In the title, four practices are listed that can help you help yourself and reach a new level of life — they differ in format and scope. These practices work over different periods: some produce results in just a week, others in the long term. Some practices are easier, others more difficult to perform; some are easy in terms of psychological state, others are challenging in terms of time, and so on. All four practices are interconnected.
Practice №1: Daily reflection “How did I treat people during the day?”
This will take 5 minutes of your time. Every evening, make a reverse report of the day and review how you treated people today (your children, colleagues, husband, wife, friend, passerby, and so on).
It’s very important to do this completely neutrally: without material or social emotions, look at how you truly acted toward Anna, Sasha, Polina, your children; toward all the people you met in the morning at meetings.
What did I bring them: kindness, positivity, manipulation, did I want to take advantage of them, belittle them, rise above them, compare us?
This practice will have an effect in just a week. If you do it for a year, it will take you to an entirely different level of life.
The point is not whether you “treated other people right or wrong”; the point is in the analysis and observation of how you acted. Maybe today you mocked everyone, manipulated — fine. The important thing is to calmly, consciously note it. What does that mean? It means acknowledging that you were in a state of manipulation. If you say: “I manipulated Anna today, but I had to do it because…” (and here’s the red button). It’s important to neutrally, calmly say to yourself: “That was manipulation, so I’m a manipulator, why not live in manipulation?”
In many topics I’ve discussed, you just want to say: “I’m not a vampire!” Here, the first thing you need to do is calmly say: “Yes, fine, I’m a vampire 90% of the time!” or “I manipulate people 99% of the time!” So what? But the point is you can’t say that to yourself. It’s important to learn to say it simply, calmly, and absolutely easily to yourself.
This is a fundamental practice you can expand and do your whole life. But without expectations. If the next day you say to someone: “I analyzed my behavior yesterday and realized I treated you badly. But you treated me the same way.” Don’t do that: your task is to analyze only your own behavior without expectations of others. Do it from the position of a person who, by default, should bring purity, light, positive emotions, and responsiveness to others.
Practice #2: Learning to Truly Perceive a Person
Here we are talking about your spouse, children, parents, relatives, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, employees, managers, business partners — the people around you. To truly perceive a person means answering the questions:
- Do I really know this person?
- Do I truly understand who they are?
- Do I understand them as a spiritual being?
- Do I understand their psychophysics and overall makeup?
- Do I understand their spiritual and soul–spiritual system?
- Do I understand what impulses are at work in them?
- Which impulses do they control, and which do they not?
- Where do they act from strength, and where does weakness show?
- Where do they act from perception of the world, and where does the dullness of the world prevent them from perceiving?
- What is their current life period?
- What were their past periods?
- What future periods are likely?
- What is happening with this person right now?
- Am I ready to observe and study them not for gain or manipulation, but to truly learn more widely?
This is an incredible practice because it leads to a vibrant and fulfilling life; it allows you to develop relationships with others tens of thousands of times over! It is what enables you to expand fundamentally in perception.
I often tell adults (40, 50, 60 years old): “You don’t know your children at all.” They argue: “No, I understand my children, how can you say I don’t know them?!” But the joy is to say to yourself: “If I don’t know my children, then over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years of life I will get to know this person. And by knowing them, I will expand my relationship with them. I will develop, they will develop — and we will continue to grow together, transform, and always discover something new.” Not to put a person in a “box,” give them a certain label, and say that’s who they are.
Our whole system works like this: we need to put a person into a cell. Who are you: mentor, adviser, sales manager, cleaner, housewife, designer? You’re systematic, you’re creative… Have you tried the six-ball technique or the diagonal arc for placing a person into a certain category? Or used personality types to define them?..
Endless invention of abstract parameters brings nothing but delusion about another person. This is a vital component! Pay attention: this allows you to keep developing. If you start to get to know people who are unpleasant to you, who evoke a negative emotion in you, you will start to listen to them more, understand them better, and you will even be able to interact with them more easily from a social standpoint.
On one hand, this practice (without manipulation) allows you to develop spiritually; on the other hand, it allows you to live socially with these people. We live in a social world where people constantly deceive, use, manipulate, and influence each other. We must understand the patterns of manipulation — where these people manipulate us, and how we must conduct ourselves in society. We cannot walk around endlessly with an open heart (we would be destroyed quickly); in many spaces, that’s simply not possible.
This practice gives results every day. It is not easy, it is more difficult than the previous one, but it complements it; it allows you to increase the range of people — and the number of people for this practice is infinite.
What’s interesting about it? If you are truly, genuinely engaged in learning about and understanding other people, it becomes part of your routine. When meeting a person, you will not try to perceive them by expensive sneakers or a cheap jacket, by their beautiful eyes or messy hair, by how eloquently they speak, or by a PhD title, by the amount of money in their account or by their poverty — you will perceive them truly, humanly.
Practice #3: Returning Daily to the Real Goal
This practice allows you to clearly feel a foundation in life. It means returning daily to the real goal in all your actions.
For example, if you are developing your child and hire a tutor for them, you return to the real goal: why are you doing this? If you know you want to spend time with your wife every day, you return to the real goal: why are you doing this? Do you want her to communicate better with you? To cook for you? To earn money? Or do you simply want to bring good to this person?
In professional activities, return to the real goal daily and answer the question: why do you work? To cover current expenses? Pay off an old debt? Because your spouse told you to? To prove to people that you are capable of something? To get a record in your employment history for a future job? To obtain a diploma or certificate? To have a great time with other people? To go to an office and get a certain social package? To start a company in the future?
Why do you work? Always remember this goal.
In such matters, it is important to rely daily on the actions you take. Let’s recall the previous practices (daily reflection, truly perceiving people). The aim of these practices is not to manipulate people, but to simply do them — because the attitude toward others is the truth. That is the goal. You check yourself: “I do this practice not to grow more hair, not to get more money, not to meet famous people. I do it because it is the truth of life.”
Many people go on retreats, take substances, meet various gurus — so that they will have more money, remove a bad program, restore a relationship, or find themselves in daily peace. They do it for a specific goal — you must always remember it. Then you won’t deceive yourself or ask foolish questions.
This third practice powerfully balances life and keeps you from losing yourself as a person; it allows you to get the most out of the social environment. If you do it, you are always at the peak of certain opportunities. It’s completely normal. You feel stronger in the river — even in the one you cannot control. But you feel stronger.
Practice #4: Tracking Internal Impulses
The fourth practice lies at the foundation of human development. It allows you to reach a new level of sensations and states, and to arrive at a true understanding of why you live.
The feeling of endless, constant freedom and balance — regardless of whether something wonderful happens and you are relaxing somewhere, rejoicing, receiving a large sum of money, or whether something very bad happens (someone dies, something is stolen from you, you lose something, have a quarrel, something breaks or gets erased) — you react to it all the same. You come to a state of harmony with life.
The range of activity for this practice can be expanded: you can engage in it every 5 or 10 minutes as part of your routine or habit. At the same time, you can devote 5 minutes a day or 5 minutes every two days — it all depends on your state.
The most important thing is to actually do it: start constantly tracking the impulses that arise within you. For example, you are sitting with someone and feel the impulse to hit them; or a desire for them from a male or female perspective; an impulse to kiss the person; an impulse to deceive them. Or you start replaying a situation with this person in your head and your body starts to hurt; or a thought appears and you begin to get distracted by other things.
It doesn’t matter what impulses occur — the important thing is to start noticing them.
Imagine someone constantly has the impulse to commit suicide. It’s important to start noticing this impulse — not to fight it, not to eliminate it, but simply to notice it. When you begin to do this, it shifts into a state of awareness: it no longer controls you, you are observing it.
You may constantly feel stress when you see flowers of a certain color, a cat or dog, your spouse yelling, or someone starting to talk. You begin to track this. This does not mean that you or the other person is at fault. You are in a state of truly observing events as they happen, your behavioral patterns. You notice: if you watch videos about money, something in your stomach starts to tighten, or your head gets cloudy, or you get distracted by something else. You begin to pay attention to these impulses, to notice them. This will allow you in life to pay attention to important things and not miss them — during a dialogue with others, while walking in the park, at work, in meditation — anywhere.
Essence of the practice:
- For one week, observe your impulses and record them in writing
- Create a list of all impulses that arise
- Do not try to analyze or judge them as “bad” or “good” — simply gather them into your field of attention
- Pay attention to which impulses repeat, which appear unexpectedly, and which hide under fears, desires, goals, anxieties, habits
💡 This does not mean extinguishing or shutting off consciousness — it simply means observing what is happening.
What else is important?
- Do not overlook bodily and emotional impulses — they are also signals
- Do not judge, do not cut them off, just observe
- Most importantly — do not suppress or act on everything automatically, but understand the source of each impulse
Why can you live by this practice? If you are in a genuine perception of life (what is called a true meditative state of life, constant observation), you are always in the perception of the impulse. You do not need to write them down: you see them, know them, and feel them. You truly will not be able to hold all possible combinations of events — you are unlikely to be able to keep track of your liver, kidneys, heart, eyes, mood, emotions, and remember all of this at once!
Another point is that there is no “layer” of memorization here. It is important not to evaluate, not to assign a score of importance/unimportance to impulses, not to divide them by level of difficulty or effort (“I agree with this, I don’t agree with that”), but simply to relate neutrally: for example, I am sitting in a shirt of a certain color, there are certain flowers here, other ones there, there are three people with me here. Just observe this — calmly, neutrally. What difference does it make whether there are three or six? Don’t draw any conclusions about it. If stress appears during my speech — then it appears; if joy appears during my speech — then it appears… Observe this, record certain events, and then separately look at the causes and effects of what is happening.
If you practice all four exercises, this will make you into a person who feels the scope of life and genuine development every single day.