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Hey, you know what?

My readings page is up! From now on, you can book a Soul Realignment reading with me. :-)

So today is the official start of my new business. I'm so excited! This is the beginning of a great story. A love story, between me and you, my future clients. :-) I wish us lots of fun together and many highly interesting readings. <3

To celebrate this exceptional day, I'm extending my special introductory rate until March 12th. If you book a "Who am I?" reading now, you get 25% off. Check it out!

Today is a very happy day for me. I'm feeling madly in love, and full of overflowing joy. I wish you a wonderful, wonderful day as well!

Much love to you all. <3 <3 <3

My Goals for 2010

Happy New Year!!!

I wish you all a wonderful 2010, full of love, joy and happiness, warm cuddly hugs, great sex, deep harmonious connections, fun conflicts to solve, lots of laughter, dramatic heartbreaks and crazy butterflies in your stomach!

My goals for 2010 are very simple:

1) Start a business as a Soul Realignment practitioner and make 1600€/month by the end of the year.

2) Lose 5kg.

I am very excited! I talked a lot about it with my spirit guides in the last two days. We hammered out great plans! I asked them for specific tips about diet, fitness and business. They told me which kind of diet and exercise is most aligned with my soul's highest path and purpose, the highest good of all, and my goals, and gave me some additional tips. They also outlined an action plan for me in order to launch my business successfully.

I love my spirit guides. They're such great assistants. :-)

My general intention for 2010 is to show some size. What I call "size" is an attitude, an energy, that I intuitively understand, but have a hard time explaining. It's about my ability to make a difference in the world. It's also about living up to my potential and fulfilling my life purpose. Showing some real size also means dedicating my life to the highest good of all no matter what that entails. I cannot yet really explain it, but you hopefully will see it in me soon.

Looks like my 2010 will be challenging, exciting, fun, and sexy! What about yours?

Norway Pics

I didn't take many pictures during my Norway trip. Most of the time, I just enjoyed the moment and did not think of my camera. The rest of the time, it was too dark to take decent pics. Here are a few of them though.

This is my "bonnet with holes in it", that no Norwegian in their right mind would ever wear, according to Tarjei. In the background, King Harald's castle in Oslo.



Here is the castle:



And the view on Oslo from the castle:



The opera: good sungazing spot, according to Víkþórr.



It's fun, you can go on the roof!



Here we are, the two of us, on the roof of the opera:



It was damn cold!



Oslo in the middle of the afternoon:







After Oslo, I went to visit Tarjei in Seljord:



I loved the snow and the mountains.



And the pretty houses!









At night (which means basically for twenty hours a day) the town was really cozy.





When I came back to Oslo, there was snow there too, and it was even colder than before. Tarjei and Víkþórr sharing gloves:



And me again:

I'm going to Norway!!!

I'm going to Norway! I'm going to Norway, lalala! *dances around, jumps and laughs*

I bought the tickets today. I got the intuitive nudge to do it and followed my impulse. It went so fast that I got scared afterwards, I was afraid I could have forgotten something. But it looks like there's nothing in the way. I even made sure that I have a valid passport!

I'm leaving in one week: on Saturday, November 21st.

I'm soooooo excited!!!!!!!!!

It's silly. I have traveled before. But this time, it's Norway. I mean, Noorrrwaaayyy. Every time I have heard the word "Norway" in the last nine or ten months, it felt like someone was touching my boobs.

Norway is such a heroic and fascinating country. They have an extremely sexy language. They have the vikings (my ancestors). And fjords, mountains and snow.

I feel drawn to Norway so powerfully and on such an instinctive level that I really wonder what's waiting for me there! It must be something incredible.

What's sure is that Víkþórr is waiting for me there. :-) And he is incredible. Also, there are a few more wonderful people there that I am thrilled to meet in person at last.

But it's more than all that. I don't know what it is, but I'm looking forward to it!

Update on Rose's Personal Adventures

I got a bunch of emails asking why my blog is so silent at the moment, and what I've been busy with lately. Now shall this mystery be revealed!

Target: Norway

I spend most of my time jobbing at the moment. My goal, aside from surviving, is 1) to buy a laptop, so that I can work from anywhere, and 2) to afford a journey to Norway. If everything goes well, I'll be visiting Oslo in November.  And if everything goes really well, I'll stay there.

I have decided to emigrate to Norway. I am currently learning Norwegian. Sitting in France while learning Norwegian makes little sense. When I learn a foreign language, I want to live among those people who speak my target language. This way I can practice and learn 24/7. Everything else feels damn frustrating to me.

Additionally, there's a charming young man waiting for me in Oslo. This nice bonus came up after I decided to emigrate, but now it motivates me to do so asap. I hate long distance relationships, and cybersex loses its charm pretty quickly.

Psychic Training

Aside from jobbing and enjoying some hot Skype sessions, what I spend a lot of time on is my psychic development.

Soul Realignment

I recently started training as a Soul Realignment Practitioner with Andrea. In Soul Realignment, we find out who people are at soul-level: their energy center of training, the soul group they belong to, etc.. Such details usually have a huge influence on people's personality and life. It's so interesting to learn about all this!

What I most love about Soul Realignment is that we also check if there are any energetic or soul-level blocks or negative influences that keep our clients stuck, and if there are, we clear them. This healing aspect of the work is what I'm truly interested in. After I had a reading with Anna last winter, I felt weird for several weeks (in a good way). It was a big shift in consciousness. And then, my life took a whole new turn! I'm so happy I will soon be able to do the same for other people. :-)

I'm working with seven practice clients for now. It's very, very fascinating! I totally love it. At the same time, it feels very familiar to me. It's like coming home, I feel like I've always been doing it. When I'm sitting there asking about their souls, I know: this is the work I am meant to do.

Spirit Guides

Anna teaches me how to talk with other people's spirit guides. I'd like to be able to do that. This way, I could channel messages for my clients from their guides and the other way around.

Soul Realignment is about knowing who we are at soul-level, and about clearing energetic restrictions. It's not so much about day-to-day decisions. Being able to communicate with people's spirit guides would allow me to help them in more mundane matters.

I'm very lucky to have two great teachers. I love working with Anna! First, she has a very sexy accent. And second, her training is a lot of fun. :-) We started last week. She gave me some exercises that I did every day. I'm very much looking forward to seeing where it will lead!

Language Coaching

I recently started a business as a French and German coach for language fetishists. Being one myself, I love to work with them. Teaching language fetishists is a lot of fun! I was used to doing this with friends, but teaching people I don't know well and getting paid for it is a whole new level.

I already have one guinea pig client who's totally adorable and allows me to experiment and make mistakes. I teach him French via email and Skype, and have now started recording audios as well. I'm not comfortable yet with recording myself and with audio teaching, so this is pushing me outside of my comfort zone. For the future, I can see myself creating a lot more audios and even small educational videos.

My language coaching work makes me very happy. I love it! I cannot imagine my life without it anymore.

Of course I'm building a new website for my business, with a little blog on language fetishism. It's still work in progress, so I'll keep it secret for now!

My plate is just too full. But I'll try to write more on this blog. I love it so much!

And I love you. :-)

I hope you're all well. Sending much love to you. :-)

Do you know Linux?

Linux is incredibly sexy. I love it. Here's a basic introduction for those who are not familiar with it yet.

What is Linux?


"Linux" is a generic name for lots of different computer operating systems. Those are all based on the Linux kernel. The kernel is the hard core of an operating system. The Linux kernel was originally programmed by a guy called Linus Torvalds. That's where the name "Linux" comes from.

The project grew rapidly and since then many programmers have contributed to developing both the kernel and various Linux distributions. (A Linux distribution is a complete Linux system, including lots of programs, ready to be installed on a computer.)

For example Debian, which I use, is being programmed by hundreds of volunteers all around the world! Isn't that beautiful? :-)

Some Linux versions are the collective creation of communities, like Debian or Gentoo. Others have been developed by companies, for example SuSe, RedHat, Mandriva, or Ubuntu. There are many different distributions, both commercial and non-commercial.

Why so many Linuxes?


Linux is free software. Some distributions contain or give access to pieces of non-free software, but most of the stuff, including the kernel, is free.

Free software means that everybody is free to use it, to see the source code, to modify it, to sell it or give it away to others for free, both in its original or in a modified form - basically to do whatever the heck they want with it. The only restriction is that when the software, in whatever form, is sold or given for free, the persons who buy or receive it also have the same right to get the source code and do with it whatever the heck they want.

So for example I am free to download a Linux version of minesweeper, to replace the flags with chocolate cakes, and then to sell my chocolate cake minesweeper to you for a thousand dollars. And you in turn are free to put it on your website for everybody to download it for free.

This explains why there are so many different Linux distributions. Everybody is free to make their own!

Free software is not necessarily free as in costing nothing. Most of the time this is the case though. You can download many Linux distributions and programs free of charge.

I love the concept!

What does Linux look like?

Linux desktops can look in all kinds of ways. Unlike in Windows, where there is only one possible graphical user interface, in Linux you can choose among many different window managers and desktop environments. (These are the programs that take care of all the graphical stuff.) So you have a huge choice of different looks available to you. You can even pick a different one every time you log in.

Here just a few examples:

This is what the desktop on my previous computer, Antonio, looked like.


It is a window manager called fvwm2. No menus, no panels, no icons, nothing. No mouse either. I controlled it completely over the keyboard.

This wasn't the original configuration of fvwm2 - but since all files are accessible, if you don't like something, you just change it!

Those windows you are seeing are called shells. They allow you to enter text commands instead of clicking on menus and icons. I love using shells.

This other one is very simple and elegant as well. It's called Twm. To access the menus you just click on the background. Here with a white shell, on my new computer, Protein.


There are also more complex and comfortable desktop environments, which work exactly the way Windows would. The following one is called KDE.


KDE is quite flexible. You can add fancy wallpapers, more panels at the bottom and on the sides of the desktop, icons all over the place, etc. It can look a lot like Windows, too. Look:


And this is Gnome. It's the one I'm currently using. Here too you can have lots of menus, panels, icons and all that. I personally enjoy simplicity, so I keep it clean.


If you pay attention to the panel in KDE, you'll see in both pictures this grid with numbers. 1-4 in the first one, 1-10 in the second one. The same is visible in the bottom right corner of Gnome, just without numbers. In my fvwm2 (the black screen above) they were not visible, but I had nine of them. These are virtual desktops.

Unlike in Windows, where you have to squeeze all of your programs on one desktop, in Linux there are several desktops, and you can switch between them at will. I love virtual desktops. They are so incredibly practical!

As you can see, Linux is very nice. :-)

I'd like to say a few words about its inventor, or else something would be missing.

Who is Linus Torvalds?

In the early 90's Linus Torvalds was a Finnish computer science student at the University of Helsinki. He programmed his system instead of studying. This is a great example of how going for what you truly love instead of doing what's expected can lead to huge success.

I read his biography a few years ago. If I remember well, he said he programmed the Linux kernel in his bedroom, eating junk food and skipping the classes. After Linux had become famous, the university gave him a diploma anyway. At the time the book was written, he was working in the US and earning lots of money. Since then he has quit his job though, and now works for the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and developing Linux.

One anecdote in the book that I remember very well is how Linus met his wife. He was giving a computer science course at university and asked his students to write him an email as an exercise. Back then this wasn't as trivial as it is today. A female student used this exercise to ask him out in her email. I remember the sentence "I married the first woman who asked me out electronically", which I found cute.

If you're interested in reading the biography, here it is: Just for Fun, the story of an accidental revolutionary. The book certainly is not earth-shattering. If you want to learn about Linus as a person, it is an easy and pleasant read.

Thirty Years in this World!

Today's my birthday. I was born exactly thirty years ago, at my mother's home, with only an elderly family doctor as medical assistance. My mother says he spent the night nervously drinking coffee. It was his first birth in a long time.

I was born on a door. "Uncle Denis" - that's how we kids used to call the doctor - had decided that my mother's bed wasn't hard enough. Without further ado he unhinged a door and placed it on the bed for my mother to lay on.

My mother says that as soon as I was there, I looked around with a fierce frown and made my dissatisfaction clear by grunting vigorously. Then I grabbed with both my hands the scissors Uncle Denis wanted to cut the umbilical cord with. My character doesn't seem to have changed much since my birth. ;-)

I'm very, very happy to be thirty! Honestly, I didn't think I would be that happy. Thirty is 2*3*5. Of course it's the product of the first three prime numbers, so that's not bad. But not as cool as 29, which is a prime number on its own! However, I must be decimal system biased, because those three full decades impress me. I'm very happy and excited that I survived for thirty years.

When I was born I was almost blind, I could just see light and dark. I got my first glasses at the age of 18 months. For twelve years the doctors trained my eyes. Now I can see enough to get along well in life, even without glasses. I see only with one eye and have no 3D vision, and sometimes I bump into something I didn't think was that close,  but heck! who cares. I feel so damn thankful.

When I was seventeen I had an accident, I collided with a car and fell on my neck. At the hospital they said it would have broken had I not been very flexible. I didn't like the idea that my last thought would have been "Shit!". A few years later I was diagnosed with a beginning cervix cancer, that fortunately was operated out before it could become a real cancer. In my early twenties I went through severe depressions and almost killed myself several times.

When I look back, my life in those thirty years has been full of struggle. So in some way I feel lucky that I made it to my 30th birthday. I'm damn proud of myself, too.

Plus, I've always had the belief that "Real life will begin when I'm thirty." I don't know why but I've always thought that. And now that I'm thirty, I feel SO happy. So excited! It's like now the truly exciting and joyous part of my life can begin! Yippee!! :-)

Fasten your seat belts, we're switching to warp drive!

How a kitchen timer saved me

Do you know this feeling that you have so much to do that you cannot afford the time to do anything?

I am often nervous because there's so much I want to do. I have so many goals and projects! So many great things to achieve! This makes me quite nervous.

I still work with my paper scrap system. I totally love it! It's a great method to organize myself and to decide what to do next. However, this alone doesn't solve all problems.

Whenever I do something, I tend to think "I have no time for this now, there's so much to do, I have no time...". This nervousness prevents me from fully concentrating on my task at hand. I don't really pay close attention to what I'm doing here and now, because subconsciously I'm thinking about all the other things I want to do and about how I have no time. The scraps of paper tell me what to do, but they're not able to make me calm down enough to actually do it properly.

This of course leads to poor productivity. And poor productivity leads to making the problem even worse: I end up with even more things to do in a shorter time. What a pain in the ass. It's frustrating and even leads to insomnia.

But not anymore! I found the solution: a kitchen timer.

There are two ways I use it:

When I want to do something that will yield a specific result and can be done in a short time, like doing the dishes, I give myself x minutes, set my timer, and try to complete the task within that time frame. The deadline is the timer ringing.

When I want to work on a bigger project, like writing my eBook, or when I want to do something with no particular outcome, like meditating, I give myself x minutes, set my timer, and focus on this activity for x minutes. This is called timeboxing in personal management.

Using a timer has great advantages. The biggest one, for me, is that it allows me to calm down.

I have a bad sense for time. I often completely lose track of time. Sometimes I start doing something and don't notice that I spend hours on it. I even miss appointments because of that. I usually never know how long I've been doing something, or how long I will need to do something, or what time it is. Btw, this seems to be a common trait in cyclical scanners.

Because of this, starting anything makes me nervous because I don't know how much time I will end up spending on it. In the background of my mind, I'll be nervous and permanently ask myself what time it is or how much time I have left. Wearing a watch or having an alarm clock in front of me doesn't help: I'll just end up checking the time every thirty seconds, unable to concentrate.

A timer changes everything. When I know the timer is there and will let me know when my time limit is reached, I'm able to truly relax. It doesn't stress me out: unless it's ringing, it's silent. I don't need to look at it, I don't need to mentally keep track of the elapsed time, I don't need to ask myself what time it is now, I don't need to take care not to forget anything. I am free to focus completely on what I'm doing!

The timer creates a safe space for me to play. It gives me permission to completely let go and get lost in my ideas, knowing very well that something will bring me back into reality when I need to.

This is especially great when I'm meditating. Meditating has always been very difficult for me, because subconsciously I always tried not to lose myself in complete timelessness. But that's exactly what's great about meditating: the timelessness. Now I'm able to enjoy it, knowing that the timer is there to call me back.

The timer is very reassuring. It's a great guardrail.

It's also reassuring to know it will only be x minutes. Even when I have plenty of things to do, investing x minutes for one of those is not a catastrophe. I know it won't be more than that, and that there will be enough time left for the other things as well. This too has a calming effect on me. It gives me permission to fully concentrate on this one task without worrying about getting all others done as well.

When the task I'm working on is boring, it is particularly reassuring to know it will only be x minutes. ;-)

When I use the timer as a deadline, trying to complete something in less than x minutes makes it more challenging, more exciting, more interesting than just doing it within no particular time frame. Doing the dishes is trivial. But "Will I manage to do the dishes in less then three minutes?" is a lot more fun. :-D

I'm in love with my timer! I take it everywhere with me. It's such a relief for me to have it. I even use it when I don't need it at all. For example to read a chapter of a book or to journal my three daily pages. I know these are tasks that don't take long and I really don't need to set a timer for that. But I feel better when I do. It just gives me such a wonderful sense of security and freedom. :-)

Getting Organized

Hear ye! Rose is getting organized! All miracles are possible ;-)

I'm a chaotic and impulsive person. I've always hated self-discipline, schedules, and following rules. I still hate self-discipline, schedules and following rules... but now I need to get organized and productive.

Why?

As a scanner I always have many interests and several projects running simultaneously anyway. But lately it has gotten much worse. After defining my life's purpose and my core values, I got many ideas on how to express this message into the World. Then I experienced some more learning and growing. I gained confidence, my doubts faded. Going raw gave me the necessary energy. Eventually all those great projects appeared viable! I got more and more excited about them, and felt more and more pressure to implement my ideas.

But I was too messy to be able to take action efficiently. All those ideas! All those emails! And all those things to do! I felt completely overwhelmed. Most of my energy got lost on desperately trying to figure out what to do next, what to begin with. I was plagued by nagging feelings of guilt, and kept procrastinating out of sheer confusion.

That's why I need to get organized now. I get too many emails and have too many ideas that I want to implement, I cannot insouciantly live for the moment anymore. I know - most people first get productive and then begin to think about their life purpose and all those nebulous things. For me it was the contrary. I never could motivate myself to get productive without having an excellent reason to do so. But now that I have such a reason and know what I want to do, I can learn how to do it. I want to give myself the means to do a great job. So I need to learn a couple skills, and get highly productive!

Managing my Emails

My first step was to figure out how to deal with my emails in a more efficient way. My inbox was always full, it took me ages to reply to some emails, and the whole thing was quite draining. I asked a few people how they do it, and someone told me about the important vs. urgent concept. I think this is Stephen Covey's idea, isn't it?

Now my system is the following: I have five folders called 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

1 is for urgent and important emails.
2 is for urgent but not that important emails.
3 is for important but not really urgent emails.
4 is for emails that are neither urgent nor important.
5 is for emails that need to wait for some date or some event before they can be replied or reacted to.

When I go through my inbox, I move each email to the appropriate folder, unless it's possible to reply in just a few words, like "Thank you very much, I wish you a wonderful day" or "Get lost, you bastard". In this case, I write back immediately. After all emails have been classified, the inbox is empty. Once a day I rapidly skim through all folders to see if some email needs to move to another folder. Then when I have some free time, I go through folders 1-4 and write back, beginning with folder 1, then folder 2, and so on. If I lack time to answer all emails, at least I can be sure that the most urgent and important stuff has been processed.

That's it.

It took me two or three days, but now my inbox and all folders are empty! And I'll never create such an email mess again. :-)

Managing everything else

Inspired by this success, I decided to apply the exact same system to other areas of my life. I use plastic boxes instead of folders, and instead of emails, I work with scraps of paper.

Whenever I think of some task that I need, have or want to do, I write it down on a scrap of paper, and throw this scrap of paper in the "inbox". If I know all the steps required for some project, I write every single step on a distinct scrap of paper, put the first one in the inbox and all others in box 5, the waiting box. Every time one step of the project is completed, the next one gets taken out of the waiting box. Once a day, I check the boxes and if needed redistribute the scraps of paper. And whenever I have some time, I open the first non empty box, and get going.

The good thing is that when I open a box and look at the tasks, I'm free to choose which one I'd like to complete now. This system is not as rigid as, for example, a calendar. I feel a lot more free this way, because even though I pick only something from this particular box, I still can listen to my intuition or improvise depending on my mood, the amount of time I have, the situation... It's much more fun than a to-do list, too. Almost like a lottery! Because of the huge amount of ideas I have, there are plenty of scraps of paper in my boxes. I usually don't remember what is in there exactly, so taking them out and pondering which one I'm going to tackle now is a lot of fun. :-)

Another good thing is that when I get bored with some task, I just put the scrap of paper back in its box, and choose another one. Yippeee! No guilt over not completing a job! This system is totally flexible. I'm free to spend as much or as little time on any task as I feel like to, to switch tasks as often as I want to, and to have as many projects as I'm interested in...

I also appreciate that I can use one single system to manage just everything in my life, be it buying food for the cat, designing my first eBook, or planning my kettlebell training. Such a comprehensive system is a good match for me, because there is no distinction, in my life, between career, hobbies, private life and public life.

The boxes are even big enough to contain letters. So I just put my mail in the same boxes as the scraps of paper.

Getting clear

The challenging part of this management system is that you need to know what's urgent, what's important, and what's not. For me this is no problem, because I know what my purpose is, my values, my goals, my priorities. I have it all together, only the organizational part was missing. I was ripe.

However, I can imagine that if you're not clear about what you truly want in life, or what's really important to you, this system is too foggy. So if you'd like to try it out, first define what urgent means in your world, and what is most important to you.

Big productivity boost

Thanks to this system, my productivity has increased by something like 500% in three days. It feels like playing. I go around with a big grin on my face, loudly claiming "I'm good! I'm so damn good! Yet another completed task! This is so much fun!". To the point that my friend Tom looked at me with a telling mien and observed "Self-praise stinks". :-D

The day I decided to get organized and productive, I immediately ordered a few appropriate books on Amazon. They haven't arrived yet, I guess I won't need them? Maybe they'll teach me some other useful principles. I'll keep you posted, in case I learn something interesting.

I wish you a productive day! :-)