Recently, many Instagram followers have asked if I had any reading suggestions or content recommendations to delve deeper into what I discuss in my videos.

Answer: yes, I have plenty!

My personal journey—officially begun 7 years ago with meditation—has been accompanied by countless readings, audio recordings, videos, podcasts (...) that were essential in providing a framework for what I was discovering.

Problem: most of my sources are in English... and haven't been translated.

Worse: I found that the few French sources I came across were... how should I put it? Less rigorous. They mixed everything together: spirituality, wellness, alternative medicine, astrology...

What I've truly found in most of the sources I'm recommending here is a certain rigor. Not always, not everywhere, but generally speaking: they don't use pseudoscience to justify what is spiritual in nature; they remain very conservative in their everyday advice; they rely primarily on practice and personal reflection rather than devotion to anyone; they encourage free and independent thinking rather than belonging to a sect.

Another problem: some of the sources I'm recommending here are paid. It's not astronomical, but these are books or recordings I haven't found freely available.

If you're not discouraged, here they are, in order of my preference 👇

Meditation is about bringing your attention to the present moment.

The arm. That tension in the neck. The bird singing. A thought arising. A sudden feeling of sadness. That shifts and disappears. The foot against the ground. The breath. The bird, again. The head moving.

(To start, it's sometimes recommended to focus your attention solely on the breath. See what works for you.)

This is called the flow: perceptions, thoughts, and emotions arise, transform, then fade away. Everything passes.

But regularly, we get stuck on a thought.

We wake up as if from a dream, realizing we've been ruminating on something for several minutes. This fixation that blocks the flow is called (quite fittingly) "an attachment."

It's normal, it's part of the process: we notice it and come back to the present.

Some even say that this back-and-forth between thought and the present is the heart of meditation, like a muscle you work through the repetition of a back-and-forth motion.

Then, you carry a bit of this flow into your daily life.

And everything becomes easier.

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Related:

• All in the Body
• Thinking Is Not The Solution
• What meditation changed for me

I've discovered that I work like ChatGPT.

And you probably do too.

Meaning that my next action is essentially determined by whatever context elements I happen to have in my head at that moment.

And, like ChatGPT, that context is minimal.

We don't carry our entire lives with us at every instant. Depending on the day or time, we focus on this future problem, that current difficulty, this trendy goal.

The resulting decisions are based on a tiny, anecdotal sliver of our cognitive heritage—and most importantly: one we don't consciously choose.

So lately, I've decided to change all that.

Every morning, I read the same note containing the context elements that seem relevant for my day. That I've consciously chosen.

I no longer let social media, TV, or impromptu calls fill my head. I fill it myself, every morning, with hand-picked thoughts: positive, strong, and organic.

In this fertile ground, the right action grows effortlessly.

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Related:

• Shaping Your Day
• It (Re)starts Today

Three people recognized me on the street in Paris because they follow me on Instagram.

One the night before last, and two this afternoon.

All very kind, each time.

So what do I do, quit everything? 😅

I realize there's a very temporal aspect to professional jealousy.

In rivalry with peers, we want to do it before the other.

The hardest moments to go through are when those we admire or envy reach a summit before us. We feel left behind—even if it's not exactly the summit we were aiming for.

So we want to enter the race, to hurry to do it now.

Sometimes losing sight of what we really want to do.

Because, at the end of a career or a life, does it really matter when we did things? Doesn't fulfillment come rather from having done exactly what we wanted to do, regardless of timing?

So it's easy to lose sight of what matters.

Image

Deeply moved by this sad but dignified lion walking through the flowers to commemorate the Bataclan attacks ten years ago.

Verbal thought is just commentary. (We've talked about it.)

It's not what chooses the action. No: it observes and comments.

A bit like a babushka sitting all day at the foot of a building:

"Did you see that? They chose to raise their right arm again. What kind of world are we living in, I tell you."

Sometimes, she uses her memory to interpret the body's manifestations:

"You feel that knot in your stomach? It's the same one we felt during the divorce. They have regrets, for sure!"

Except most of the time, the babushka is wrong. Because her world revolves around two or three obsessions that loop endlessly and that she thinks she sees everywhere.

So, rather than listening to the interpreter, you need to return to the source: the physical sensation, the body's manifestation.

By inspecting the present, by simply observing what arises, you'll start to learn the language.

Soon, you'll be fluent.

And believe me: it's a more important language than English or Spanish since it's the one you'll use your whole life to dialogue with yourself.

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Related:

• Without a voice in your head?
• All in the body

Personally, I've reached 12K followers on Instagram.

I remember a time when I wanted to create discussion groups with friends: virtual salons where I could find conversation and company 24/7. It never worked out. Now I have something like that with the channel's messages and comments: at any hour, conversations with people interested in the same topics as me.

It creates a lot of opportunities. I say yes to many things. Projects, meetings. Not everything.

Professionally, the channels I've created for ChezFilms are taking off too. (Insta, TikTok, Youtube and Linkedin.)

The numbers aren't astronomical but it's working for what matters most: I'm getting client inquiries.

This week, I have five phone meetings with qualified prospects: people who are interested in exactly what I offer. (The hardest part was defining that offering precisely.)

We'll see how it all works out. It's exciting. But we're not letting up.

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Related:

• The Mechanics of Success
• Time and Productivity

Everything is so clear when I'm present.

When I'm curious about the moment, when I inspect the colors, sounds, and sensations that come to me... The world is no longer mysterious. It's no longer frightening. Stories of success and failure seem far away.

Action becomes easier, too.

Every gesture feels obvious and problems seem to solve themselves.

Yet I spend most of my time elsewhere.

Even though I meditate in the morning and return to presence several times a day, I regularly let myself get caught up in urgency and fabrication. Less than before, perhaps.

In those moments, though, it feels like going back to square one. Everything becomes serious again. The past and future are threatening again. We're back to trying to solve problems that didn't exist two minutes earlier.

Apparently this is normal: we move in and out of presence.

The goal is to stabilize, to truly change our operating system.

I'm going to work on that.

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Related:

• Controlling Is Resisting
• The Ego and the World
• Thinking Is Not the Solution

Hit ten thousand followers on Instagram.

Does that officially make me an influencer?

The best part: the messages and comments.

It's helped me find a whole bunch of people who are interested in the same things I am.

And I also get tons of messages from people my videos seem to be helping.

And for now, the videos are quite easy to make.

So that's good.

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Related:

• 4000 followers 😯
• One video per day (again)