4 Practices That Can Change Your Life in 7 Days: From Reflection to Inner Freedom

AVAlexander Volchek

A practice that lets you reach a new level of feelings and inner states, a practice that brings you into a state in which you truly understand why you are alive at all. An endless, constant sense of freedom and balance, regardless of whether something wonderful happens—you are away somewhere, resting and enjoying yourself, or you suddenly come into a lot of money—or something terrible happens: someone dies, something is stolen from you, you lose something, quarrel with someone, or something breaks or is erased. You come into harmony with life. Doing this, together with the three practices I described at the beginning, makes you someone who feels the scale of life and real development every day.

AGAnna Gurina

Sasha, I know you have four top practices for helping yourself and reaching a new level in life. Please share them with us.

AVAlexander Volchek

Today I will give you four practices with different formats and ranges. They are very important and work over different periods. Some produce a result within a week; others work over the long term. It is always important to have practices that work in the short, medium, and long term. Some are easy to do; others are difficult. Some are easy in terms of your inner psychological state. Others are difficult because you have to find time, and so on. They work together, and these four practices are designed that way. Practice number one is daily reflection on how you treated people during the day. Every evening, sit down for just five minutes, go backward through the day, and look at how you treated people. It is very important to do this in a completely matter-of-fact, neutral way, without what are usually called emotions in the material world—without material or social emotions. Look at how you actually acted toward Anya today, toward Sasha, toward Polina, toward your children, toward the people you met this morning or at your various meetings.

How did I act toward those people? What did I bring them? Goodness and something positive, or manipulation? Did I try to use them, put them down, or elevate myself above them? Was I comparing myself with them? What happened in those interactions? Notice that this practice will have an effect within one week. One week. If you do it for a year, it will transform you and take you to an entirely different level of life. Again, the point is not that you acted correctly. The point is to analyze how you acted. Perhaps you told everyone to get lost, mistreated them, and manipulated them. Calmly and consciously identify that. What does consciously identifying it mean? It means acknowledging, “I was manipulating here.” If you get to the point of saying, “I manipulated Anya today, but I needed to manipulate her because...” that is a red flag. The important thing is to say to yourself neutrally and calmly, “That was manipulation. But I am that kind of person: I am a manipulator.”

“Why shouldn’t I live by manipulation?” We discussed many topics today, and on some of them you say things like, “I am definitely not a vampire,” or ask me to give you a percentage. The first thing is simply to tell yourself calmly, “Yes, okay, I am ninety percent a vampire.” Or, “Okay, I am ninety-nine percent manipulative toward people. So what?” Find that out. Look at it. The issue is not the cameras filming us. It was not the cameras that kept you from saying it. You could not say it to yourself. There will be no cameras during those five minutes in the evening. So just say it to yourself calmly and easily. It is a fundamental practice, and you can expand it and do it for your entire life, of course, but without expectations. If the next day you go to someone and say, “Listen, I analyzed things yesterday. I treated you badly, but you treated me badly too,” that is another red flag. Your task is to analyze only your own behavior, from the position that, as a person, you should fundamentally bring others purity, light, positive emotions, and responsiveness. That is number one. As I said, we will go through four practices.

Each practice is part of the whole set of four. It is important to see them all. Practice number two is learning to truly perceive another person. Whenever you meet someone—your husband or wife, children, parents, siblings, relatives, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, employees, direct reports, managers, or business partners—try to truly perceive them. These are the people around you. It could be someone who caught your interest in a café or restaurant, or someone you stopped to talk to on the street. Anyone. Begin asking: “Do I really know this person? Do I truly understand who they are? Do I understand them as a spiritual being, their mind and body, their overall makeup, their spiritual system, their soul and spirit? Do I understand what impulses are at work in them, which ones they control and which they do not? Where do they act from strength, and where from weakness? Where do they act from perceiving the world, and where are they suppressed and the world does not let them perceive? What period of life are they in now? What were their past periods, and what lies ahead? What is happening to this person?” Observe and study them, not to use that knowledge or manipulate them, but to truly get to know them more broadly.

This is a great practice, an incredible one, because it brings vividness and fullness to life. It lets you develop your relationships with other people tens of thousands of times over. It lets your perception expand fundamentally and phenomenally. I often tell adults—people over fifty or sixty, or even forty or thirty-eight—“You do not know your children. Not at all. You do not know them.” The person argues furiously, insisting, “No, I understand my children. I know them. How can you say I do not know my own children?” But what a joy it is to tell yourself, “If I do not know my children, does that mean I can spend the next ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years continually getting to know this person? As I get to know them, our relationship will expand. And because I am developing and they are developing, it will all keep developing and transforming together. We will always discover something new, instead of putting a person in a little box, assigning them certain colors, and saying, ‘That is who they are.’”

But that is how our world is arranged: you have to put a person in a box. Who are you? A mentor, an adviser, a sales manager, a cleaner, a mother staying home with children? Who are you, exactly? “You are a designer. You are systematic. You are creative. You have this kind of approach.” Techniques are devised: “Have you seen that technique with six spheres? Or that diagonal curve for putting people into a particular category? Have you classified people by psychological type?” It is an endless invention of abstract parameters that bring nothing but misconceptions about another person. This is a crucial point. Notice that you can develop further by getting to know people you find unpleasant, people who bring up negative emotions in you. Study and observe them, and you will begin to hear and understand them more. Even in social terms, you will find it easier to interact with them. On one hand, if you do this without manipulation, it is a practice that lets you develop spiritually. On the other, it helps you live with these people in society. We live in a social world where people endlessly deceive, use, manipulate, and influence one another.

We need to understand the patterns through which people manipulate us, and how we should behave in society. We cannot endlessly walk around with an open heart; we would simply be killed tomorrow. There are many settings where you cannot do that. This practice produces results every day. It is not easy; it is harder than the previous one, but it complements it very strongly. It also lets you expand the range of people you can engage with. There is no limit to the number of people you can apply it to. What makes it interesting is that if you truly work on getting to know and understand other people, it becomes part of your normal routine. When you meet someone, you will not try to perceive them through their expensive sneakers, cheap jacket, beautiful eyes or hair, unwashed head, eloquent speech, PhD, bank balance, or poverty. You will perceive them truly, humanly. I said all four practices are closely connected. Practice number three lets you feel a very clear foundation beneath you in life.

Return every day to the real purpose of everything you do. If you believe, for example, that you are helping your child develop and you arrange tutoring, return to the real purpose: why are you doing it? If you want to spend time with your wife every day, return to the real purpose. Why? Do you want her to communicate better with you? Do you want her to cook for you? Do you want her to earn money? Or do you want—

Her to earn money? Or do you simply want to bring goodness into this person’s life? In your professional activity, return to the real purpose every day. Why are you working? To cover your current expenses? To repay an old debt? Because your husband or wife told you to work? To prove to society, your friends, the people around you, or your mother that you are capable of something? Are you in this particular job because you want it on your employment record for a future job? Are you working to earn a diploma or a certificate? To have a great time with other people? To go to this office and receive a particular benefits package? Because this action will help you start a company in the future? Why are you working? Keep remembering that purpose. In these kinds of social matters, it is important to ground the actions you take in that purpose every day. And when you look at the previous practices, remember the one I mentioned about reviewing how you treat other people each day.

I remember that the purpose of this practice is not to manipulate those people. Its purpose is simply to do it, because your relationship with other people is a matter of truth. That is the purpose. I check myself against it. I am not doing the practice so that more hair grows on my head, so that I get more money, or so that I meet famous people. I do it because it is a truth of life. Many people go on retreats, gobble down drugs or use other substances, or meet gurus so that their money will grow, to remove some harmful pattern, repair relationships, or find themselves in a state of daily calm. They are doing it for a particular purpose. You must always remember that purpose. Then you will not deceive yourself or ask foolish questions. This third practice brings tremendous balance to life and helps you avoid losing yourself as a person. Overall, it also lets you get the most out of your social environment. If you do this, you are always at the peak of certain possibilities.

That is completely normal. You feel stronger in that river, even in a river you do not control. Now, the fourth practice lies at the very foundation of human development. It lets you reach a new level of feelings and inner states, a state in which you truly understand why you are alive at all. An endless, constant sense of freedom and balance, regardless of whether something wonderful happens—you are away somewhere, resting and enjoying yourself, or you suddenly come into a lot of money—or something terrible happens: someone dies, something is stolen from you, you lose something, quarrel with someone, or something breaks or is erased. You respond to it in the same way. You come into harmony with life, and that harmony is very important. You can expand how often you practice this. You might engage with it every five or ten minutes, as part of your routine or a habit. Or you might give it five minutes a day, or five minutes every other day. It all depends on your state. That is where the foundation lies.

The main thing is to do it: begin continually noticing the inner impulses that arise in you. You might be sitting with someone and feel an impulse to hit them. Or you feel sexual desire for them, attraction between a man and a woman, or an urge to kiss them. Or an impulse to deceive them. Perhaps you replay a past or future situation involving them, your body starts hurting, or another thought comes in and distracts you. Begin noticing the various impulses as they arise. What matters is not which impulses occur, but beginning to notice them. Imagine someone repeatedly has an impulse to take their own life. The important thing is to begin noticing that impulse, rather than fighting it or trying to remove it. When you start noticing it, it enters your awareness. Instead of the impulse controlling you, you are the person observing it as it arises within you. Perhaps you repeatedly feel stress when you see flowers of a particular color, a cat or a dog, when your wife or husband shouts, or when someone begins saying something.

You begin noticing it. That does not mean the other person is to blame, or that you are. You are truly observing what is happening and your pattern of behavior. You notice, for example, that when you watch videos about money, something tightens in your stomach, your head becomes foggy, or your attention drifts. You begin paying attention to these impulses, noticing them. That will help you pay attention to important things in life without missing them in conversations, while walking in a park, at work, during meditation, or anywhere else. You will not forget about them. Notice that this is not extinguishing or switching off consciousness. It is simply observing what happens. Why did I say you can live this practice? Because if you are truly perceiving life—in what is called a real meditative state of living, constant observation—you are continually aware of impulses. You do not need to write them down. You constantly see, know, and feel them. You will not be able to hold every possible combination of things in your attention: you are unlikely to be able to keep track of your liver, kidneys, heart, eyes, mood, emotions, and everything else simultaneously, while also remembering it all.

But the point is not to memorize all of it. Do not evaluate the impulses, give them scores for importance or unimportance, prioritize them, or divide them by difficulty—what is complicated or hard. Do not sort them into what you agree or disagree with. Simply observe. I am sitting here in a shirt of this color; these flowers are here, and those are over there. There are three of us here. Just observe calmly and neutrally. What difference does it make whether there are three or six? Do not draw a conclusion from it. Stress arose while I was speaking—so it arose. Joy arose while I was speaking—so it arose. Observe it, note some of these events, and then, separately, examine the causes and consequences of what happened. Doing this together with the three practices I described at the beginning will make you someone who feels the scale of life and real development every day.