Jaya is hyper-educated, but she learned almost everything based on incentives and games. When I give her a command like talk!, she wags her little tail, denouncing the pleasure she feels when she receives a command. Because for her it's not a command: it's a game, a joke, an opportunity to interact with me. And she knows she's going to get a reward, whether it's a treat or a caress.

Dogs, critters and commanders respect an affable leader much more than a hysterical one. The authoritarian thinks he gets respect with his shouting and insults, but he does not. People only obey him as long as they have no means of overlapping and boycotting his supposed authority. They will not give their lives for him. Whoever develops the usual attitude of speaking softly and treating everyone well, even when they are wrong, if one day he speaks a little more seriously, that is enough for everyone to respect him.

You must know people who live giving reprimands and nobody pays the slightest attention to them. Everyone laughs at them. They are used to it. The lack of shame has set in. But you must also know people who are always loving and one day reprimand someone, always affectionately, and in spite of that, the one who is reprimanded cries because he did not want to offend that leader. This is true for the leader of the pack.

In my childhood everyone commented that my maternal grandfather did not need to scold his children. It was enough for him to look at them. It seemed incredible to me. Until life gave me the same gift. Many, many times I don't need to say anything. I just watch. And my co-workers react positively.

You can get that from your dog. When Jaya is lying on the bed and I want her to come down, I don't waste verbal commands. I just look at her firmly. She lifts her head and glares at me, as if inquiring, Is it with me? Is it for me to get out of here? If I continue to look at her, she lowers her little ears and climbs down from the bed.

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We have multiple intelligences: bodily, emotional, intellectual... and they are like gears in the same machine.

There are two main approaches throughout history to develop the capacities considered higher. One is perfectly in line with the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage: abolish the body, deny it, withdraw attention and importance from it, so that other intelligences can emerge. The other proposes to develop the body (that gear) as a way to achieve overall harmony.

Among the supramental capacities that have been pursued at different times is meditation. Today there are many systems that propose to develop this aptitude. In many cases they go straight to the point, proposing the permanence in immobility with the legs crossed for hours. Have you already tried it? Have you tried to remain motionless for several minutes? From a fly to sleeping legs, at the beginning everything disperses you.

If you are not strong, with a resistant biological structure, meditating is very difficult. In fact, one of the obstacles to meditation cited by a well-known sage who lived in the third century B.C.E., Patanjali, is illness, the incidence of which is minimized if there is care for the body.

If instead of trying the farthest thing, meditation, and crashing against the closest thing, the body, we start by paying attention to the closest thing and try to feel what is happening inside, for example listening to the heartbeat, this changes the equation and the corporal universe becomes an ally to improve concentration, an indispensable previous step for meditation, which consists in stopping to think.

You have traveled the path that leads from worm to man, and many things in you continue to be worm. Once you were monkeys, and now also man is more monkey than any monkey. And the wisest of you is only a split being, a hybrid of plant and ghost. But do I command you to become ghosts or plants? wrote Nietzsche in his Thus Spake Zarathustra. This hybrid of plant and ghost, a split being, is the human being disconnected from his bodily, sensory heritage, the spiritualist in search of elevation? However, prior to this vision is that other one that sees no opposition between body and soul, does not seek to dissect what would not survive separately. If I fall to the ground I get up with the help of the ground, is the phrase of shakta tradition that sums up this view.

When you are on the verge of collapse, the point where you find it hard to keep up with all your schedules and commitments and you would like to schedule the whole day and try to see if it is possible... do the mental exercise.

Come on, imagine it. You would take a vacation without traveling, or you would grab a backpack and go around the world. You'd watch your favorite shows all day, or read until your eyes were tired, slipping guiltlessly into several naps throughout the day. You would change your routines, sleeping during the day and dancing at night, or the opposite: you would wake up before dawn every day with the clear horizon of dedicating yourself to your business, those you never had time to undertake before this new phase. You would visit the universes of your favorite people, with no end time, until they would start to blink because they would not have the privilege of changing their routine at will.

Or would you end up building the same life in the long run? The same commitments you worked so hard to get rid of? Maybe you'd do it an octave lower: a little less of this and a little less of that would probably be enough. In that case you wouldn't need to destroy everything, it would be more a matter of dosage.

Now another visualization: you go on the road in your favorite vehicle, car, bicycle, roller skates.... You don't have to arrive at any fixed time, no rush. You can stop to eat something on the way, you can get off to watch the cows, get wet if it rains, or stop until it stops. After a while, you will spontaneously get into your cruising speed, which you will maintain most of the time. You tend to stabilize at a certain speed, because that saves effort: a constant pressure on the accelerator, or a rhythmic movement of the arms and legs, or a breathing and pulsations that trigger a body rhythm. Of course, you can modify that monotony by proposing to go faster or slower, but there is also something economical and easy, pleasant, in surrendering to it. It is an equation that works for you at that precise moment, considering the millions of variables.

How much room is there in your life for you to move at cruising speed?

More on this subject in the free book Viva mais e melhor, by Professor DeRose and in O método DeRose e a gestão do stress, by Joris Marengo.