Matej

@Pinocchio Yes, I found one "school" at my city too, so it's just a question of time now.

I'm seriously thinking about one. But I don't know whenether people are doing those things in Czech yet. All those retreats are like getting your ass kicked constantly for several days. It'll be fun the first time, not knowing what to expect.

@Woody Yeah, people have funny expectations sometimes. My firends decide to keep a diet, manages to accomplish four weeks or so and then gets back to eating nonsense again. I prefer excersising at home and then go to the gym when I'll feel more capable. For now I don't think I'd have much to do there except for being awkward. I'll gain some strength and make a routine at home first.

I do not know what do I want but I know what the world needs. Through our evolution as a species, we made great technological success but its trade-off is bringing the planet on a verge of destruction. Carrying on at this tempo and with current trends and public priorities, human life is unsustainable on Earth. There are only two things we can do. 1) Start focusing on preservation of natural resources and using the great technological level to save what's left. 2) Focus mainly on colonizing space, which means sucking all Earth's resources a like nutrition from placenta so we can leave it behind in the name of progress. Personally I prefer the first option but there is so much to be done. First problem is ignorance. We are deep asleep and all we care about is making money and then exchange them for pleasures. Greed and hatred in close follow-up. All I'd love to do is to teach people mindfulness. Open mind, meditation. How can we raise children when we can't take proper care of our selves? Is there a proof that meditation and mindfulness improves quality of life from all sorts of perspectives? Well, yes, there are numerous neurological and psychological studies on meditating monks. Do people care? Not really. The hope I have now are people who are already somewhat interested. All I would say would be "Look I know how ridicullous it sounds but 20 minutes of meditation and nonjudgemental awareness will completely transform your life. It's fool-proof." But that's against culture. That's against what society stands for. I'm concidered a freak, doing these things. I don't really mind being a freak but we're digging our graves here. We have couple generations and Earth is unhabitable at this rate of pollution, intense agricalture and manufactoring things nobody really needs. My dream is to make a change. But that only shows that I'm not okay with the state of reality being what it is. I'm somewhere between a mad man on the streets, shouting that the end is comming and a monk, trying to persue people that to sit down and do nothing is really important.. It's a hard possition to be in. It's hard to be taken seriously.

@abrakamowse Think of it this way. Concidering you do something to help others, as your business plan. You need to stay alive. You need to treat yourself well in order to give a good service to the public. If you'll have financial problems, you can't run your business the optimal way. Making a good profit/spendings ratio. The earnings isn't only for your personal enjoyment, having financial support makes it easier to develop the company, to reach another frontiers. You need to charge this much for this product in order to help more people with whatever you are doing. Of course, greed is one of the main pitfalls, that needs to be mentioned. Now the question of discovering weaknesses, I think mindfullness would do. If you encounter a problem, think about how and why it happend. Pay nonjudgemental attention to what you do and you might notice mistakes you make.

@Woody I really appreciate the kind of wokr-out using your body-weight. With all the things I do, every minute of a day is precious and spending it with transport is a little unnecessary, concidering you can achieve your goals at home. Sure there is the problem of lack of friends you could make in gym. There is a lot to think about and a lot of try-and-err. The key is determination.

@Guest Amazing. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, it's very inspiring.

@Dhana Choko @Daphne Processed foods are a bad joke. I'm cooking and making salads and all the good things. I did watch Forks over Knives, after reading through some posts in here and I learnt something. Still I think strict vegan is overkill. You might say that gluten causes various deseases and health problems so you shouldn't eat it. And with cooking and baking (and frying for that matter) you kill vitamins and important parts of nutrition so you should eat only raw. I'm pretty sure those are valid reasons to change one's diet but the point remains, unless you have serious health conditioning, this is not worth the effort, time and money you have to put into it.

This single quote from the book Thoughts without a thinker (ISBN13: 9780715627112) made me stare blankly at the world all around me with wonder.

Not eating meat is a big decession and it impacts your life quite a lot. I am vegetarian beause I feel the importance of the decession. But I don't feel that way with veganism. Not eating meat is important but being against all animal products seem to me like an overkill. As a vegan you wouldn't eat even honey. That is just completely different mindset. I don't eat meat for sake of the animals. With milking, lying eggs or making honey I don't see that big of a problem. Sure the animals are still treated poorly but to become vegan I would need to see health benefits for my body. There are some but for the price of making much more strict diet. TL:DR version: I see a point in not eating meat, not so much in excluding the rest of the animal products. Recommended book: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer - 0316069884 (ISBN13: 9780316069885)

@Murtaza Yep, will do.

Personally I prefer meditation with no artifitial noise added. If my fridge turns on or when neighbours are talking loudly, that's the way things are. Reality. But when I play some drones, sea-waves, rainymood or anything, it just distracts me. Because those things aren't real, it's artifitial. Maybe there are sounds that help your brainwaves to calm etc, but my point is that I could just like that start intoxicating myself to enhace/adjust the meditative experience. That is fairly exaggerated, of course. The point being, if I need something to make it easier or different, then I'm not doing it right.

Simple thing. Don't watch them. Enlightment for me is an idea. A concept. There is no first-hand way to experience it for me at this state so I just do my things and if it comes one day, fine. If not, that's fine too. I would suggest the same for you, don't waste your time with this high level stuff, first set the basics right. You can't build a house starting with the roof.

It's like bottom-less well. For starters I would just sit down and think about what my life lacks. Listening to all the talks about enlightment and all that is nice but for me and many others it's just a nice idea and that's it. Go for practical things. I'm lonely so that is one thing to work on. My body is weak so another directions could be working out and finding out some proper diet. Meditation is a great thing because it makes you learn to live with yourself. That sounds stupid but while meditating you learn so much about yourself in a very subtle ways. Stay patient and determined.

My story isn't as emotionally strong as some of what I read but this is my life. My parents devorced right before I was supposed to start going to elementary school so it delayed for a year. Several memories that most likely determined my personality. There was no violence as far as I can tell but still at this age it is an impacting experience. After that I stayed with dad, seeing mom every second weekend. She's all into new age spirituality and health, which thought me to open my mind to many things. Everyone percieves the world different. As a kid I was really quiet and I still am. To some degree I have the feeling that nobody really cares about what I was about to say, so I just remain silent. Couple years down the road my uncle gave me an album of Rammstein. That made me infinitely curious about all genres of music. Mostly hard and heavy. Choosing uni was easy because I wasn't very good student, I just followed the easiest paths, so I picked something that I can manage without an effort. Building and constructions. I couldn't care less about that but I finished as one best. During summer hollidays I helped out on my aunt's child camp as a supervisor and later on a squad-leader. After school I failed to find some worth-while job, so I ended up at McDonald's. After about a month or so I said to myself that this is not possible to carry on and I decided to save some money and go to England. So I stayed working there for about half a year, saved almost everything I made and now I'm here. In Manchester. Two years, since I arrived, changed about ten different jobs and now I found out that I'm not happy here. It's impossible for me to stay on a place like this for the rest of my life because it doesn't feel like home. Many foreigners get used to the feeling of alienation and separation, whenether it is language barrier and cultural differences. So I'm comming back after 25 months. Meditating for seven months daily and pondering about life for about a year. All this lead me to seeing some really important things, that are missing in my life. I don't know who I am. I spent lots of money and time in all sorts of creative hobbies, all without carrying on after learning some skill. Drawing, programming, playing piano, playing guitar, ukulele, harmonica, translating comics to my native language, web-design, storytelling, analogue synths, circuit-bending and many more. At every one of them I felt like that is the right way to express myself. But then I learned the ways and I didn't know what to express. So I stopped. At the end I found satisfaction in learning things. Anything. Psychology, phillosophy, languages, all the stuff mentioned earlier, music and games. I don't play games but I love to learn things about it all. I don't know who I am and what to do. So I meditate. Because that feels like the right thing. Like I might understand what is going on. I might understand what to do. I'm returning home with many skills and knowledge, personality changed a lot but I'm still lost. Self-actualization is my attempt to find out.