Steps to take advantage of life.
By: Paco Chávez
Tags: Health, Habits, Love, Personal Development, Spirituality

Learn how to cherish the opportunity to make the best out of your life, as long as you choose to see it this way.

7:00 AM. My conscious mind wakes up and so a new day begins. I don´t mind waking up this early, I used to wake up even earlier. However, my anxiety kicks in as soon as I´m awake and my brain shoots thousands of neurons per second, just another day in my psyche. I pick up my cellphone and open Instagram while my brain shouts, “Stop it! You told yourself you weren´t going to do this!”. To myself (and I´m guessing to yourself too), opening any application or just simply grabbing our phones as soon as we wake is a clear signal that we are slaves to technology and that we immediately give away our power and our time as human beings to something external. Some people may see this as an exaggeration and most will probably dismiss the thought and tell you it´s no big deal, however, I made a vow to myself some years ago that I wasn´t going to be like most people. Being like “most people” makes you average, mediocre, and stagnant in your ways. Luckily it didn´t take me more than a couple of minutes lying in bed to remember how incredibly lucky I am to be enjoying the holidays with my family at the beach. This is just my personal prediction, but in the future when mankind has exhausted most of the resources of this earth and is obligated by nature to change, we will all migrate back to nature and live simple yet beautiful lives by the ocean. Our days will consist of optimizing our ways to eat, live, and sustain our health with our evolved minds but limited resources while the waves and the horizon put us in a permanent state of presence and gratitude.

“Everything is part of the equation. This is happening is on the way, not in the way”.

Your values determine your actions.

With just a few days left until I return back home to the city, I realized just how precious time is. How fleeting our lives are. I quickly deleted Instagram just for a couple of days so I can absorb the full presence of the opportunity to be alive this very moment, poured myself a hot mug of coffee, and decided to take a shivering cold dive into the morning waters of the ocean. I hadn´t felt this alive for the longest time, hadn´t felt this level of freedom and grace in lord knows how much time. All by myself, I could watch a few people taking morning walks on the beach with their dogs and smiled back, welcoming this beautiful day with the potential to unravel whatever we wish. We truly do possess the power to create the life we want, we just get lost. We get utterly and completely lost pursuing things we think we need, chasing goals other people have told us to chase. We even chase other people´s goals and never even get the chance to write down what our own dreams are. Each day grants us an enormous gift, the gift the make our own decisions! Waking up and opening Instagram, Facebook, or even e-mail for that matter is a decision, a decision that leads to action. I am the culprit of having actions that speak different about who I really am, that is because for a long time my decisions reflected poor actions. I was run by a dormant, unconscious version of me that failed to identify what his highest values were. When you can understandably identify your highest values you become master of your own destiny. You transform into someone who leaves no space for excuses, laziness, and complacency. Determining your highest values requires a few mental exercises and a bit of introspection, but once you get clear on what they are you will be able to set yourself up for a radical change in your life. Lately, I have been able to restructure and identify what my highest values look like. These involve my physical and mental health, exercising when I have to and resting when I must, eating clean foods, daily Wim Hof exercises (highly recommended), and training for new levels of strength. After my health goes my creativity, although I am a fitness junkie I am also an artist and a creator. I love to write and play music. When I first started I told myself I was merely doing this as a method of self-therapy to dissolve my insecurities about myself. Once I regained my confidence, self-love, and perception of my higher being I realized writing is meant to be shared. The art of communication combined with the internet has introduced new levels of connection to the human species and the more I write about the intricacies of life and personal development, the more connected I feel to other people and the earth. Learning is also of my highest values, every day we learn as long as we choose to become students. Although we can also become masters and teachers, the wisest master is one who knows learning is infinite. Boy was this the year of learning, with the COVID pandemic I had to learn to maneuver into a whole new version of reality. It nearly destroyed me. I learned I was not even close to becoming the financially independent person I told myself I was becoming. I learned that the relationship I was in was merely filling a void inside myself I could not fill. I learned I had lost connection with my family I had to gain back, amongst many many other things. Finally, another one of my core values to live by every day is the simplicity of love. I noticed I was lacking love to such an extent that the universe was never going to be willing to help me if I didn´t practice gratitude, always searching for the next step, always wanting more. This dangerous feedback loop of endlessly filling voids with external things kept me unsatisfied, worried about the future, and ruminating on past negative experiences. So I bought a journal, grabbed a pen, and started to practice journaling once and for all, writing every morning 3 things I was grateful for, at first it was uncomfortable. How could I be grateful for things if I still don´t have what will make me happy? This is the objective of the practice, to stop searching for things in the future and focus on what you have in the now. I realized I was grateful for the opportunity to simply breathe and wake up, it fueled me. Grateful for the opportunity to work on a better version of myself. Go as deep as you want, the mind has no limits as to what it can be grateful for. This sent me down a positive road of acknowledging my family, my body, and the journey I´ve been on up to now, it has changed my life. It has brought new people, opportunities, and creativity into my life without forcing a single thing. It has literally warped my perception into a new lens, I became a highly sensitive being aware of a whole new specter of things. Aware of myself and who inhibits this body and this mind, who is this human experiencing this life? Before we realize, our experience in this life is over and who knows what we will be thinking then. Did I fulfill my destiny? Did I truly work to become the best version of myself this world received? Did I make a dent in the universe? Or was my life just a monotonous, cycle-repeating journey? Extraordinary things don´t happen by themselves, nobody wakes up and plans your life for you. Be mindful of your shadow (we´ll talk deeper about that later), and keep your ego in check. Express love to every single human being that has the honor of crossing paths with you. Some people will feel your love for only a second of their life as you say your good mornings, others will be with you every day of your life. If we strive to keep all these things in mind, and not divert our attention to the “musts” and “have to´s”, we can set the course of our lives into one of greatness and opportunity.