It's not the same to read, study, or practice philosophy.

We can read philosophy like reading a story. In search of inspiration, perhaps learning something, incorporating some thought model to solve an issue that afflicts us.

We can go to university to study philosophy. Read many authors. Compare them. Listen to profound explanations of the context in which the texts were written, the stories and lives of their authors. Become expert connoisseurs of the proposals of each philosophical line.

But practicing philosophy is another thing.

Practicing philosophy is living it. It is having a compass and using it so as not to walk aimlessly. It is permanently applying the proposed thought models to the small and big moments of life. Especially to the small ones, because with a little luck that prepares us for the big ones.

Training meditation is, to a large extent, training concentration. A simple meditation exercise is to imagine a geometric figure and try to keep that image present without getting distracted.

In very brief moments we will inevitably get distracted. The distractions that arise will be of one of these three types: physical, emotional, or mental.

A physical distraction can be, for example, that the knees start to hurt, the back gets tired, or the neck bothers us. Physical sensations that take the focus of attention that we were trying to maintain on a certain thought and bring it towards the body.

An emotional distraction is a little more subtle. For example, we may feel anxiety or boredom. Perhaps a feeling of sadness surfaces. Or if we had a bad day and we are in a bad mood, it becomes difficult to direct attention towards the object of concentration.

Mental distractions are thoughts. We remember something, we start thinking about something else. We make associations. We direct attention to memories of the past or projections of the future.

To reduce these distractions and advance in meditation training, all these aspects (physical, emotional and mental) have to be worked on. Performing a comprehensive work of the individual is crucial if we want to obtain true results with this technique.

Book - Thoughts Unveiled - DeRose
Biological yeast for life to grow and become fluffy

I think, therefore I am. This is how Descartes referred to the human prerogative to think, in his Discourse on the Method, in 1637. With this, we conclude that the Method has been discussed since at least that date!

There are many ways to transmit the DeRose Method: technical, philosophical, ethical, behavioral discourse, stories, messages or through sutras, which are the maxims of this book. Sometimes, a simple sentence contains the synthesis of a complex premise or the impact of a perception capable of changing your life forever.

The thoughts in this book are little seeds upon which you can meditate and, with that, germinate conclusions, discoveries, paths through which, who knows, you will be able to lead your life with more security, success and harmony. These maxims can be the path of stones, through which you will lead your destiny, erring less and getting it right more; suffering less and enjoying more. These sutras provide maturity, consideration, understanding, comfort and even a certain mastery over the facts of life.

Available on our website!

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.

To read this book in its entirety, click here

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.

In our understanding, stress is the psycho-organic state produced by the mismatch between the individual's potential and the challenge they need to face. Stress is the consequence of the psychophysical effort to face the obstacle. To manage stress, we try to increase the practitioner's energy, so that their potential rises and they can face the challenge from top to bottom.

Stress in itself is not a bad thing. Without it, the human being would be vulnerable and would not be able to fight, work or create with the necessary energy. What is bad is the excess of stress or the lack of control over it.

Between one psychophysical alert and another, the person would be able to recover from this state of extreme organic and mental tension. For this, it would be necessary that there be less frequency of the state of tension or, then, specific techniques to minimize the resulting generalized fatigue and that produces a chain reaction of secondary effects such as heart attack, high blood pressure, migraine, insomnia, depression, nervousness, drop in productivity, hair loss, herpes, digestive problems, ulcer, gastritis, sexual impotence, back pain and the worst of all health problems: the doctor's bills!

Just reduce stress to also alleviate all its effects, which, otherwise, would hardly yield to a definitive solution. They would be merely palliative measures or a masking of the symptoms.

The DeRose Method has in its collection several efficient resources to reduce stress to healthy levels. This opinion is shared by a good number of doctors who recommend this method to their stressed patients.

For this reason, there are many entrepreneurs, executives, artists and liberal professionals who seek, in the DeRose Method, the extra dose of energy and dynamism they need, but, at the same time, the control of stress.

Ninety percent of people feel the effects of combating stress already in the first session of our method. Our techniques and social activities stimulate oxytocin, which is a hormone produced in the hypothalamus. With its stimulation, levels of cortisol (stress hormone) decrease in the body.

From the pocket book Stress
Professor DeRose, Egrégora Books

One day, I went to the dermatologist to have him analyze my hair loss, and he said, It's stress. And it was no use explaining that I am the least stressed person he has ever met. I work at what I love, I wake up whenever I want, I decide what I want to do, I have a wife who is a sweetheart and we never argue, my secretary takes care of everything for me... in short: I have no stress at all. But the dermatologist continued to think that the hair loss was due to stress and not testosterone.

Some time later, I went to the cardiologist to control my blood pressure, which was a little high, and he pontificated: It's stress. And it was no use explaining that my father had high blood pressure, so the first suspicion should be genetics. He continued to think it was the supposed stress.
On another occasion, I went to the gastroenterologist to see if we could locate the bacteria that I had certainly brought from my many trips to India and that was causing abdominal cramps. He told me: This is stress. And it was no use explaining that, with 25 years of traveling to the Himalayas, it was inevitable that I had brought bacteria, protozoa and a whole zoological garden of microorganisms different from ours. He continued to think that the cause was stress.

One day, I hurt my back practicing Aikido. I went to the orthopedist and, as soon as I declared that I had back pain, he told me, based on his experience: It's stress. And it was no use explaining that the cause had been trauma. He persisted in saying that, regardless of the impact on the vertebrae, stress was associated with back pain.

But the most incredible thing was when, years later, I went to the dentist with an abscess in a tooth and the dentist immediately said: It's stress. Recent studies have proven that stress triggers abscesses and all sorts of inflammations, including cancer, because it lowers the body's resistance.

What is the conclusion?
The conclusion of the cases above is that, whatever your problem, the trigger may have been stress. You may have viruses and bacilli in your body that would never create any problems if there was no decrease in immunological capacity due to stress. This is the case of the herpes virus, which is there quietly until you have an episode of stress: immediately the nasty blisters start to appear on the lips or on the genitals. You may have a genetic predisposition to cancer, but it would never develop if there was no decrease in the body's resistance.

From the pocket book Stress
Professor DeRose, Egrégora Books

The rules of etiquette are basically applicable to followers of the clean proposal. However, these tips will be useful to everyone, as they aim to develop an aesthetic sense of behavior with universal scope.

It is indeed true that a DeROSE Method practitioner has a more elegant, cordial behavior and a polished ability to manage conflicts. Therefore, we must be attentive to a perfect family, social and professional integration. Obviously, we try to maintain mimicry in order not to attract attention. But sometimes it doesn't work. So, may we be noticed and remembered for our elegance, sympathy, culture and cordiality.

Most of the rules of conduct arose from practical reasons. If you can discover the vein of human consideration, you will also have discovered the origin of all the formulas of etiquette. It all comes down to a matter of education. Good manners are the ways of acting in the company of other people so as not to invade their space, not to embarrass them and to make everyone feel good and at ease in your presence. Therefore, good manners are a matter of common sense.

By the way, with regard to this detail, let's recognize that good manners are also constantly changing conventions, depending on time and space. Therefore, the etiquette manual that is useful for Europe is not useful for Japan and what was published a few years ago may already be outdated today, as the world is changing rapidly.
So, the best thing you can do when you are out of your habitat is to wait for others to act first, observe and do the same. If they eat with their hands, follow suit; if with chopsticks, try to do the same.
But if, despite everything, you cannot follow certain customs, simply decline them. I will never be able to slurp soup or tea, or burp at the end of a meal as is correct in some countries. In these cases, I count on the indulgence of the hosts for the fact that I am a foreigner who does not know how to behave 100% according to local manners. I settle for about 95%.

However, if you are the host, put your guest at ease, doing as he or she does — whenever possible. I have a friend who, in order not to embarrass his guest, accompanied him and drank the lavender that was served after the meal to wash the tips of his fingers.

Another well-known fact was that of an Arab diplomat who, at a gala reception, finished eating a chicken drumstick and threw the bone back over his shoulder. For a moment, everyone looked at each other as if asking: What shall we do?. Immediately afterwards, the host imitated him and then everyone was throwing their bones over their shoulders... and having a lot of fun with it.

From the book Method of Good Manners,
Professor DeRose, Egrégora Books

Half a century of life has taught me to accept a flaw of human beings as something incurable: their dissatisfaction.

I have traveled around the world countless times and met many, many people. I have been in close contact with countless initiatory fraternities, cultural entities, professional associations, sports academies, universities, schools, companies, federations, foundations... In all of them, without exception, there was discontent.

In every human grouping there is a cohesive force called an egregore. According to the law of action and reaction, every force tends to generate an opposing force. Therefore, in these same groupings, small disagreements constantly arise that take on dramatic contours through the refraction of an egocentric perspective that only takes into account the satisfaction of the expectations of an isolated individual who analyzes the facts according to their own conveniences.
In other words, if the facts could be analyzed without the deleterious interference of egos, it would be found that there is nothing wrong with these facts, other than emotional instability. Instability that is congenital in all human beings. A kind of original design flaw, which is still in the process of evolution. After all, we are an extremely young species compared to other life forms on the planet. We are in the infancy of our evolution and, as such, we inevitably commit the natural immaturities of this phase.

Note that very few people are satisfied with their worlds. In general, everyone has complaints about their work, their subordinates and their superiors; about their remuneration and recognition for their work; complaints about their parents, their children, their spouses, their condominium, the government of their country, their state, their city, the police, the justice system, the traffic department, taxes, ill-mannered neighbors, unskilled drivers, undisciplined pedestrians... So much to complain about, isn't it?

If we go down this path, we will conclude that the world is not a good place to live and we will continue to be bitter and make others bitter. Or we will commit suicide!

Already in antiquity, the Hindus observed this phenomenon of endemic human dissatisfaction and taught how to solve it:
If the ground has thorns, don't try to cover the ground with leather. Cover your feet with shoes and walk on the thorns without being bothered by them.

In other words, the solution is not to complain about people and circumstances to try to change them, but to educate yourself to adapt. The correct attitude is to stop childishly wanting things to change to satisfy your ego, but to change yourself to adjust to reality. That is maturity.

The other attitude is neurotic, because you will never be able to modify people or institutions to fit your desires. Don't be a misfit.

So, let's stop with that. Let's accept people and things as they are. And let's try to like them. You will notice that they start to like you much more and that the situations that seemed immovable to you before, now change spontaneously, without you having to demand it from them. Try it. You will like the result!

From the book Change the world, start with you,
Professor DeRose, Egrégora Books