I grew up with high expectations of achievement, which I soon internalized as a perfectionism trait. I set the bar up high for myself and the people around me. I went on the academic path and started studying bio-chemistry. Still, following my amazement for flying objects, I learned how to fly. This led me to change my goal and eventually work in a cockpit. There, I followed precise standard operating procedures that have been optimized for efficiency and safety. It’s a high pace, high precision environment. It’s very rational.
Personal changes
Then a shift happened. The past three years were intense in ways of questioning myself, my life, my world and the world I live in. Meeting new people who seemed to understand things about intuition and listening to your heart made me realize that this was foreign territory to me. I was in my head most of the time. You could call me an over-thinker because I always found a way to understand and optimize, trying to reach that point of perfection. But yeah, overthinking led me as well to a lot of unnecessary thinking, assumptions, misinterpretations, anxieties.
Meditation, yoga and tantra brought me to discover the intelligence we have outside of our mind. The body, the gut feeling, intuition. It’s about knowing without thinking. It’s about feeling. Yet, how to feel? How to see the signs when I don’t know where to look? How to even know what they mean then if I recognize them? And how to trust them?
Those practices indeed helped me find a way to come out of my head. Nevertheless, I wanted a field to explore that new knowledge. A journey to step out of my comfort zone and rational decision making in order to integrate it and make it mine, turn it into wisdom.
My inspiration
Two main elements inspired me the most. One was something I learned in a relationship coaching. It was about discovering what we want when we feel stuck and can’t decide. Mainly then, because all the outcomes I could rationally see would inevitably put me through pain. The advice I got was to flip a coin. Not to follow the result of the toss but to observe my reaction to the result. And decide accordingly.
The second was the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It’s the story of a boy who starts on an adventure to find a treasure. Not knowing how to reach his destination, he receives two stones on his way: Urim and Thummim. A white stone and a black stone, symbolizing no and yes. The concept is to pull out a stone from his pocket when he is stuck and needs a question answered. However, the biggest advice he receives is to follow the signs which would lead him on his path. And it turns out that he starts seeing the signs and doesn’t need his stones as much as he thought he would.
This was the birth of my idea. Go on a journey and distance myself from rational decision making: flipping my coin as a means to show me the way when I really don’t have a preference, or give me answers by triggering a gut reaction.
Hopefully, during all that I would learn to read the signs and follow my heart, develop my intuition.
