Twenty-one years since one more hope for equality was killed - Tupac Shakur.

“You know it’s funny when it rains it pours. They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor”. Tupac Shakur

Before I tell you some things you might know and might not about Tupac, I want to tell about the fact that this young man was a light of hope and that regardless of the fact that he was shot at a very young age, he left an endless amount of light behind him.

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside while still alive”. Tupac Shakur

I think that the worst part about Tupac and his life is how badly he was judged by so many people around the world who were not and still are not able to understand his message to the world and all of that because of prejudices. Because he was black and a rapper. Which are two things that people are programmed to interpret as bad, as a mess maker, a gangster, and a non-trust worthy person. When in fact, he was a true intellectual with one of the deepest souls that ever walked on this planet.

“My mama always used to tell me: ‘If you can’t find somethin’ to live for, you best find somethin’ to die for”. Tupac Shakur

Tupac Amaru Shakur, known as 2Pac or Pac, was an American rapper, record producer, actor, activist, and poet. His records have sold over 75 million copies worldwide. Rolling Stone ranked him 86th on its list of The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

On September 7th, 1996, Shakur was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting at the intersection of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane in Las Vegas, Nevada. He passed away 6 days later in the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada.

“There’s no way that Michael Jackson or whoever Jackson should have a million thousand droople billion dollars and then there’s people starving. There’s no way! There’s no way that these people should own planes and there are people that don’t have houses. Apartments. Shacks. Drawers. Pants! I know you’re rich. I know you got 40 billion dollars, but can you just keep it to one house? You only need ONE house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it to two rooms? I mean why have 52 rooms and you know there’s somebody with no room?! It just doesn’t make sense to me. It don’t.”  

Tupac was shot because he was speaking out the truth. Because he was screaming out the truth. The truth of the lives of all of us. The truth of social and financial control. The truth of brains control. The truth about us all being equal; the truth that a person is not his circumstances or a number of opportunities life gave him. A person is whom he is deep inside. Don’t judge a rich man at his richest days, look at him when he is poor and compare.

“You gotta make a change. It’s time for us as a people to start making some changes, let’schange the way we eat, let’s change the way we live, and let’s change the way we treat each other. You see the old way wasn’t working so it’s on us, to do what we gotta do to survive.” Tupac Shakur

“I‘m not saying I’m gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world”.
Tupac Shakur

It has been 21 years since Tupac was shot, and all of that and more is still relevant. 
When will we do some changes?

With Love,

Yana

We Can Win Poverty, We Don’t Want to

“I believe that the greatest failure of the human race is the fact that we’ve left more than one billion of our members behind”. Andrew Youn



“We are an exceptional people, but we’ve left over one billion of our members behind”.

Andrew Youn

What if I told you that the human race has already found all the solutions we need to eliminate poverty on our planet? Well, we actually did. We have reached some of the most exceptional achievements and we are only getting started. 
We can win poverty, but we don’t care enough to want to do it. 
We can win poverty but the leaders of most countries are busy with making their own pockets bigger than they already are. 
We can win poverty but we prefer spending money on weapons, war, and luxury. 
For example, the amount of money spent in six months during the Iraq war could have solved the problem of the Amazon rain-forest forever, which is the lungs of our planet, and no single tree will need to be cut again.

“We are an exceptional people, but we’ve left over one billion of our members behind”. Andrew Youn

A TED talk by Andrew Youn, the Co-Founder of One Acre Fund, made me realize how far we have gone as a human race. What is it that we failed in? We fail in having a will. In fact, if we think about the tools and the knowledge that we own in the modern world, it is a living proof, that we are undefeatable. However, do we utilize our own strength and growth in the right way?

“Hunger, extreme poverty: these often seem like gigantic insurmountable problems, too big to solve”.

The truth is that humanity has fallen into a very low level of morality, and it makes us blind, not letting us notice the most important things. Starting with love. When love is all we need. 
We have all the means necessary for all of us to be living a full life, mentally and financially. But something has gone wrong along the way, and I am finding it hard to point out what exactly because the list is too long. While major agricultural corporations are growing, the struggle of the small farmer grows along.

“Most of the world poor are farmers; they lack access to tools and knowledge. The good news is that humanity actually solved the problem of agricultural poverty a century ago. In theory. Therefore, ending poverty is simply a matter of delivering proven goods and services to people”.

In fact, there is no one else that we are hurting except our own selves. Except for our own future generations. Generations that will keep living in blindness and lack of awareness. The problem of the poor is the problem of all human race and we all can make a little change to a better world together. We simply have to want it.

“Hunger and extreme poverty curb human potential in every possible way. We see ourselves as a thinking, feeling and moral human race, but until we solve those problems for all of our members, we fail that standard, because of every person on this planet matters”.

With Love,

Yana

 

The Power of Manifestation and Law of Attraction

“A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks he becomes”. 
-Gandhi

I believe the fact that I started reading self-development books and connected to my spiritual side at a very young age, served as a great guide for me throughout the obstacles that came along my way. The power of faith gave me the strength to convert obstacles into illusions. Giving me the ability to live as fully as possible, at any given circumstances. Nevertheless, the learning process is still going and I trust will never end.

I often witness people noticing my happy and positive approach to things and ask me, how am I so happy most of the time. Once, after a long deep conversation, where I exposed my weaknesses and concerns, a friend of mine said, “I have never seen you like this, you are actually human”.

This is obviously too funny. Yes, I am human. Moreover, yes, I have anxiety and a million things to be concerned about. In spite of that, I choose my approach to what comes along my way.

“Be thankful for what you have, you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never ever have enough”.– Oprah Winfrey

There isn’t a perfect way or an answer, but there is one strong thing that people know all over the world, and many of them implement it. The power of manifestation and the law of attraction.

“Keep your thoughts positive, because your thoughts become your words.

Keep your words positive, because your words become your behaviors.

Keep your behaviors positive, because your behaviors become your habits.

Keep your habits positive, because your habits become your values.

Keep your values positive, because your values become your destiny”.
-Gandhi

The power of visualization and manifestation are tools that exist within each one of us and we can use them daily. Whether we do it or not, it is our aware choice in every given situation. I believe we can manifest anything we want. Our thoughts create the vibration in which we live and we are able to manifest what whom we attract to our lives.

See the things that you want as already yours. Know that they will come to you in need. Then let them come. Don’t fret and worry about them. Don’t think about your lack of them. Think of them as yours, as belonging to you, as already in your possession. – Robert Collie

 

With Love,

Yana

Racial Unity

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.”
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Let me ask you a question. What makes my white skin better than my friend’s black skin?
Allow me to answer this question. Nothing.
The difference is only in one thing. The way people are programmed to think. I highlight the phrase programmed to think, not born to think, or think naturally. A child is like a Plasticine. A new born baby can be shaped into a million versions of self, brought up in so many ways and taught to believe in so many different things, take so many life directions and become many different versions of self. Depending on what he has been taught.

“People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Along with that, it is important to highlight that sociologists do not offer a clear answer to the question of what influences us more, our genes or our environment. The discussion about what does shape and affect our personality and way of thinking remains lacking a concrete answer and there are many opinions in regarding this question. I would add, that from my personal life experience, in the past 9 years while I lived in four different countries, the variety of social set-ups, consistency, and structure, helped me to shape the person that I have become and served as a guiding line in being able to finalize a self-identity in which I fully found myself. Nevertheless, I will add, that for a long time I was observing the details of different lives, societies, religions and cultures layouts, which I am thankful I had the ability and the opportunity to do, in order to build a more clear picture in my head and understand where do I belong and how do I identify myself. But of course, the journey is endless.

I wrote in the past about ego, and how it destroys us. Here is an abstract from one of my previous posts.

•  The ego is an enemy. Kindness is a friend.

When I first realized that there is a thing that lives in us called ego, I did not completely understand how destructive it is for us, and how much work it takes to eliminate it from our minds. I am not even sure if it can be ever all gone, but it can definitely be placed in a very strict control. I find ego one of the biggest enemies of a person, of all relationships and one of the main reasons for conflicts in interaction in between people. I taught myself to put kindness in the first place, put ego as far as possible from my mind and let the kindness be my best friend and lead.
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you are already in heaven now”. Jack Kerouac

From the post “26 lessons I learned by the age of 26”.

Today I want to add about the best friend of the Ego. Named, Ignorance.
Together they form a dangerous combination, a combination that blurs the mind of a person and does not allow clear thinking. 
A lot of racism, lack of tolerance to the other and hatred has its source in the ego of the ignorant human who believes in being better than the other, chosen or of a higher and social group.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that”. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Baha’i Faith, the world’s newest independent global belief system, teaches the oneness of God, the unity of humanity and the essential harmony of religion.

Baha’is believe in peace, justice, love, altruism, and unity. The Baha’i teachings promote the agreement of science and religion, the equality of the sexes and the elimination of all prejudice and racism.

“We spend our lives trying to unlock the mystery of the universe, but there was a Turkish prisoner, Baha’u’llah, in Akka, Palestine who had the key”.  
Leo Tolstoy

“From the Jewish ideal of treating the stranger as one of our own, to Christ’s appeal to care for even people whose differences we believe should cause us to despise them, to Muhammad’s insistence that we were put upon this earth in all our human diversity that we may know and not despise each other. These founders of the world’s great Faiths have offered us the same essential message”. Maya Bohnhoff, a Baha’i and a New York Times bestselling author.

“And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

With Love,

Yana

Fears, Frames and how Traveling Expands our Minds

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
G.K. Chesterton

A recent article I read in a traveling blog about a trip of an American young man, who traveled from Japan to Nigeria, highlighting how radically different were both destinations and how risky was his trip to Lagos.

An expansion. The constant feeling of an expanding mind is what I kept feeling from the age of 18 when I left home and living with my parents. At first, I didn’t really understand what was it that was happening to me. It felt similar to finding an answer to a question you wondered about for a long time. It felt as I was reading every day a new page of the book of life, which is a special treasure that not everybody finds but only those who are courageous enough to come outside of their comfort zone and not run back to safety.

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Henry Miller

I grew up in a small city, where not much was happening. A small amount of population, same roads, same people who grow up together and mostly end up marrying each other. In places like that, as a rule, the mindset is quite close, there are many rules and a lot of talking, what creates many fears. As well, there is a lot of comfort and many safe zones, what makes it scarier for most people to make a move.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

Did I fit it? I believe that I have always had an ability to adjust quite quickly and easily, and never complain. Only with the years after living in different countries, I learned to distinguish between the feeling of adjusting and being happy and the feeling of truly belonging and being happy.

We moved to Israel from Russia when I was 6 years old, and that was adjustment number one. It was hard at first, but I learned the language and lived quietly. At the age of 18, from a small city, I moved to Moscow. That is when the expansion started. For the first years, it was overwhelming me daily, it was as if my mind was growing wider and wider in the understanding of the world. After five years in Moscow, I intuitively kept moving from country to country without even knowing where I was going, I just knew I can’t stop, until I found home and then I found myself and peace.

“Travel far enough, you will meet yourself.”
David Mitchell

One of the main things that I have learned is how many limitations we impose on ourselves, which derives out of nothing but fear. Us, the people, we judge out of ignorance, we set frames and limitations out of lack of knowledge. We choose without asking for options. We decide without thinking, we follow without stopping to ask. We live without wondering.

The best thing that I have done in my life is traveling. I compare life to a book. Living in one place, inside of the rules of one culture and sometimes one religion is reading only one page of the book. It not only limits our mind but also takes away from us the ability to ever live to the fullest of our potential. The more we learn and see, we unlock new levels of self-awareness what completely changes our views on life, cultures, religions, spirituality, politics, fears, frames and most importantly – on ourselves.

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Gustave Flaubert

 

With Love,

Yana

The Mind that Knew the Truth-James Baldwin

It is hard to find the right words to describe my admiration to James Baldwin’s approach and way of thinking. His voice and speeches are magnetizing. He had the ability to see the picture clearly when at the same time managing to stay entirely objective and open the mind of his listener. James was everything that our society did not want him to be. 
A black, gay, wise man.

“I am saying that a journey is called that because you can’t know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find or what you find will do to you”.

The 40’s in America, segregation touches everything and everyone.  James understood things that most people didn’t and still don’t. “When you ask your questions, you begin to know more about what you think”. People do not stop to ask, to wonder and decide whether what they are doing is moral, whether they are treating a certain person right, and whether they are taking advantage of their power.

“I have been taken in hand by a young white schoolteacher, named Bill Miller, a beautiful woman, very important to me. She gave me books to read and talked to me about the books and about the world, about Ethiopia, and Italy and the German third Reich, and took me to see plays and films to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year-old boy. It is certainly because of Bill Miller who arrived in my terrifying life so soon that I never really managed to hate white people…
Therefore I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason”.

Why did the white man have a need to create segregation? To feel stronger and higher because he couldn’t be high enough on his own without creating an illusion of a race lower than his own?
Why does schoolchild find himself a victim to beat and humiliate? Is it to make oneself look stronger and braver because he is not confident enough in his own skin? Or because he can’t seem and feel strong enough without having a victim who will be “lower” than him? 
Colonialism accompanied by greedy leaders created a story for the people to believe in, and they did. In fact, they still do.

“There are days, when you wonder, what your role is in this country and what your future in it is. How precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how we are going to communicate to the vast unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here and terrified…”

“If we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles, if we had in fact in your mind a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles or the Irish or any white man in the world says ‘Give me liberty, or give me death’ the entire white world applauds, when a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged criminal and treated like one”.

With Love,

Yana

The Herd Instinct

Herd behavior describes how individuals in a group can act collectively without centralized direction.

A few days ago, I read an essay by a Harvard Professor, Elizabeth Lunbeck, about how cultivated individuals can become barbarians in a crowd. I often observe situations in which what looks different to the crowd and the masses are not being accepted and welcomed by the society. It is a heart-breaking fact that most people are not ready to embrace new approaches and knowledge different to those they have already been taught. It is as if humanity enjoys programming itself and forcing one’s brain to stay close-minded no willing to understand that knowledge is the strongest armor.

“In Group Psychology, Freud asks why crowds make a ‘barbarian’ of the ‘cultivated individual’. Why are the inhibitions enforced by social life so readily overwhelmed by all that is ‘cruel, brutal and destructive’ when we join together with others? And why does the crowd need a strong leader, a hero to whom it willingly submits? The crowd – which is, after all, just an evanescent massing of humanity, a gathering that will quickly disperse once its task is finished – is oddly ‘obedient to authority’. It might appear anarchic, but at the bottom, it’s conservative and tradition-bound.”

Freud raises a very significant question when talking about the need in obeying an authority. To which theory the former Soviet Union can serve as a great example, along with a more radical example, sadly enough still existing in our days, which is North Korea. 
A very significant part is the fact of how easy it is to manipulate a human’s brain. A person does what one is taught to do. A person follows what one is taught to follow and a person obeys those who he is told, to obey.

Because of these processes, derives another fact, which I find even more radical and significant. The lack of ability and will, to release oneself from the chains of being obedient to an authority, even when it stops to exist. Which is a very noticeable thing in contemporary Russia, where a vast amount of its population is not willing to live without being told what to do or live without a higher power. Even over twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Nothing threatens a corrupt system more than a free mind.” Suzy Kassem

 

With Love,

Yana

Benny Harlem, Creativity and the Human Nature

‘The only way for me to protect her for life is to prepare her for life’

Benny Harlem and his six years old daughter Jaxyn are a true inspiration of a father-daughter relationship, of a creative duo, and even more than that, they are sending an important social message to the world.

‘Parents continuously grow if we pay attention to our children’s Godly Sunlight’

Benny Harlem is an artist, producer and now also known as a Guinness world record holder with the highest hair top fade.

It all started one day from simply posting a picture on Instagram. Very soon, their images became known worldwide. However, the most important message, behind the art and the exceptional example of fatherhood is a powerful social message, which Benny is delivering through his creativity.

‘My only concern of my daughter is the nobility of her character.
I teach her to demand respect’

In his images, there is a big accent on the social questions of race, equality and the memory of the history of slavery. The history of black people is the history of America. No matter how many changes there will be and how many years and decades will pass.

At first sight, I found Benny’s images radically different, powerful and meaningful. I admired him and his little daughter Jaxyn from the first moment. The account kept growing, and Benny’s mission started touching more and more people. Through his work, he delivers messages of healing, strength, respect, and love.

However, not all people see the good in kindness. It is the basics of human nature. Anything and anyone will have an opponent. What moved me the most to share this article about Benny and Jaxyn, except of the inspiration and creativity their work brings, is the fact that these two people, spreading nothing but peace, love, respect, and strength, are getting threats with racist messages, saying “You will not make America Africa!”. Moreover, saying that slavery has finished a long time ago, so it is time to forget along with insulting Benny and his child. 
Why hatred has such a deep place in the heart of the sender? How can his hatred to the different from him, be stronger than his ability to love?

Will America ever be Africa? I don’t think so. Did Africans move to America voluntarily? 
I don’t think so.

This subject is endless and painful. Painful to think how much weakness and lack of ability to accept each other and live in peace there is. It is us, the people who decide what our lives among each other will look like. History is there to be remembered and respected but not to be repeated. 
Otherwise, what have we learned and where have we moved?

‘She’s a beautiful girl who’s gonna be a pretty woman, but I teach her to love herself first’

With Love,

Yana

The man who spoke with words of magic and color –Fred Hampton

“Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. If you don’t struggle, damn it, you don’t deserve to win!”. -Fred Hampton

I find it hard to tell the story of Fred in words, in a text of any length or in any other way at all. He was only 21 when he was murdered but the revolution he did along with others, non-less significant, left a big impact forever. 
I believe that as every revolutionary, he knew that doing what he was doing, every day might be his last, but he also knew he was on a mission he couldn’t stop.

“I believe I’m going to die doing the things I was born to do. I believe I’m going to die high off the people. I believe I’m going to die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle.” Fred Hampton

The Black Panther Party was a revolutionary Black Nationalist and socialist organization and was founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in October 1966, to which Fred Hampton joined in 1968.

Even though Fred wasn’t the first one to start the Black Panther Party, he had a fascinating ability to attract the audience. The speeches would come out of his mouth as a flowing river of words. Making every listener feel as every word Fred said referred directly to him. Hampton’s organizing skills, substantial oratorical gifts, and personal charisma allowed him to rise quickly in the Black Panthers.

 “We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too”.

Fred Hampton was murdered on the 3rd of December 1969 in his sleep after a sleeping drug was slipped into his drink.  

As well as Martin Luther King, Fred had a nonviolent approach throughout all his journey as a revolutionary. 

“You don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We’re not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism. We’re gonna fight capitalism with socialism. Socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself”. 

Fred never wanted the people to see him as a person holding a higher position than they do or having a different struggle. He was one of the people, acting for the people.

“I am the people, I’m not the pig. You got to make a distinction. And the people are going to have to attack the pigs. The people are going to have to stand up against the pigs. That’s what the Panthers is doing, that’s what the Panthers are doing all over the world”.

“You don’t fight racism with racism. You fight racism with unity”.

“Let me just say: Peace to you, if you’re willing to fight for it.”
Fred Hampton

Fred Hampton: “You Can Jail A Revolutionary, But You Can’t Jail A Revolution”.

Watch him here:

Outtake from the 1971 documentary film 'The Murder of Fred Hampton', featuring an excerpt from a speech by Brother Fred Hampton, in which he emphasizes his political views and priorities. Brother Hampton was deputy chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party and was killed in his apartment on December 4th 1969 by the KKK aka FBI and the Chicago Police Department.

 

With Love,

Yana

How to Love

What is love? The greatest mysteries of them all. The greatest and the deepest feeling we experience towards another person. The feeling that makes us expose ourselves completely, show our naked soul and make another person the guardian of our heart.

Thich Nhat Nanh, the legendary Buddhist said, “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen”.

“When you love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help him to suffer less. This is an art. If you don’t understand the roots of his suffering, you can’t help, just as a doctor can’t help heal your illness if she doesn’t know the cause. You need to understand the cause of your loved one’s suffering in order to help bring relief”.

 “The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same”.

 What is it exactly that awakens in us when we experience love and how do we sense it? Does love at first sight exist? I believe it does. Whether it is possible or not, life is a journey of learning. A journey in which we may sometimes run into the fire, overwhelmed with feelings, following our intuition, we are capable of hurting ourselves doing that, as well as cause confusion and scare the other person. Life is a journey in which we search for ourselves, for our significant other, and our home.

 Thich Nhat Nahn describes in his teachings the relation between a home and our significant other.
“Every one of us is trying to find our true home. Some of us are still searching. Our home is inside, but it’s also in our loved ones around us. When you are in a loving relationship, you and the other person can be a true home for each other. In Vietnamese, the nickname for a person’s life partner is “my home”. If a guest said to the woman, “That meal is delicious, who cooked it?” she might answer, “My home prepared the meal”, meaning, “My husband cooked the dinner”.

 Thich Nhat Nanh also teaches us about recognizing true love.
“True love gives us beauty, freshness, solidity, freedom, and peace. True love includes a feeling of deep joy that we are alive. If we don’t feel this way when we feel love, then it’s not true love”.

 Sometimes we fall into emotions so deeply, that we lose ourselves, we stop considering our own selves, we don’t see anything beyond the emotional barrier we are trapped in and feel that the world can’t exist for a single minute without that person close to us. We stop being ourselves, our own true inner person stops to exist because of our emotions. This kind of experience can teach us a lot about ourselves and about love. The importance to keep being ourselves and not forget to give our partner his own freedom is highly crucial.

 Thich Nhat Nanh talks about sharing the same aspiration:
“In a relationship, when you and your partner share the same kind of aspiration, you become one, and you become an instrument of love and peace in the world. You begin as a community of two people, and then you can grow your community. We share everything, but we still have our freedom intact. Love is not a kind of prison. True love gives us a lot of space”.

 Nhat Nanh teaches about the difference of a true love and deep infatuation. Which is a strong reminder of how important it is to learn to love ourselves first before we love another person.

 “Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering. When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person”.

 On this note, I wish us all to find true love and keep enjoying this beautiful journey of life.

 You can read more of Nhat Nanh’s teachings in his book “How to love”.

With Love,

Yana