Hello Friends, It has been a while

I have had a feeling lately, a certainty disguised as a suspicion. I am in Japan right now, Tokyo to be exact. It is one of my favorite places in the world (as it almost always is for everyone that isn't from here.) I hate thinking about how to structure newsletters to "hold readers attention" so I am just going to say what I want to say and hope it reaches the right eyes and minds.

To me the whole spiritual journey is about one thing. Kindness. Or rather more accurately #Altruism. I will be honest with you I grew up hating people, society, humanity. All I ever saw was cruelty perpetuated by cruel people who became cruel as a result of other peoples cruelty.

It is a reality shattering realization when it clicks for you that no one is coming to save you and if you want the world to be more kind you have to be the kindness and let that frequency multiply and reverberate and HOPEFULLY return back to you.

Like many things in life kindness is the hardest thing in the world because it is one of the easiest. All you have to do is make a decision to be kind but all you REALLY have to do is…

• Put personal gain/benefit to the side
• Work through trauma and subjective perceptions of reality that shape your interactions with others/reality
• Trust that being kind is the "right" choice and that everyone is inherently deserving/worthy of it
• Be strong enough to sometimes be taken advantage of or used/manipulated
• Risk being hurt, heartbroken or feeling alone
• the list goes on…

Every single one of these bullet points and every single one you can think of is rooted in our need/desire to protect ourselves, defend ourselves, or the belief that what/who we truly are is the ego/self we identify with.

An interesting thing happened to me as I became more and more "Grisha" more certain of the person/man I was, more aligned with the kind of life I wanted to live, feeling more "worthy" of the joy and love this world is rife with. Kindness started to become easier and easier.

I realized I did not care if the world was not going to reward me or pay me back for my kindness, I started to matter less and less and the joy I received from being kind started to matter more and more.

Virtue truly is its own reward.

As you become more certain of who you are you feel less inclined to defend it, the less you defend it the less you feel the world is out to attack/get you and the easier it becomes to feel safe enough to be kind.

If you want a way to measure your "Spiritual Evolution" ask yourself how easy you find it to be kind or better yet how easy do you find it to be Altruistic.

Altruism is kindness free from expectation, payback or the promise of good karma. You do it because it is its own reward.

All the work that I do is to have altruism be effortless. To have it be my natural state of being free from the fear that world is out to get me, or will punish me or that I must protect myself and my heart.

Remember my friends, a tree with deep roots fears no storm.

With and From Love,

Grisha