Traveling Insights: An Inside Perspective

It's been a while since I've posted here. I'll admit it's been hard to keep up with all the traveling I've been doing this summer, both for work and for plesure. I'll be dividing what I write accordingly between this blog for pleasure and my business blog with Mezclada. As I write this, I'm sitting in a plane on my wya to Lyon, France. Soemthign I could never have anticipated.  Today I want to take you back to July 20th-24th for the Neo Kizomba Festival in Austin, Texas. My first ever dance festival of its kind, and to be honest, my first rela formal introduction to kizomba, a dance with roots in Africa that was later popularized in the 80s in France.  Most readers at this point probably know that I'm a fan of dancing. So investing in a festival such as this one seemed like a natural next step to take my dancing to the next level. Little did I know that I would find myself dancing in the pool, awake until 1 a.m., and comforted by how much Spanish I hear...

El martes pasado me desperté con una sensación de pesadez al darme cuenta que el tiempo que me quedaba de mi viaje a Costa Rica había llegado a su fin. Hasta ahora, me había ido bastante bien manejando mis emociones. El año pasado, fueron dos semanas completas antes de mi partida que lloré incontrolablemente. En momentos aleatorios a lo largo del día, me encontraba rompiendo a llorar, pensando en el futuro y que no sería el mismo. Este año, realmente no me golpeó hasta unos días antes. Dejé de empacar hasta la noche anterior a mi vuelo, sin querer enfrentar la realidad de que en poco más de 24 horas me encontraría en un lugar mucho más fresco donde no podría simplemente ponerme una camiseta sin mangas y comenzar con mi día. Estoy escribiendo hoy en mi blog personal en lugar de para Mezclada, donde he estado escribiendo sobre mis experiencias durante los últimos meses, pero principalmente desde la perspectiva de la educación financiera y la atención plena. La razón es que el tema de ho...

Last Tuesday I woke up with a feeling of heaviness, realizing that the time I had left during my trip to Costa Rica had come to a close. Up to now, I had been doing pretty well handling my emotions. Last year, it was a full two weeks prior to my departure that I cried uncontrollably. In random moments throughout the day, I would find myself bursting into tears, thinking about the future and it not being the same. This year, it didn’t really hit me until a few days prior. I pushed off packing until the night before my flight, not wanting to face the reality that within a little more than 24 hours I’d find myself in a much cooler place where I couldn’t just throw on a tank top and get started with my day.  I’m writing today on my personal blog instead of for Mezclada, where I’ve been writing about my experiences for the last several months, but mostly from the perspective of financial literacy and mindfulness. The reason is that today’s topic, which it has a lot to do with mindfulne...

Sometimes the most wonderful things can happen when your plans change. I've been writing about my travels in Costa Rica for the past several weeks as part of my 60-day financial fitness challenge through my business, Mezclada, and feel like the way that my mindset has shifted over the course of the past 50 days or so is quite remarkable. I was writing on the beach this morning, taking down all the notes of seeds that have been planted since I arrived in Santa Teresa at the beginning of January, and had one big takeaway that I felt was worth writing about here and publishing to share with others. It doesn't matter if you have $10,000 coming in every month if you can't take off at 4 p.m. to go use the sauna.  I say this because I've set a goal to earn 10K/mo. through Mezclada and my consulting work. But I realized that where I'm living, the people I'm surrounded by, and the activities I get to engage in on a daily basis are worth that much if not more. I'd mu...

Cualquiera que haya escuchado una entrevista con Nilda Chiaraviglio ha oído hablar de la idea de que el universo siempre se comunica con nosotros. Ya sea un mensaje de una película, algo que escuchamos en una conversación a nuestro lado, el título de un libro que se destaca entre todas las novelas en un estante... siempre estamos en este divertido intercambio energético con las cosas que nos rodean. De hecho, la física cuántica nos dice que todo se mueve, todo el tiempo. Las partículas de los objetos aparentemente concretos y sólidos están, de hecho, vibrando a una frecuencia tan baja que para nosotros es imperceptible. Hay tantas maneras en que podemos captar estos mensajes, consciente o inconscientemente. Algunas personas interpretan sus sueños. Otros rezan. Y otros piden la guía de los árboles y la naturaleza. Y luego... respiramos hondo y esperamos. Creo que escuchar requiere un cierto nivel de agudeza. Algunas personas lo llamarían intuición, otros podrían llamarlo apertura o pres...

Anyone who's listened to an interview with Nilda Chiaraviglio has heard of the idea that the universe is always communicating with us. Whether it's a message from a movie, something we overhear in a conversation next to us, the title of a book that stands out among all of the novels on a shelf...we are always in this funky energetic exchange with the things around us. Indeed, quantum physics tells us that everything is moving, all the time. The particles of objects that are seemingly concrete and solid are, in fact, vibrating at such a low frequency that to us it's imperceptible. There are so many ways we can pick up on these messages, consciously or unconsciously. Some people interpret their dreams. Others pray. And others ask for guidance from the trees and nature. And then...we take a deep breath and wait.  I think that listening requires a certain level of acuity. Some people would call it intuition, others might call it openness, or paying attention. And what's coo...