I see her picture.

It shows her beauty, her big heart, her careness, her calmness, her pieceful soul.

The picture is accurate.

But it is not her.

She was with me just a couple of hours ago.

I could enjoy her.

I felt her.

But she is already gone.

And I don´t know if I will see her again.

I only have a 2D image of her on a screen.

That kills me.

It brings me immediately into tears. They explode from deep inside my throat all they way up.

Worse is that I know it will happen again.

Whenever I see her, I know I will have to say goodbye. And then this idea of going from 4D to 2D breaks my heart, no matter where I am.

Still, there´s a hope:

6 months here, 6 months there, always together.

It could work.

There´s hope.

It is difficult to find a nice place to live in once you are over 30 and out of university.

The options that pop up are:

• Live in a flat by yourself, alone.
• Share a flat with 20-years-old students.
• Share a flat with other 30+ years-old employees which are interested in sharing a flat just because it is the only affordable option.

None of them fits me.

I have been single for 2 years and it is difficult to find a place to live that I love because:

• I don´t like living alone. I can, that is not a problem, but I don´t enjoy it as much as sharing spaces and experiences with other people. Sharing life with others is enriching, more fun and of course cheaper.
• I don´t match with 20-years-old students anymore. It is great talking to them, they are interesting, fresh and full of energy and dreams, but for the main part, we have different rythms. Usually students are more in party mode and their worries and responsibilities are very different from people that are already working.
• I want to share the flat with people that are willing to share experiences, not just because they can´t afford to pay a flat for themselves. Most of the times, these 30+ years old people are employees with kind-of a boring daily life. I have been there too. I want to share life with passionate people that are proactive, creative and take care of their soul and body.

Community living

The solution to that comes from community living.

It is not that there are no people in your city or in the world that share that interest for living in community. It´s just that we are not together, there is no facilities for us.

• It is possible to find hostels, but that is for travellers.
• It is possible to find residences for elderly people or for students, but, what if you are not part of these groups?

Therefore it becomes necessary to create a new community.

A community of people, no matter the age, that are interested in:

• Sharing spaces and facilities
• Sharing life experiences, their passion and knowledge
• Travelling, getting to know other cultures, getting to know themselves by getting exposed to other ways of thinking
• Making their dreams come true, bring their ideas into action
• Personal growth, that enjoy reading, meditating and exercising
• Taking care of their health, in terms of mind, body and soul

Mixing long and short stay people

I have been developing the idea of building a hostel already for some months.

Here was mi idea of a hostel with yoga.

But, wouldn´t it be more enriching if it would be combined with residents?

I would like to live in that community that I build.

And after my experience as a volunteer in New Orleans, living in a hostel is great for a couple months, it´s an amazing place to get to know travellers, but you can also miss the long-term connections.

I would say it is not a good option for long-term stays, because hostels are a place for travellers.

In a hostel, people usually stay around 2-3 nights. You connect with them and, by the time you feel confortable with them, they leave. It is incredible how this experience makes you grow, because you can learn from their experiences and from yourself talking to them, but long-term connections and friendships are also beautiful.

If I want to live there, I would like that there are long-term residents as well, people that you already know and you don´t have to explain again your life from the beginning each time.

Finding the right people

As with almost everything, the solution comes from inside.

I myself wanted to find a space as the one described while I was making my online business grow.

I needed a place to stay for long term, a place where I knew I had my space to work and focus, but also a place where I could talk to other people that are in similar conditions.

Co-working spaces function this way: they bring together people that otherwise would be working on their own.

But you cannot live in a co-working space.

And therefore you miss a big part of people´s lives.

That´s why a residence for those so called digital nomads with facilities for working would be great.

These digital nomads or online workers, the same as me, are people that like travelling (that´s why they want freedom to work from wherever they want), are proactive people (the pursue their dreams) and enjoy personal growth.

They are basically travellers that need a permanent residence for some time.

But they enjoy connecting to others.

Hostel for travellers and residence for online workers

I would say these 2 groups match perfectly.

• Travellers usually want to extend their trips but don´t know how to make a living while travelling; that´s where the online workers can help them.
• Online workers want to feel like they are travelling while they make their businesses grow; that´s where travellers share their experiences and that works as an encouragement for them to work harder.

As a consequence:

• Travellers can connect with locals, which they are almost always willing to do, in order to learn from their ways of living, good places to visit and eat.
• Residents can connect with travellers and have this refreshing and multi-cultural feeling of new people coming in town

As a general scheme, it could work like this:

There would be 3 blocks:

1. For residents. They would be sleeping in their own private rooms and they would be able to focus on their work in their working space.
2. For travellers.  They would be sleeping mainly in dorms and would be able to hang out, read, meet other people or do their stuff in the living room and common areas.
3. Common facilities, those spaces that bring people together and connect them: kitchen, sauna and room for meditation and yoga

Both travellers and residents would be allowed and encouraged to use the other spaces: travellers could find a spot for working and residents can get to know other people while hanging out in the living room.

This whole thing is just an idea.

It´s actually getting bigger from what I had in mind 7 months ago when I started my trip, which was simply finding a flat or refurbishing one for me to live in, but this idea of community living sounds good and much more exciting to me.

Let´s see where it takes me.

When a project lasts for months or years it is easy to lose perspective.

Daily tasks appear to be disconnected from the end goal and therefore they seem to be unimportant.

You may feel like you are wasting your time and your life doing minor things.

But you are not.

You are aiming to a big goal.

And for that you need to follow the necessary steps, which take time: hours, days, weeks… But that´s all.

How to keep the motivation in the process

The single most important thing to keep the motivation during a long process is to keep your end goal in mind.

Go back to the roots, to the origin.

What is it that sets your soul on fire from this project?

Why did you start it at all?

Think of it.

Focus on that end point, on how you will feel when you have reached the goal, on how your life will be, what you will be doing.

Keep that in mind every single day and you will keep your motivation in the highest levels for your daily, simple tasks.

When to do it

From my experience, the best time to focus on that end goal is in the morning.

I have two preferences:

1. In bed, after waking up and before standing up. Remind to yourself why you are waking up, what is the end goal that you want to reach. Meditate on that for a while until you feel inside yourself that you have to jump from the bed to start the day and work towards your dream.
2. In my morning routine. The best way to set myself up to be the most productive is by doing my morning routine. I read, I do some sport, I meditate for some minutes, I shower and then I am ready to start work. In that meditation, I like taking 2 minutes to focus on that end goal. I feel it in the center of my body, right under the belly button. I concentrate my energy there, while focusing my mind on that place in the future, when I have reached the goal.

By combining these two in the morning, I have the energy and motivation to work straight at least for the whole morning, when I am more productive.

So, keep your «why» in mind every single morning.

And get a free boost of motivation to start the day.

In these times of the internet and social media, it seems like boredom is fobidden.

There is no down time.

But there shoul be.

Boredom is the place where creativitiy grows. You need those times where you don´t know what to do, in order to connect with yourself, to know what you feel like doing, to know waht to do and why to do it.

So don´t be afraid of getting bored.

Just aknowledge it when you feel it.

Appreciate it.

And use it to re-connect with yourself.

Don´t expect to reach excellence by being average.

Excellence is a habit.

And you have to cultivate it everyday.

Don´t wait until you have that big contract, that big opportunity, to give the best of yourself.

Give it now.

Don´t wait until you earn a lot of money, until you are famous and have a perfect life to be excellent.

Be it from today.

Big contracts, big opportunities, a perfect life, fame and money are consequences of being excellent, not causes.

Therefore, start today, when nobody knows you.

Focus on what you have to do and give your best.

Now.

Results and excellence will come as a consequence.

I am in the process of designing my new lifestyle.

In this trip that I started 6 months ago I am learning a lot about myself.

The idea of starting a hostel is based on these learnings.

Take time to travel.

Take time to know yourself.

1. I need movement

Movement and exercise do good to me.

Whenever I have done it continuously and intensively, I have lost weight, I have felt much better in the daily life and in the long term and I have felt much more energetic and clear-minded, much more alive.

Swimming, contemporary dance, yoga, acrobatics, padel or soccer have brought health to my body and peace to my mind in different periods of my life.

2. I prefer living in community

Even if I can live alone, it is much more fun and enriching for me to live together with other people.

When living alone, all my dark side comes up. I feel like I am wasting my life imprisioned between 4 walls.

However, when living with other people, there is always something going on, either good or bad, but it always bring growth, sharing experiences and learning.

3. I change

It´s not that I want to change.

It´s not that I have to change.

It´s just that it happens to me.

I change.

Often.

One day I love doing something and the following day I am totally bored or fed up with it. It happened to me with architecture, contemporary dance, yoga… Sometimes the passion comes back and sometimes it doesn´t. Or maybe it didn´t come back yet.

The point is that I change.

And that I have to design a lifestyle for myself that allows those changes in me.

4. Working does good to me

I have experienced an early retirement.

I have been earning money for months straight without having to work.

I know it can sound very compelling.

But I have found that all the ghosts come up when you have nothing to do and you have all day long, all the time, just to do nothing.

I always thought that freedom would be amazing.

And it is. Don´t get me wrong.

But it has downsides: what to do with all that time?

Work and volunteering have given me purpose.

That physical activity and tasks have given me energy. When I am focused on work somehow I am meditating, I am giving the best of myself towards a goal in which I believe.

And that makes my life way easier.

5. I enjoy serving

I make more effort for others to feel good than for myself.

I am quite minimalistic. I don´t need that much to live confortably. But I love serving others, making them feel good, making them feel welcome. I don´t mind making an effort for that.

If I know there will be someone who will enjoy it, I don´t mind cooking late, waking up in the middle of the night or going shopping far away.

I feel very thankful to be able to do that.

I always thought that waiters bring happiness to people because they bring them food and drinks.

6. I connect easily with travellers

I feel them.

We are the same.

I love languages since I can remember.

I love communicating with people from other cultures.

Travelling is an exciting way to connect with yourself and the encounters that you find while travelling can be very deep and inspiring.

I love that of travelling.

7. I like challenges

Challenges are exciting.

We are in this life too short time to be bored.

Risks are part of life.

Businesses are challenging, they are a great way to develop yourself. experience personal growth, find those areas where you can be really useful to others and offer the world your vision and dreams.

Being an employee sucks.

Being a student is good for a short time.

It´s much better to create something, learn from the mistakes and benefit from the good choices.

It´s all growth.

Those are my learnings until now.

That hostel-life is the most compelling and related lifestyle that I can imagine for now. Maybe it changes with time. You know… I change 😉

• «Should I continue my trip?»
• «Or should I settle down back in Spain?»

I have been asking myself this questions for weeks.

Both ideas sounded exciting to me.

I´ve been travelling for 4 months around Europe and in January I will have been for almost 3 months in New Orleans (Luisiana, USA).

• My main reason to continue the trip was to finally balance the western countries in this trip with by visiting Indonesia; I wanted to try surf and yoga there.
• My main reason to settle down was starting this new project that excites me a lot.

On the other hand,

• My main reason to NOT continuing the trip was the fear that I was (conciusly or unconciously) postponing the project, avoiding taking the resposibility of settling down.
• My main reason to NOT settling down was the fear of going too fast with a project that is for now just an idea in my mind and, as a consequence, not having the experience of Indonesia, with their surf, yoga and spiritual culture.

There is always pros and cons to any decision you have to make.

What I learnt

Thanks to a friend that I met at the hostel I realized that, when making big decisions, it is good to:

1. Honour timing. Everything has it own time and rythm and you don´t have to know everything in advance.
2. Look inside. All the answers are inside ourselves. Take the time to look inside and be honest with yourself.

What I decided

I let days pass by.

I kept the questions in mind, but did not force myself to make any decision.

I found out that this trip is being an auto-reafirmation of my personality.

I am feeling very free to make my own decisions, no matter what other people think.

I value other people´s opinions, especially of those who I trust and admire, but this is my life and I make my own decisions based on myself.

Right now, I feel that I am in the middle of a process, where I am learning many things about myself, what I enjoy doing, what I want, what does good to me, what people I like meeting, what my boundaries are, what I can and cannot accept…

I feel the process is in progress.

I feel that if I settled down now, I would be stopping this process in an unnatural way. And I still have some exciting plans in mind that I would like to experience and that it would be much harder if I wanted to do them once I settled down.

So, for now, the trip is not finished yet.

What will happen next?

Do you know when it is inside you and you don´t know what it is?

That bad feeling,

That emotion,

Something happened to you,

But you don´t know exactly why it is that disturbed you so much and then it comes in the form of a physical feeling somewhere in your body.

It happens often to me.

The last time it was like a ball of fire located in the lower chest, really in the center.

I had an unlucky encounter with a friend and I couldn´t react quickly (I can almost never), so, as usually I let it rest until I could understand what I was feeling and why.

Hours passed and I got to name it.

I was mad.

I felt anger.

So badly.

I knew I had to talk to this person about it; otherwise the fire ball would come out in an inappropiate moment and in the wrong way.

Anger grew up along the day.

I tried to stop that growth using three tools in the following order:

1. Talking to friends. That does wonders to me, because it helps me understand what is going on inside.
2. Exercising. In this case I used yoga, a whole 1.5 hours-practice of Ashtanga Yoga. It helps chanelling emotions and let them integrate in your body.
3. Getting drunk. I needed it in the evening. I had a pretty hard time with anger during the day so I knew that escaping from my mind and being a bit crazy for a good while would help. And it did.

The following day I encouraged myself and opened my heart to this person, letting her know in a calm way what I had felt and why I was mad. From a first conversation I still had a bad feeling inside, even though she apologized, so I tried a second time, in a much friendlier and relaxed way, since we both already knew what was going on.

In that second approach smiles and hugs happened naturally.

It´s beautiful when:

1. Something moves inside you, good or bad emotion, you call it. That means you are alive and you are not just a cow that eats grass all day long.
2. You take the time to understand what is going on inside you.
3. You approach the person with whom you have the problem, explain to her what you feel and you solve it together. By the way, hugs cure.

You feel lighter afterwards, something releases inside yourself, the knot gets undone.

what I learnt

I only needed 5 minutes into my yoga session to understand why I was feeling anger so hard.

Really, 5 minutes.

On the 3rd sun salutation.

I felt anger because I needed to grow. That´s why we experience bad emotions: to grow, to understand better ourselves, to overcome a new problem, to understand better other people.

Anger, sadness, apathy, fear…

Whatever you can call a bad emotion is actually the best help for your personal growth. They move you so that you feel so unconfortable that you have no other chance than to solve them. When you can name them, understand what caused them and solve them, new emotions will come back in the future, but you already have that background to understand more easily what´s going on.

So be thankful.

Appreciate those bad emotions, because they are there to help you.

They are part of you.

Enjoy them.

Accept them.

And take them with care.

I just realized what I look for when I travel.

It took me 6 months.

I hadn´t even thought of it; I started travelling 6 months ago because I felt like doing it.

I wanted to know how I would feel and what I would think after travelling for months straight.

But I didn´t know what I was looking for.

Probably solutions to things that were not clear in my mind and which couldn´t get solved if I would have stayed in the same place, repeating the same routine once and again.

How I found it

I found what I look for in travelling by talking to people.

Just talking.

It is my favourite therapy.

When you see what others do, you realize if you agree with them or not and that way you see clearer the way you do things.

Landscapes

This belgium guy told me during breakfast that he had spent one year and a half travelling around the world, mainly hiking and going to forrests and mountains.

He was so enthusiast about it!

I have done that as well (I mean hiking).

But I don´t enjoy it so much.

After some hours or days I say to myself: «Ok, but what else?».

Because it can be beautiful, healthy and of course a good exercise but when I spend hours on my own, walking in nature, my mind wanders as well and goes fast from one place to the other, usually in a negative loop.

«What am I doing here?»

«Am I doing the right thing?»

«Why am I alone?»

«I shouldn´t feel lonely. I should be happy alone.»

And so on.

Therefore hiking or nature is not what I look for.

Challenges

I found also people that enjoy challenging themselves.

They want to travel from place A to B in a certain amount of time in a certain way, for example cycling, walking, motorcycling, driving or using public transport.

I have not even tried that, because it doesn´t sound compelling to me.

I think to myself: «What´s the point? If I want to go to B, I take a plane or 5 buses or whatever I need and then I arrive there. And once I´m there, I enjoy it.»

For me it´s hard to enjoy the trip in that sense.

Because if I have a goal, I wanna reach it as soon as possible.

So, what is it that I look for when travelling?

Personal growth and social interactions.

I LOVE trying to understand myself and why I behave the way I do.

And for some reason, being surrounded by people and interacting with them makes me grow and understand better myself.

I feel connected.

It doesn´t matter how the interaction goes, it always brings growth to me.

And I love it. Even if I am not really concious of it.

I never had a One Night Stand.

I never found any sense in something like that.

Why would you give away you most private you to someone that you don´t know and who you don´t care about.

If I kiss a girl, that means that I feel that we could have a relationship, and that I would enjoy it.

Othewise, I don´t kiss her.

I only did it once, but it was a One Weekend Stand… and I still thought it could go a bit further, but it didn´t.

So,

The point is.

I am happy to see a girl that I like, who goes out or spends a night with an asshole.

That saves me a big amount of time.

Because it means that she is not ready for a relationship.

She just wants to have fun.

She is looking for something superficial.

Good for her.

That´s not what I look for in a girl, so that saves me a lot of time.

I never really got the point of a one night stand.

How can anyone be interested in kissing a body who just met a couple hours ago?