busier and meeting different people and learning new things and I decided to a personal development course about chakras and bio-psychology.

I also reflected how language barriers were causing me a lot of frustration. I still have a lot of improving to do in my Portuguese, there is no doubt, but I can really feel an improvement and now I feel much more confident expressing myself in Portuguese in professional and personal situations. So what changed...my boss´ advice to "let go of my fear" helped a lot and also thinking about some of my deaf colleagues and the deaf Japanese character on the movie "Babel" and their challenges to communicate...I realised I had so little to be afraid of...so I started to talk more and most of the time it works :)

* Getting into a weekly routine:

- Monday nights are boxing class at the gym (no people, just boxing bags)

- Tuesday night is a course about democratic education (learning a lot of new vocab and also theories and principles about how to run schools and treat children)

- Wednesday night is giving English classes to some of my colleagues and belly dancing class
- Thursday night is gym

- Try to go to gym once more during the week (but as Denise and I have discussed it is quite a struggle to defeat the "third time in a week" phenomenon!)

* Started an amazing course in bio-psychology at an eco-village about 2 hours out of São Paulo. It is a wonderful mixture of ancient Indian science of Tantra and chakras and modern science about the connections between our thoughts, emotions and physical health. There is one module per month and each module goes for a whole weekend, staying at the beautiful eco village, whose serenity and beauty renews your spirit. For our first module there was a wonderfully rich mix of about 70 people...grandmas, grandpas, mothers and teenage daughters, young singles, young couples and everything in between...we had a great energy and supported each other through out the intensive programme, which included lectures, drama, music, dancing, yoga and meditation.

There were many special moments during the weekend and I had a headache at the end of it because of all of the thoughts running through my head. Here are some examples:

- Being reminded of the power of our thoughts to create our reality and how our brains physiologically cannot tell the difference between visualising an experience and actually experiencing it. I realised how I could use positive visualisations to help improve a negative work situation and I heard more loudly how negatively I talk to myself, which gives me a chance to become a better friend to myself.

- In the middle of a simple dance I realised the importance of celebrating and embracing my past and future and focusing on the present. I think I am too harsh on myself and my past mistakes, instead of acknowledging them as part of my journey to arrive here and how I am now.

- I realised how short my attention span is, but also I felt myself improving in the second rounds of meditation and yoga. (Unfortunately the first time I tried to do some yoga at home after the course I strained a muscle in my neck and spent the whole day in pain, but I am not giving up ;)

- During one of the visualisations about the first chakra (associated with instinct, security and survival) I realised how often we might feel unhappy because we dont have the things we want in life...but then when I was trying to visualise my desires in the different petals of the first chakra, it was quite tough to visualise and describe them in detail...but once I could it was quite powerful.

- To be honest, during the course I found the regular singing of mantras (baba nam, kevalam = everything is love) to be quite torturous...but then I accidentally bought a CD with 13 different versions of this mantra and started to play it at home...and now I LOVE it...these mantras were designed in Sanskrit to send positive energy to the "happy" parts of our brains and now I find myself humming this mantra in the shower or on my way to work.

- One of my outstanding questions from the weekend is how to combine visualisations and holograms with not having expectations, which almost always seem damaging.

* Our personal sustainability network is also progressing here in São Paulo and we just had our third meeting last weekend. After sharing our personal experiences, questions and practices around personal sustainability we started to explore the issue of food - everything from how to be a healthy vegetarian, what is organic and biodynamic food and where we can find it in SP, to how to avoid packaging and what can be recycled.

So hope I have started to make up for weeks of non-blogging...looking forward to sharing more regular, smaller observations and thoughts soon...