I would like to contribute this post to Julien Blanc, a guy who influenced very much of what I decided to focus on in my life, and even lead me to this path of writing articles greatly inspired by his work.
His Story
Julien's story is a VERY unique, he is coming from a Swiss village, where he grew up as a shy and introverted boy.
He was a very good student and went for a prestigue university to attain a solid, laid down path-to-success. He says he hated every day of it. He would wake up, and immediately think about how to go throughout the day as rapidly as possible, slacking off on classes, and mostly watching movies for the end of the day.
Obviously, this was not his truest passion. He was really into music since he discovered it, and loved to play and practice guitar. He would fantasize about creating amazing songs, becoming a famous rock-star, and living a life of artist.
After a while, he decided to change the path of his promising life and "burn the boats" by dropping out of his college, picking up his guitar, taking $5k with him and flying out to LA, without a plan, with a vague goal of becoming a rock-star.
However, he never became one, but in the meantime, he discovered pickup, which is cold-approaching girls and getting as much reference experiences in order to get better and build yourself into a pimp.
Seeing his huge potential, Owen Cook, Co-founder of RSD, decided to hire Julien as his assistent. RSD is one of the leading international dating advice companies that hold seminars around the world and make extensive programs on how to approach and date girls.
This was a real treat for Julien, and while it was a very tough job with dense schedule, it was more fullfiling to him than going down the classic path of success. After Julien proved his exellence, Owen decided to make him a new instructor for RSD, holding his own seminars, writing his own programs, teaching his own audience.
This was maybe not the same as being a rockstar, but there is a great intimate connection between the two. Julien wanted to express himself by composing his music, which was now a creation of his own content, he wanted to make concerts, which was now translated into holding seminars.
And recording the videos, editing them and uploading on youtube, and making programs is analogy to recording songs and selling his albums.
This job really fullfiled his needs of being an artist.
His brand was increasing, and he was one of the best in this field, but this didn't make him stop. On the contrary, Julien started to get greedy, pushing his marketing by shocking the audience, publishing offensive humour on his twitter account, etc.
He had it all. According to any man's standard, there was nothing more he ever needed. He had the money, he had friends, he had all the girls he wanted, he was getting cheered on for it, he traveled as much as he wanted. He was really slaying it.
Falling From The Sky
His pushing of marketing went a little bit too far, making him exposed to the wider audience, and starting to get attacked massively by media. It was very controversial, and he was soon reffered to as "The most hated man in the world." He was even denied entry to Australia, United Kingdom and Singapore. He got invited on CNN to give an interview on all this. It was just a catastrophe.
His fame slowly started to decline, he started to lose a lot of money for the charges, many friends have given up the friendships, he was just doomed and slowly started hitting the rock bottom. Everything he had was now taken away from him. He felt in despair, he felt worthless.
This happened, as he teaches it so perfectly now, because of the fact that he tried to build up his self-image and get all of the external things, which he did, but he never really got to the cause issue. He tried to compensate for his disowned parts, by building up his ego with the external stuff.
Now, this doesn't mean that he shouldn't have get immersed in this journey, or that pursuing success is bad. This just means that placing your whole self-worth on external circumstances, fame, success, sex and money is not so smart to do as it turns out.
Going Full Circle
Julien soon made a leap, and let go of these things that kept running him. After he let go of everything, he experienced a satori moment and realize that he's enough just the way he is. He started to delve more into self-help and spiritual books, and practiced a lot of inner work with his energy coach. He learned about past traumas and the pattern that has been running him his whole life.
His pattern was a self-destructive artist. He would build his art, perfect it, make success with it, and then make some move and let it all just collapse, so that he could make it all again, from scratch. This pattern almost costed him life, but it was his greatest lesson and made him go down a completely different path.
The path of digging down through the layers of resistance and showing people that that's the real change we're all after. We always seek tools, and external solutions and enancement, before we ever took effort to take a look if something's wrong about our own being.
Julien built his own brand, JulienHimself and started to teach self-help and life-enrichment content. Roughly a year ago, he made a program on this, Transformation Mastery, which I already mentioned on my introductory post.
This was the greatest leap of investment I made, and I really recommend it to anyone who wants to get themselves in order from all of the horrible things that happened to them, and finally start to live a free life.
Julien now makes Transformation Mastery Live events around the world, where he teaches this stuff, but also goes straight to the deep work, triggers people with his guided meditations, which follows with releasing and healing of traumas. A lot of times, people just got overwhelmed, while screaming and crying themselves out, all the way.
You can see this in one of his videos, where it literally looks like exorcism.
FREETOUR
Prior to his Transformation Mastery Live events, he gives a freetour, which is a free event where he mostly discusses about this stuff and gives you out useful information about how all of this is running you. It doesn't get much practical, but you can learn a lot and write down some useful questions that you can answer at home, getting a great insights about your own life.
The last Freetour and TM Live event was in Zürich, Switzerland, where me and my girlfriend decided to go one day and visit, while checking out the freetour. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn't have enough money to attend the main event.
We agreed to spend a day there, visiting the city and then going to the seminar at 6pm, so we decided to buy the bus tickets, and go on to 11+hr ride during the night.
We slept as much as we could, although she used all of the space and comfort from me :/
Zürich is a nice, both peaceful AND paceful place with lots of nature but also modern life. I believe it's a great city to live in and it holds a great, high standard, which explains the fact that it's hard to find a man not wearing a suit. I would like to give you more information, but that really bores me and I don't know what to write about it, so it would make a shitty content, sorry.
But here are some pics instead:
We tried a Swiss chocolate, and there really is a different, more rich flavour to it than with the regular ones you buy at the super-market.
6PM was approaching, and while we started to head towards the location, I was really curious about how it's going to unfold, how the beggining tension will be breaked. I was really excited before even getting there.
We got into the seminar room, the clock ticked, Julien was announced by his assistent, and he got in from the back of the room. It was an amazing feeling to finally see someone who you look up to so much, live, in front of you, walking on his legs, you might know what I'm talking about..
People stood up and cheered him on with a powerful scream and applouse.
Audience was not so loose to begin with, and I was suprised to sense some tension in his speech and jokes. Maybe I was wrong, but perhaps it just shows the fact that none of us are immune to being under a bit of pressure in front of other people.
Only thing that may discern us is how we react to that pressure. Do we take it in and acknowledge it, embrace it, or do we go in our heads thinking about how we should not have that pressure and feeling bad for having it.
We can't change our spontaneous reactions to the external environment, but we CAN change the attitude towards that reaction which spontaneously emerges. That was the thing he hammered a lot on, and with a reason.
Emotions are like waves, going up and down all the time. And the reason why for some people they stay down a lot is because they're not fully acknowledging the downsides.
When they're happy, everything's good and nice, but when the course of emotions takes its way down, we're not content with our emotions anymore, that is, we do not feel them and instead, create a resistance towards really experiencing them.
But with this resistance comes the payoff. "What you resist, persists!"
No emotion wants to eternally stay with you, because then emotions would not make any sense to us. They come, and they go, just like people in your life. It's important to realize that they're not defining who you are, but they simply provide you with useful data which can be read only after you've surrendered to the emotion.
Here am I, telling you this, but soon I was getting paranoid about raising my hand and asking Julein a question. I'm uncomfortable with public speaking and putting myself out there, but I wanted to ask him some unique question to me. I started to sweat, hearing my heartrate through my ears, my stomach twisting, throat tightening, even my head was feeling in pressure.
I was thinkng that if I raise my hand to ask a question, I will just lose my mind in the mid-sentance and embarrass myself to the death. But after a while, I thought well, this is the seminar where everything should be accepted, if not, I will just make everybody into a good laughter. During all this time, I really sat down with my triggered sensations and felt them, I was facing them but they kept intesifying, then I would keep feeling.
After refolmulating a question in my head 174th time, I finally decided to raise my hand. I was not picked right on, but I kept raising while appropriate times would come. Finally, he pointed to me. To my fascination, I was able to project the question clearly and consicely. After he gave an answer to me, I thought, Holy shit, I was having a dialogue with him!
It felt so good when I did it, and suddenly I started to care way less about what others would think of me, I realized that the point is not in managing every single detail about yourself and there is no right way to be "you." My sensations cleared up, and only so because I acted in accordance to my wants, despite my acknowledged fear.
We concluded a seminar with a powerful exercise. We would have to stand up, and scream, jump, laugh and throw ourselves around for the next 30 seconds. People unleashed so much energy during this, and for me it was really a relief doing this. After the 30 seconds, everything felt lighter and I felt really good in my skin. It felt freeing and really fueled us up with energy.
I was really satisfied with the event, it lasted for about 3 hours, and I made a few insightful notes that I will share with you here on my blog.
The seminar was held on 13th of April, and ever since that day, I keep reflecting on it and always find something valuable to think about. It imprinted on me a great and lasting memory and convinced me that I need to go to his main event next year!
I guess that the main message of this post was to encourage people to go after what they find valuable, even if it requires 23 hours of traveling!
FOLLOW and stay tuned!