Codex Vitae 2017

This Codex Vitae, or “book of life”, is a collection of beliefs and values that inform my decisions and life. It is a living and instropective document; as my understanding changes, so do my beliefs. The main purpose of this document is to (1) pull my beliefs into the light where I can questions them more effectively and (2) to share philosophies, concepts, tools, and inspiration that have been helpful to me.
This work is freely inspired from the one of my friend Yoann Lopez. Go read him, he does amazing stuff.

Contents

How to Use This Codex

Meta-beliefs

Principles

Things I No Longer Believe

Fears

Self-care

• Productivity
• Food
• Physical Fitness
• Intoxicants
• Mental and Emotional Wellness
• Relationships

Material World

• Money and Consumerism

Work

• Career
• Learning
• Passion Projects

Adventure

Philosophy

• Society
• Politics

Influences

• Concepts
• Books
• Quotations and Sayings
• Inspirational Lives

Predictions

How to Use This Codex

This is not a prescription for how you should live your own life. But feel free to copy the structure of this page and create your own!

My own goals with this:

→ Develop a habit of using the Codex as a tool to examine my beliefs and values.

→ Increase my self awareness and my self-esteeme

→ Create a new version every year to be able to follow and acknowledge my evolution year by year.

→ Expect beliefs and tactics to change — don’t hold on to anything too rigidly

→ Push myslef forward to break rules and my thoughts patterns.

Meta-beliefs

> Beliefs about beliefs.

• We should seek for a ballance between intuition and rational feelings as both are as important.
• When some beliefs are not our owns, we feel bothered when they are at stake and we instinctively reject every debate about them. This is how we can recognize and destroy them and settle our own ones isntead.
• Questioning others beliefs is extremely important to remain free and to evolve. But we have more to learn about questioning our own beliefs.
• I tend to agree with some principles/practices even though I don’t truly understand them because I feel that some parts of them are true even though the explanation does not really fit with my thoughts patterns. I tend to think about it later and try to use this new point of view to understand and accept more things behaviours and thoughts untill making it part of my own thoughts patterns or rejecting it radically.
• Most of the concept I believe in are concept that I found spiritually, intuitionally and experience based. Though, I need to understand every step of it as clearly and methodogically as possible.
• I tend to make a belief mine when I have experienced it, before that, the belief is potentially mine, I often put it at stake to test its resistance.
• Few of my beliefs are born from myslef: I feed myself with others’ beliefs.

Principles

> Fundamentals that guide my life.

• Emotion and Intuition — the strongest feelings I have experienced were the results of emotional and intuitional decisions, in the worst as in the best.

• Openness to experience — The YES MAN project is my way of life. It has led me to incredible places, people and situations. It has also helped overcome fears and got my ambition and opportunities wider. And I am deemply convinced it is just a start.

• Curiosity — Be curious, try and learn about a lot of very diverse things. This is the way to grow one’s mind and feed creativity and ambition.

• Interconnectedness — I am aware that everything is connected but I need to confide more in the postiveness of this interconnection. Things are not made to be harmful to anyone, so they won’t be for me.

• Love is above everything but does not justify everything.

• Fear — when you are afraid of doing something, of feeling something, jump into it, it means that you have a lot to loose or a lot to win. That makes your life rich of intense feeling. Otherwise, you are not taking risks but your life just has the intensity of a flat encephalogram.

• Growing — Immobilty is a choice. Choose the stairs instead and keep climbing faster and faster. This does not mean you should not have the kid inside you being part of the journey. But just keep the best of it and what you need from it for now.

Things I No Longer Believe

> These are things I have changed my mind about.

• Monogamy and sexual orientations are a lie. It is the result of religions brain washing that is now deeply inked in thoughts patterns. Our race is polygam and bisexual. Even if I am aware of it, I still live and think myself as a monogam and heterosexual person.

• Love is not equally shared. We are not all able of the same kind of love.

Fears

> This is a list of fears that I am continually working on. I try to understand what’s at the root of these fears and what beliefs or practices I can develop to know that things are going to be okay. Because, in a very broad sense, things are going to be okay.

• Not having enough money which would force me into thinking of winning more of it in every action and decision I would make.

→ Compensating aspiration: reach financial independence and make a leaving of what I love.

• Being “to much” or “not enough”

→ Compensating aspiration: internalise the fact that people will accept me as I am and will love and respect me even more for each time I am out of the box.

• Expressing my thoughts and feelings fully when it seems risky

→ Compensating aspiration: try with baby steps to express what I can. Think about I forgot and go and tell it to the other.

• Having my heart broken even though I have always learnt a lot and I have never regreted.
• Not being loved

→ Compensating aspiration: being true and honest with other and with myself. Love them as honestly as possible without any restriction. Not underestimate myself and overestimate the other.

• Not being financially independent

→ Compensating aspiration: Save more money, spend less on useless stuff

• Body insecutity: I fear to become fat, to no longer fit with the beauty standards and being rejected, notably in couple relationships, because of it.

→ Compensating aspiration: suceed in really don’t giving a f*** of beauty diktats. Overcome such superficial thoughts. Accept my body and all its changes with love and compasion. Build a body I am confortable in thanks to a better diet and sports.

• Not achieving my dreams because of lack of self-esteem.
• Being pregnant, notably for all the damages it could have on my body
• High speed

Self-care

Productivity

Beliefs

• Productivity is about focus even if you can focus only 10 minutes on something you need to be focused.
• Daily procrastination is an enemy. It reaches you very easily and it’s really hard to escape from it. It is part of self disciplne.
• I am not a productive person.
• I do believe that there are as many daily organisation systems as people. Advices and ideas are worth to be listened and read but they should only inspire us. Unfortunately, this system can only be built on the go and will change as our life will evolve (country, job, activities,…).
• Doing is always better than saying.
• We can train our productivity thanks to our self-discipline. Very often, disciplined people are very productive and very productive people are very disciplined.
• Lack of productivity is a significant source of creativity (good news for me!)

Pre-Decisions

• Meditation is great at helping you being focus, which is fundamental for being productive
• Do breaks to reconnect with the tangible world : eat, have a talk or walk.
• Try more organisation hacks and really define what does work for me or not and why. Track it.

Aspirations

• Be better organised at work
• Find an organisation system that does not alter to much my disorganised nature as it helps me for lot of other things.

Food

Beliefs

• Diets should not be ponctual changes but a daily way of eating shaped for the needs of you own body. It must changes as does your way of living.
• Avoiding sugar and processed food is a necessity, but it is hard.
• We shouldn’t care about what others think when it comes to eating
• We should eat only what would be affordable for us when we imagine ourselves naked and alone in the jungle : roots, seeds, fruits, raw vegetables, eggs, grasses, mushrooms …
• Sugar is really addictive, but with willingness, it can be cured. We are all sick from it since we have been fed wih it since our childhood. However, you can reeducate yourself eating it less and less. But yes, it is difficult and even peinful at the begining
• Learning to dislike food you actually love (or at least no longer crave for it) is very efficient to avoid very bad food such as very sugary products : sweets, some pastries, nutella (it’s possible I swear). Instead, buy less sugary version of it to teach your body how to no longer craving for sugar.
• You have to eat for pleasure but when you try to put pleasure on hold, it’s easier to eat reasonable amount of food and to stop overeating
• A raw products based diet would solve most of the dease of the century. It would also help us to live far from all addictions and not seeking for autodestruction, conflicts and wars.

Pre-Decisions

• I don’t diet, I have my own rules that I follow and break from time to time
• Have a routine for my breakfast and scarsly cheat on it
• Try to avoid juices because there’s a lof of sugar in them
• Avoid eating meat since I have noticed its impact on my skin and my mood even if I love the taste of it. But I still eat sea food for now.
• Eat vegetables and fruits daily
• If I have to eat something quick outside, I allow myself to eat sandwiches and stuff like that without feeling guilty

Aspirations

• Avoid sugar
• Listen more and more to my body needs
• Eat more raw products
• Become a vegetarian
• Cook all my meals

Clothing and style

Beliefs

• Clothing and style reflect your personality at a peculiar moment and for a certain period.
• Spending more money on good quality is more important than quantity.
• Loving your clothes — but not in a materialist way — helps to take care of it and make them last longer. For instance, loving them for what they bring to you, what they show about you, how they make you feeling, what they are made of …
• I don’t like jewelries. I always say that people that offer me jewelries don’t know me in the better case, hate me in the worst.
• Being a white woman in a developed country does not justify that people are badly treated and paid for me to be fashionable.

Pre-Decisions

• Only buy clothes that perfectly suit me and make them made to measures. You will be surprised to discover it is cheaper than what you expect.
• I don’t wear useless accessories such as pins, jewelries and clothes without any other use than fashion like sleeveless jackets for example.
• Only buy clothes that make sense to me: I try to choose my clothes pickyly according to what they are made of, the history of the brand and where the product where made.

Aspirations

• Increase the quality of my clothes
• Buy less clothes
• Barter or buy more real vintage clothes
• Only buy and/or wear clothes that where made in the respect of working conditions and decent wage.

Physical Fitness

Beliefs

• Physical activity is key to feel good on the inside and on the outside
• We are all made for sports. You just have to find the one(s) fited for you

Pre-Decisions

• run once a week
• practice volley-ball, anyway, I feel bad if I don’t
• size every opportunity to test a new sport
• walk 6 km minimum a day

Aspirations

• Do more workout
• Run 3 times a week
• Work on my breathing

Intoxicants (Drugs, Alcohol, etc.)

Beliefs

• Some drugs have a real medical power and these ones should be depenalized
• The medical power of drugs should me taught at school
• I think that drugs as a “better life maker” is an excuse not to confront ourselves about the behaviours we force ourselves not to have, about the distance between the life we dream of and the one we actually experience and the people we would be surrounded by and the ones that are actually around us.
• Drugs seem to be a huge source of creativty

Pre-Decisions

Based on self-care, not morality.

• I love cigarettes but I know I should not touch them because of their impact on general health.
• Alcohol at a low level helps me to open my imagination and to have a deferent point of view on my introspection thoughts.
• Alcohol badly impacts my reactivity and brain awareness, even the day after I drank, even if it was just a glass of wine.

Aspirations

• Drink a bit less
• Learn more about drugs benefits and risks to feed my thinking on this topic

Mental and Emotional Wellness

Beliefs

• Loving someone and being loved is necessary to your overall health and fulfilment
• Being in a coupling relationship must not be an achievement in itself but only a part of your general achievement. Otherwise, it is insane and can only lead to insane relationships.
• I need to spend time on my own to think deeply and go over my own boundaries. It is also the only way to learn how to know you and end up by loving you. And, good news, it’s never to late to start.
• Meeting people, engaging with them in deep discussion, and discovering new cultures is the best travel you will experience.
• Positive thoughts lead to positive external mini miracles on a daily basis
• You cannot ask somebody to love you to overcome your own weakness of not being able to love you first. The relation will be insane and won’t work. Do the work first.

Pre-Decisions

• be more conscious about my feelings and others’
• be able to esteem myself: see me as I am trully as in the best as in the worst. Love every part of my complexity and feed it.

Aspirations

• Medidate on a daily basis
• I already gave up on materialism. Next step : tend toward minimalism
• Keep on travelling more and more
• Learn more about chamanism, budhism … everything that make us more connected to our spirituallity
• Keep developing my spirituallity

Relationships and People

> We are in relationship with everything — with every person we encounter, every animal, every plant, every rock, every landscape. (Everything in this section applies to all of these types of relationships, not just to couplings.)

Beliefs — General

• Acceptance
• Feelings are to be experienced in their most raw state without impacting too much the others. They are be taken into account and we must learn from them.
• Feelings are a very personal point of view. This is one of the less predictible thing and one of the hardest to explane rationally. Feeling it wholly is the best we can do.
• I can’t control others’ feelings
• Truth will set you free. — honest self expression is critical to my well-being in any relationship. This includes initiating difficult conversations when appropriate.
• We should not fear conflicts, things are always better after, even if we don’t always see it at first.
• Everyone is doing the best they can do. — No one intends to be a jerk. If they are, accept the situation as it is and decide how to move on from there. However, everybody is not able of the same honesty and goodness. Accept it and accept to receive the best the other can give, in the limits of his available stock.
• Their is no such thing as love.
• Every encounter happens for a reason — interconnection of things
• Everybody is not worth my love.

Pre-Decisions

• Accept everyone
• Love who deserve to be loved by you
• Have my emotional thoughts educated by my rational thoughts that are way more mature.
• Connect to more people of my level of maturity
• Stop feeling intimitated when it comes to meet people, even more people I admire.

Aspirations

• Honesty — with myself and others.
• Be even better as a listener
• Be better at connecting with my family and friends
• Learn how to show love for my parents and brother
• Be surrounded by more mature people taht I admire and who with I can be fully myself
• More honesty in communication: create conflicts when my limits are crossed and express it with the right words, without undermining how it affects me.
• Publish books
• Do more photographies and become better at it
• Read more books
• Go to more music concerts
• Learn more skills that would help me professionally
• Build myself a politics culture and get interested in it.
• Acknowledge happyness when it is here and experience fully every second of it.

Strangers

Beliefs

• I believe that most people are good. So when I start talking to someone or to engage in a conversation with a stranger, I tend to trust him and think of him/her as a kind person
• People don’t really care about you if they don’t know you. Therefore, it’s hard to grab someone’s attention when they don’t know you
• Strangerness is a myth. We are all connected, we all have at least one thing in common and lots to learn from each other to narrow the distance betwen each others.

Pre-Decisions

• Not letting the chance to toxic people to enter my life.
• Remain open to opportunities of new encounters.
• Go as I am, it saves time for everyone.

Aspirations

• Meet more people and integrate more of their thoughts patterns.
• It’s OK not getting along with everyone.
• Show that French are not as horrible as it is said.

Friends

Beliefs

• Friendships are true when they are a few
• Friends change as you evolve and it is sane. Letting go some of them without anger is good for everyone’s evolution.
• True friends don’t need to be reminded all the time that they’re your friends. They just know it. Even if you lose touch for a few months. If not, they’re not your friends
• Friendship is essential to our mental health as it provides us with love and support
• When a relationship with a friend becomes toxic. Just trash it. It’s not worth trying too hard

Pre-Decisions

• Accept the end of some friendships. It is for the best
• Let people know you love them. Otherwise how can they guess?

Aspirations

• See more for my friends
• Be ready to build friendships that better fit with the person I am and I will become

Partner

Beliefs

• Your partner should be your best friend
• You cannot ask somebody to love you to overcome your own weakness of not being able to love you first. The relation will be insane and won’t work. Do the work first.
• Your partner is always here to support you and you’re always here to support him/her
• Love is the place where you are wholly you in the best and the worst and where all parts of you are accepted.
• Communication, confidence and sharing as much are possible are fundamental elements of a coupling relation.
• Lie is the eyes is an atomic bomb that endangers the relation
• Equality and complementarity are key elements for the longevity of the relation

Pre-Decisions

• Follow what the universe sends you
• Listen listen listen
• Be understanding when point of views don’t align
• Do not overestimate the other
• Do not underestimate myself

Aspirations

• Give to the person who is worth receiving

Family

Beliefs

• Your family is only important to you if they are giving you love and support.
• You inherited some thoughts patterns from your family and you will have to freed from it and replace them by your owns.

Pre-Decisions

• Realise that we all have different point of view even if we’re from the same family and accept it.

Aspirations

• Do not get angry so easily
• Regain contact with some members of my family

Material World

Beliefs

• Materialism is a jail providing you from elevating yourself, notably spiritually speaking.
• Ordering and cleaning are for me a source of anxiety
• I like pets but believe they’re hard to move around so they tend to anchor you in one place
• Clean and ordered place are nicer to live in.

Pre-Decisions

• Do betterat cleaning and ordering thing and keeping as long as possible this state.
• Tidy stuff as soon as there’s a little mess
• Hire a made as soon as I have the money
• Sort my things more often : if there are less things in the house, it is less likely to be messy and to have to order it. It is also easier to tide it.

Aspirations

• Own even less stuff
• Put experiences above material possessions even higher

Money and Consumerism

Beliefs

• Money is a perverse thing. I aim at having enough but not too much as I fear it would alienate my nature.
• Money is the fuel of the developed word. Sad but true.

Pre-Decisions

• Quality-price balance is an efficient buying decision motor
• Think more than a month when you want to buy something expensive

Aspirations

• Track my spending
• Spend better and wiser
• Save and make my saving prosper

Work

Career

Beliefs

• For now, my career has been a matter of determination, luck and opportunities that I’m really grateful for
• “Career” is overrated. We are not married to a job or a company and we are not loyal to only one activity. We are diverse and so are our jobs and/ or projects that involve making money. We are multi job people, slahers. And I feel lucky to experience this.
• Sooner or later most jobs will disappear and we’ll be only good at creative things. Therefore we should nurture this and become more and more creative even if it’s not our background.
• I believe that what you did does not say much what you will do as a job. Personnalities, versatility and willingness will lead you where you want, even to places you never studied about. And again, i feel lucky to experience this era.
• Honesty, kindness, and empathy are better in the workplace than politics. Political people are toxic and kills everything
• Better to act than to overthink
• Break things and fix them later
• Always be kind and loving

Pre-Decisions

• Leave my job when it becomes an alimentary jobs to do something that really pleases me.
• Make sure that the vision of the company is in line with mine
• Do not accept to be underpaid. Search for how much I should be paid as my skills and experience evolve.

Aspirations

• Do good work that benefits the wellbeing and freedom of others and myself

Learning

Beliefs

• Consciously or not, we learn. And it is for the best :)

Pre-Decisions

• Be active in the process of learning and do not learn passively.

Aspirations

• Always have a new skill to be learning. Things I’d like to learn next: dancing, to play an instrument, Dutch, gymnastics ?
• Learn more about psychology and spiritualism

Passion Projects

Beliefs

• Writing
• Playing volley-ball
• Smile and laugh
• Art related activities

Pre-Decisions

• Don’t see any for now

Aspirations

• Achieve projects
• Turn rhe dream into a thing. It’s way more relevant and it brings way more value for everybody.

Adventure

Things I would like to do or places I’d like to visit…regardless of how unrealistic they might be.

• Chase aurora borealis and photograph it
• Photograph storms
• Meet the Dalaï Lama
• Go to India, which really frightens me today because I don’t feel strong enought to bear what I might see there and how it can deeply change me.

Philosophy

Society

Beliefs

• We’re all good, we just created such systems that add evil to the society
• Our civilization is not connected enought to the nature which make us seek for unnatural dreams such as money and glory.
• Climate change should be a Humanity priority.
• Creativity is what makes a society happy and useless as we leave in the era where everything gets robotised except creativty.

Pre-Decisions

• Always feed my creativity

Aspirations

• Improve the society through business that have a social impact
• Through my creativity, help people to freed from thoughts patterns that are not them.

Politics

Beliefs

• I believe I hate politics And I will continue to hate it until we reach a point where it’s not only about buying votes to get elected
• I believe that even if democracy is not perfect, this is the best political system.
• State should always interfere in the name of the people benefits, ignoring lobbies pressure. Easier to say than done, I know …

Pre-Decisions

• Learn more about politics
• Be able to properly know what I want and what I am voting for when come elections

Aspirations

• Influence politics through arts and mass expression

Influences

Books

• Friends
• YouTubers such as Autodisciple, le Corps la Maison l’Esprit, La Carologie, StartupFood, TedTalks…
• Startups CEO
• Social entrepreneurs
• People with a beautiful aura

Quotations and Sayings

• Chapter 6 — The Prince, Machiavelli
• “Fake it till you make it” — Oussama Amar

Inspirational Lives

People who’s lives or work inspire me in mine.

• Same as my influencers

Predictions (to be updated every year)

→ 2018

• It will be the year of the fall of ISIS
• Macron will be attacked
• Trump will be attacked
• Hopefully,t he year of ISIS fall
• Paris will experience other attacks
• A new solar system and new planets will be discovered

→ 2020

• OMG first damages are noticed
• New feminine contraception are available
• the gap between man and woman wage is narrowing

→ 2030

• We start to use alternative science to cure deadly deases and we acknowledge for it efficiency
• Better and more natural diet is promoted
• Dictatures are falling
• There no longer any genocyde perpetrated on earth.
• Crypto currencies are used in a daily basis
• Famine is solved
• Everybody on earth speaks at least 3 languages

Don’t hesitate to copy/paste my Codex Vitae to start your own!