OOOO + X – redirect your life – Healthy Habit Mavericks

Idea

This idea is coming from Michael Kurth aka Curse who is a german life coach, hip hop artist and buddhist. It’s a list of things together which can change your life by a few percent each day, however it will help you a lot in the long term to reach your goals.

How

Open sapce
Obrigado
Om
Ocha
Training

Open space

Open space is about waking up. The first thing some people do is to start reading things on their phone. This is concerning. It’s not good for the eyes. When we start reading concerning news these will stay with us the whole day, so if you read things which shows that the world is a bad place, these thoughts will be with you the whole day, probably unconsciously ruining your day. If you read social media similar thing can happen. We as humans have negativity bias which is is the notion when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one’s psychological state and processes than positive things. Some suggest that we need to have five times as much positive things in our life as negative, to achieve balance.
If you read e-mails most probably you are doing what someone else wants you to do: read their e-mails, buy their products, or do their work. It’s just someone else controlling you.

Michael recommends that you create an open space in the morning and don’t use your phone for the first 20-30 minutes after you woke up.

Obrigado

Portugiese “thank you”. This is the practice of gratitude and it’s connected to the previous point. By focusing on positive thing each morning, you change your subconscious to focus more on positive things in life. This will definitely have a good impact. He recommends keeping a gratitude journal to write down the positive things for which you are thankful.

Om

Om is a sacred sound in Hindu and a mantra in Hinduism, Buddhism. Here it simple means meditation. As little as 3-5 minutes of meditation is enough in the beginning. By focusing on our breathing and our body, we can recognise thoughts without judging them or without thinking about them. The point is to always return back our focus on our breathing.

Ocha

Ocha is the Japanese word for tee. Michael recommends tea and he uses the making of the tea as active meditation. Very interestingly there is a whole ceremony for preparation and presentation of tee in Japan. They usually serve matcha tea using special tea utensils. The ceremony also differs if it’s an informal or a formal event. There is coffee ceremony in Ethiopia and Turkey integrated coffee even as part of the wedding ceremony. The bride-to-be must prepare coffee and serve it with sugar but the groom, who will receive his coffee with salt instead. This is to gauge his character, so he has to drink it without any faces.

eXercise

Exercise is the fifth point by Michael as it’s quite important to realise that our body and mind is connected, so training just one of them is not sufficient. We can start by training 10-20 minutes a day.