Working on yourself — My work post-Dengue and post-Komodo
By: Mylo Mylo
Tags: Koh Phangan, Digital Nomads, Personal Development, Goals, Self Love

tl;dr; Summary

I’m on my 11th day since doing this 30 minute exercise of working out what I want to achieve in the next 6 or so weeks. My new years intention was to allow myself to learn how to propser and to propser with others.

Happy new year!

The Data

One particular week I was very weak and had the most extreme headaches of my life. Debilitating. I could look at a screen for maximum 30 minutes, maybe 3 times per day. Then it got worse. During this time I had received a message that my collaboration with the team was over. Still worse, I was hospitalized for 4 days. In the scheme of things Dengue fever was a blessing. My immunity and health were down which allowed the mosquito bites to win. With full immunity, the mosquito bites do not win fyi.

Whilst in hospital, knowing that I was no longer part of the team, I was more than slightly annoyed but what else could I do? Other than meditated and wish the team well doing h’oponono for my messenger and what I perceive to be that person’s fears of failure (- this is my own judgement). Whatever emotions I was feeling would pass, and I would eventually be healed 8 weeks later to full health.

I would not be as happy as I am had I not considered Dengue fever to be a blessing. I was fortunate to have the mild case too. There are four types of Dengue, the one I had did not have much stomach discomfort and I certainly wasn’t bleeding. It allowed me to reconsider everything whilst it took over my life for that week — this was my time for submitting and loving — the illness.

Small Steps In New Projects

I began making plans for what to work on, a few scratch projects now that I had all the time in the world at my hands. After a couple of weeks of pretty good progress, my partner sat me down and did an exercise with me. This I share from my own experience, and having just relayed my experience with someone I collaborate with on a small blog about digital currency applications, decided to write out in longer form.

2–7 Minute Exercise: I Want …

This exercise requires a pen(cil) and paper. I used a notebook-cum-diary and filled two pages writing “I want ……” every second line with the things I wanted.

How to do this:

— Don’t stop writing

— Don’t think

— Just keep writing

— If I found myself getting stuck, I was prompted to write

I want to want more

— Repeating lines is ok

— 2 minutes of it (or 3,4,5,6 or 7 minutes — your choice! It’s your work!)

The “I want …” exercise page 1 of 2 displayed. The opposite page is some content planning for the iKomodo.com website

Choices: 3 Words To Describe All My Wants

From the list of “I want…” I would choose 3 words that resonated with me the most and were compatible with the important things on my list. Not external factors, not goals, but things I really truly wanted for myself. This culminated on what I wanted right now. Freedom. Connection. Confidence. These three words summarized most of my list of wants.

Wanting Freedom

I found myself with little obligations for the first time in a while. It felt great, although at times without a direction or purpose there were some hours in some days that felt “wasted”. Having allowed myself to heal from illness was what was required though, so even if it was wasted, it was not stress on my body or my mind.



The freedom in me wanted a purpose. In the next steps.

Wanting Connection

Collaborating on an open source competitive project in the blockchain space, and splitting my time between marketing, development & online community took a lot of my time. My real world community time was limited though — and the team meetings at 11pm that would go until 2am most nights took a lot of the romance out of a good portion of the week.

These are important to me. Connecting with people. I am a human being with emotions that I’m ecstatic to be in touch with again. Having felt the freedom of no obligations during healing time, I was more in touch with what I wanted from my world than ever before.

Wanting Confidence

This is the most important one for me. I am my most confident self when I have dually achieved and I can show my accomplishments. For me this came down to playing guitar like I’ve been playing guitar for 25 years and using my engineering skills to have working “stuff”. There are other aspects too, but these two were the no-brainer “I want…” things.

Selecting A Timeframe & Making Goals

My goals written up by my lovely missus. I stuck them in the kitchen where I would see them everyday.

The timeframe that my partner and I agreed for me to focus on was 3 January to 23 February. The dates coincide with the day after we did this exercise and the day before our visas are up in this country (Thailand). The timeframe could be 2 weeks, it could be 3 or 6 months. What is important is to repeat this exercise again at the end of the period. Maybe more frequently, but for me — I’m happy with the current schedule.

We broke down the goals into 5 categories: health, fun, personal challenges & growth, work/income, island exploration (because we live on an island)

Health Goals

Make smoothies: whilst on my iPad, my partner was listening to a podcast/youtube video and this part got me from my subconscious and I asked her to repeat that section. To paraphrase,

“When I’m fasting, I have my first meal at 12 noon and I make sure it’s a smoothie and it’s got all the nutrition and superfoods I need for the day. Anything after that is a bonus.”

This was a nutritional gem.

I wanted this to be my routine, and it is. I love making smoothies because it makes me feel … healthy, like I’m looking after myself etc.

Qi gong x 2pw: I’m not into yoga as much as I’d love to be — yet. I have aspirations to do the 200 hour teacher training, but have other goals for the moment. Qi gong I get into and thoroughly enjoy. One of the local shalas has it on 3 times per week every other week. This is the time I set to go to the classes.

Ecstatic dance: I really enjoy dancing. Past are the days of going to nightclubs and raves. On this island, there are three or four ecstatic dances per week. An ecstatic dance for those that don’t know, is an alcohol and drug free event with no talking. You go to dance. If you want to talk to someone, respect the space and go downstairs to the coconut bar and have a deep conversation or get to know someone, but near the instruments and speakers — dance. In a 4 hour session, that is a lot of moving around.

Kambo: This is a new thing for me which I have the intention of purging the energy of the Dengue out of me and other things that do not serve me in 2020. Kambo is a little frog whose poison is used to induce vomiting. It belongs in the “alternative” plant medicine variety of healing but I’m told it is much more. So this is a goal of personal exploration too.

Fun

Playing guitar daily: that 10000 hour rule to become an expert at something? Well I’m there, I’m just out of practise. Like Allen Iverson said, “We’re talkin’ bout practice”. I recently picked up my first guitar student in more than 20 years.

Love making: goes without saying. Fun and a lot more. (NSFW warning: link is to a youtube video on how to give a yoni massage — curious? haha)

Volunteer support — sailing: This may fizzle out because the local sailing club is being taken over by the navy. So they probably don’t want ocean sailing foreigners being inspirational figures for the Sunday children’s sailing school…looks like swimming will replace this.

Personal Challenge / Growth

Open mic improv: I’m an expert guitar player and a not so expert singer, but I can hold a tune and definitely can rock out. It’s been 15 years since I played in a gig, time to rock.

Writers night: Go down to the local writers night that is on weekly.

Man circle: I attend man circles to take time out to hang with a bunch of men without beers, women, sports and other distractions of the modern life. Also to hold the space for the circle, it’s been a couple of months since the last time I held the space for the men, definitely pre-Dengue.

Mark — meet up guitar: This has already happened, I didn’t waste time on getting this opportunity to teach someone the guitar off the ground.

Island Exploration

Hike to bottle beach x2: We live on an island. I was working a lot of hours a lot of days missing out on being present to enjoy the daily life here. This is a 4 hour hike and 1 hour scooter ride return trip. Do it twice (at least).

Bottle Beach a week before “high season” — very peaceful & very beautiful after morning rain

Other side of island: Having worked a lot, I’ve been to the other side of the island once. Now is the time to do it more!

Hollystone: this is the island outdoor night club nearby. It is quite enchanting in a hippie built kind of paradise with guest DJs that come through on their travels. Really good tunes sometimes!

Work / Income

This is the crux of it. To find a balance between the things I enjoy doing in life, and the things I enjoy doing in work — and maintain digital nomad status.

iKomodo website: I believe there is a massive gap between the dev teams in the Komodo ecosystem and how their accomplishments are expressed for others to learn. I wrote articles for the blockchain project, and it was well received by many in the community. This launches on January 27 with some recent updates and the first posts about the evolution of bitcoin technology.

Basketball league software: I have this old project that needs a rewrite, from NodeJS backend and custom VueJS front end to a Python backend with a Material Design front end with Vue.

Prototype App: I have already completed this as far as I want in a web app. It is somewhat similar to acromaps. I used wordpress and a bunch of plugins to get a workable prototype with no coding, because my coding time is set to 4 hours per day at the moment. Later in the year will put the hat of a flutter dev — the maps integration is strategically ($$$) scalable on apps rather than web.

Summary

I’m on my 11th day since doing this 30 minute exercise of working out what I want to achieve in the next 6 or so weeks. My new years intention was to allow myself to learn how to propser and to propser with others.

Happy new year!