Finiding a new job

I am in the Netherlands for exactly a week now. At a point in my life in which I want to prove to myself that I can completely make a life in another country all by myself without the help of other people.

A week gone by and I am still looking for a job. Its not very easy.... Language mainly, although there are many jobs in English in difficult to get in. And although I can start working tomorrow as a waiter, I want to work in my specialty (IT).

So let's see what this week will bring on. In any case, I am planning to stay strong! keep on looking and not loosing hope.

Wish me luck!

Master cleanse and relationships

So you are doing the master cleanse… Do you have a partner? A boyfriend? girlfriend? husband or wife? a friend?
See how each and one of them respond to your cleanse. How each and every one of them respond to this experience that you are going through.
People who never stopped eating for 10 days cannot really understand what you are going through. In a sense its like being in a survival movie. Crashed with a plane on a desolate island for 10 days and waiting for a rescue. The only eatable thing on that island is a very sweet and spicy lemon tree and in the morning you always find yourself drinking a whole lot of sea water…

So many mental and physical hardness that you are going through these days. And the people close to you, do they understand it? do they support you? how do they support you? does it scare them? does it scare you to find out how they respond to it? I am not telling you what the cleanse will do to your relationships, I am just saying: look very well at the people that you have surrounded yourself with over the years. Look at how they interact with you in this difficult but important and significant short period of suffering and self-discovery. Watch yourself respond to them and see what happens to your relationship.

The master cleanse can be a life changing experience if you really look through the doors that it opens into your life and into your life of social connections with other people.

Please write me and tell me about your experience with the people who important for you while doing the cleanse.

Doing the cleanse with another person is a whole new thing, a thing I will talk about in my next entry. If you are interested please check my blog for more info on that and other interesting topics.

Good luck!!!

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Stuff you didn't know about the master cleanse

First, you should know that the master cleanse is definately worth doing. It sure as difficult as it sounds to be. Those 10 days of starvation were …. hungry days. I can tell you that.

One thing the master cleanse didn’t do for me was that I didn’t loose any weight. I actually lost about 15 lbs (7 kg) during those 10 days, but I gained them all back gradually in following 4 months after the cleanse. Since, loosing weight wasn’t really the goal in the first place I really don’t mind that. However, a lot of people warn you about it and I shall do the same. Do Not Do This Cleanse To Loose Weight!!! it wouldn’t work.

Another thing I want to share with you. I am not so sure this cleanse actually cleanse you out. I read so many different opinions of physicians, practicioners and other people doing this cleanse and they all say something different. I didn’t necesariily feel more clean after this experience.

So why to do it:

1. It just teaches you so much about food. How much you are addicted to it, how much it controls your life, how much we are eating rich things that we don’t really need. Try to look at ice cream, a burger, pizza, after 5 days of cleanse and you won’t believe that your body ever consumed something like that. And of course this feeling disappear 4 months after finishing the diet. But the knowledge that you gain about food remains there.

2. It teaches you how much food is important for social interaction. Try to spend 2 hours with a friend without talking about food, snacking something, or drinking something. Almost every social interaction is about food in one way or another. Getting the experience of that knowledge is mind exploding.

3. Relationships. If you are lucky enough to do the master cleanse with your partner or a friend, it is an experience that will teach you a lot about your relationship. At moments of physical needs and stress (caused by hunger), people reveal their true self. And it will shock you to find some stuff about yourself and your partners. More than that it will stabilize your relationship or will provide evidence that you maybe should not be together. A very important experience.

4. Lastly I can think of for now – Your senses. Become a real human again. I can’t describe in words what happens to your senses, especially smelling after 4 days into the cleanse. You will start to percieve things the way they should be. Smelling meet from the other side of town. Passing next to a leather shop on the other side of the street and smelling every jacket and shoe with their own specific smell. You will feel again as a perihistoric human, more connected with parts of yourself you didn’t really know about.

All together, it is an experience that will somehow connect you with a deeper spiritual level of yourself. I know that many people are doing it from other reasons, but in my opinion this is mainly what this cleanse is all about.

Read more about it in my blog or wait for more entries by me coming soon…

Good luck!!!

See more progress on: master cleanse

Understanding Spiritual Enlightenment and Self-Development

So many people these days are searching for a spiritual path. Each of us is motivated by our own particular dissatisfactions, but the real motivation is the same: we crave to reduce our suffering and enhance our happiness. Suddenly, we wake up one morning with a new path in our life; it can be Buddhism, Kabala, Sufism, New-Age traditions, or anything else. There is often a whole new community of people indulging in our newfound interest, and another world is suddenly available for us. The new path fills us up with something great, filling a place that was empty for so long.

Most of us are quickly drawn to big words and ambitious goals such as enlightenment, self-realization, getting in touch with god, seeing the light, etc. Thus, the goal of our path is the ‘ultimate’ realization of our most revered spiritual leaders.

However, most of us do not understand what is it that we want when it comes to our goals. Mainly we are confusing two ideas: self-development and spiritual enlightenment.

So, what is it that you want?

Are you seeking to improve the way you are feeling right now? If you are, then you are looking for self-development.

Are you looking for improvements to your life? Increasing your quality of life or enjoying your experiences more? If you are, then you are looking for self-development.

As long as you are looking for a way to enhance the experience and alleviate the suffering of the person you are, then you are looking for self-development. We should be careful not to confuse this with the search for enlightenment, as these are two different things. Of course, self-development is a very good thing. Improving your quality of life, understanding yourself and how your and others’ minds work is very important and a very spiritual act by itself. These are all issues which are important for improving life and making the world a better place. In that sense, self-development is a wonderful gift for people in the modern world.

However, we tend to confuse it with spiritual enlightenment, and, as I have mentioned, it is not the same thing. If you seek enlightenment, then you seek to find out who you truly are, and to find the nature of the universe and of existence, all of which are independent of your normal identity. Self-development, on the other hand, tries to stabilize and enforce the existence of the normal identity that you have. By seeking enlightenment you are not seeking a way to improve the way you normal identity feels, but you are seeking your true identity. Happiness of the normal self is often a by-product of that search, but sometimes that journey requires a great deal of effort and hardships that many of us are not prepared for.

Whatever the path that you choose for yourself, your path is the right one as long as you know what you are looking for. Going on the spiritual enlightenment path while having only self-development goals will require a lot of energy and time spent toward achieving something you will never achieve, because in fact you never wanted it in the first place.

Whether you are interested in Self-Development or Spiritual Enlightenment, you can surf to the website http://www.globalyogi.com, which offers you the opportunity to become a Global-Yogi—to pursue your own spiritual path anywhere around the world, and find resources, spiritual-teachers and spiritual-teachings around the globe. The information listed can help on paths of self-development, enlightenment, or both.

You can also view my blog http://global-yogi.blogspot.com/ to read more articles about spirituality and self-realization.

Copyright © 2007 Uri Kugel & Lindsey Kerr