Julie Hilsen: 0:22

Awakening Minds

Hello, dear friends, and welcome to another episode of Life of Love, where we gather each week to bring forth messages of hope, inspiration and, you know, just courage to live your life of love as it presents in your authentic way, in your unique self, and we honor everyone’s path, just so happy to have your ears and your hearts connecting each week. My community is very dear to me, as is my guest this week. Rudy Daniel is from Tel Aviv and he’s a spiritual journeyman, I would like to say. He has gone on a quest to help people find their unique way that they show up in the world, and we’re going to get into talk about the masks that we wear in everyday life and how to get beyond those.

Julie Hilsen: 1:14

On a personal note, rudy has found deeper connection with the divinity through his work and a beautiful side effect. He’s found a deeper connection with the universe that changed his perception of life through his spiritual journey of exploration. So I’m excited to pick his brain about what that means, because that’s quite a statement, and so welcome, rudy, to the show. We’re so happy to have you all the way from Israel.

Rudy Daniel: 1:41

Thank you, julie. Thank you very much, excited to be here.

Julie Hilsen: 1:44

Yeah, well, yeah, it’s just such a delight. Yeah, so your book, your book has been something wonderful, and then your app that you have is such a gift to humanity to help you know daily affirmations I love the Snoop Dogg. Have you heard his affirmation, his rap that he did for the kids?

Rudy Daniel: 2:05

No no.

Julie Hilsen: 2:07

He’s like affirmations are positive statements. Every day I get better. There’s no, oh he goes. No one better to be than myself, no one better to be than myself. Every day I get better. There’s no, oh he goes. No one better to be than myself. No one better to be than myself. Every day I get better. And it’s just like he sings it or he raps it in this beautiful way, and I was just like Snoop Dogg with the affirmation. I just, I really dig that. So it is a brave new world. So how did? How did you come up with your idea to start an app for affirmations? And I understand it’s like you have a new edition coming out, but it started as a 15 second reset. I love it. So, yeah, what was the brain for that?

Rudy Daniel: 2:49

So actually, it came in a dream. It was about three years ago. It was about three years ago. I had a very vivid dream where I saw a new practice that would help people to engage with mindfulness, and I woke up in the middle of the night. I was very excited about it and I kind of wandered through the living room thinking of how to do it, how to bring it forward, how to give birth to this idea. I was kind of deep in my career. I was working for a tech company and one day I just sat with a friend on the balcony a good friend of mine and we were talking about dreams. I was sharing dreams, he was sharing dreams and I told him about this dream and he grew very excited about dreams. I was sharing dreams, he was sharing dreams, and I told him about this dream and he grew very excited about it.

Rudy Daniel: 3:40

And a year and a half later, here we are, launched, three months ago, the AfroMate app, which is an app that is about short and engaging mindfulness practices suitable for the go-get-it, test-based life we have right now in our Western society, and we feel that short practices which are easy to relate to and engage and easy to maintain, would be the best way to kind of get into this world of mindfulness, awareness and presence, rather than trying to lean on ancient Eastern traditions of meditation which would be very difficult for the Western mind to comprehend.

Rudy Daniel: 4:30

Sitting even 10 minutes alone, thinking of nothing, is quite an impossible mission for someone without context and cultural context and understanding of these kinds of things. So we feel that this is the way to go go about it. And we see that the world is. Although we live a good life, in terms of our evolution as human beings, this is the best time to be alive. But there is a very big rise in anxiety, depression and one in every four adults is dealing with these kind of issues and it’s really becoming the new pandemic of the 21st century. People are in a bad place although the world seems good. So this is our mission to get people more mindful, get them on board on seeing life in a more profound way through these short practices and thank you for the intro, by the way.

Discovering Inner Wisdom and Mindfulness

Julie Hilsen: 5:36

Oh, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. Wow, it was easy to do. I mean, and we were talking about, you know, we’re getting to know each other before we started recording that. You know we’ve sort of programmed our minds to be short attention span, like we pick up our phone and we want to see content. You know there’s five minutes, you’re waiting in line and everyone’s looking at their phone to get a dopamine fix, and so to take that and take that habit that we have and redirect it in a way that is more mindful and more conscious, I think it was just a brilliant mind child that you really took where we are and said, okay, where can we go? Where can we go from that? How can we?

Julie Hilsen: 6:17

It’s not like bringing someone back in time to be a Tibetan monk and go be in a room for eight hours or or do a complex breathing maneuvers, which are beautiful. I mean, if you can get there, you know, all the more power to you. But the majority of our population, like you said, they don’t. You know, they’re not used to spending five minutes just with complete quiet and mind clearing. I mean, we reset our computers right, like when our computers stop working or our phones stop working, we power them off? Why can’t we do that for ourselves? Why is it such a luxury to power off? Is it because we want to prove ourselves all the time?

Julie Hilsen: 6:57

Or you know, I would love to talk about divinity with you and to take to realize you have a mask on and that the mask needs to come off. How did you come to that? I mean, I’m just picking your brain of how you did, because I think it’s really valuable for people to hear the story of how you know how you came from where you were to where you are now and and give, give people hope, because it gets discouraging and hopelessness is one of those low vibrations that we want to help anyone try to get out of if they’re ready. You know, sometimes you need to be there for a minute so you can blast out of it, and I respect that. But anyone who’s looking for hope, I want to provide that.

Rudy Daniel: 7:45

So how did you determine that you had a mask? Well, it started in my childhood. I had a lot of mystical experiences as a child which seemed strange at the time and I didn’t know. There were mystical experiences but I kind of felt weird about things I experienced and it continued through my adolescence and at times I was thinking that I’m about to go crazy. I had these strange things that were happening in my life and then it disappeared and when it disappeared life became a bit dull. So I kind of saw reality as more of a drag. I tried everything, I tried the go-get-it attitude and I did a lot of things and, you know, ticked all the checkboxes for a normal human being and most of the comforts that human being can have.

Rudy Daniel: 8:41

In the age of 33, I was kind of done. I was thinking to myself that life’s a drag and there’s nothing to get out of it and it’s all just you. You know nonsense. It’s just a race to the grave and what I’m doing here and what should I proceed anyway? And what purpose should I serve?

Rudy Daniel: 9:05

You know, these kind of questions they brought up my childhood again because when I was a child I used to think a lot about the universe and what is what is infinity? I was trying to think a lot about the universe and what is what is infinity? I was trying to, as a child, close my eyes and think of the infinite, how it looks, how it feels. What is infinite? And I was trying to play with space and time. And all these questions kind of presented themselves again when I was 30, 30, 30-something, 30-ish, and then, because I had more tools as an adult, I could read and I could address these questions with better tools and I began asking myself the fundamental question of who am I anyway? I mean, I experienced the world and I have all these experiences and you know, it’s kind of catalog the world like this is a tree, this is a stone, this is a human being, this is an angry human being, this is a happy, this is a man, a woman, a husband, all these titles. And I kind of realized that all these things or I thought there were things are very transient in their nature. They keep on changing and even my body was changing and my psyche was changing.

Rudy Daniel: 10:26

So when I tried to put a finger on who am, I got really confused and that’s kind of kicked, kicked off the journey of self-exploration and I was obsessed. I was reading all kinds of teaching. I could get my hands off the East and the West, most of the Eastern teachings and mythologies and whatnot science, arts. I tried to build a picture in my head of what is reality and through this process my mind changed, my psyche changed and I began seeing the world in a more profound way.

Rudy Daniel: 11:11

So at a certain point I didn’t see a tree as a tree anymore. I saw it as some sort of a beautiful process and it gave me the opportunity to touch a crack in reality which was veiled until then, and I could see things from many planes of consciousness. One, one kind of experience could be observed from three different points of view at the same time. So this was a very exciting change for me and I pursued that exploration and with it came all the mindfulness that today I’m trying to convey to the world, the idea of mindfulness. It was slow but it was radical and I feel that if you are willing to ask yourself fundamental questions and not be intellectually lazy, you will soon understand the paradox of your assumptions on the basic things of life and then it kind of leads you to the way it leads you to asking the right questions, because if you ask the right questions, you will get the answers you’re looking for. Yeah, so that’s my story in a two minute pitch.

Julie Hilsen: 12:28

I love it and how profound it was. A tree I mean, the trees are so, so amazing for so many many reasons and that you brought up seeing a tree from three different dimensions. And I think that the trees and nature, they want us, they want us to experience that. They’re just like waiting for us to ask the question or be creative enough to ask, to think about the different dimensions, that they’re there and it does. It adds magic, it adds life, it adds spark to your day Because, if not, you’re reacting and responding to stimuli like a robot or something that’s trained.

Julie Hilsen: 13:12

You do A, b to get C. You know some, something that’s trained, you know. You do A, b to get C, rinse, repeat and it, like you said it’s, it wears you down, it makes you like the race to the grave. That’s so. It’s such a great way to put it, because I think that’s the way a lot of people feel and we’re starting to say wait a minute. Is that where we want to be? Work like yours and stories like yours are so inspirational. I honor your vulnerability to share and that you know the idea that you start, you’re a child and you had these things, and when kids ask you impossible questions. That’s because they’re getting. Their intuition is so pure and the universe is trying to hint to them, the magic around them. And we take for granted all the magic around us because it’s always there and we focus on the negative because that’s a different stimulus. Right, like we pay attention to the different stimulus instead of saying, wow, I’m surrounded, these trees are a canopy of love around me and they’re holding the ground and connecting to all the other trees in the world. You know that mitochondria network People. If you haven’t heard about how the trees communicate with their roots underground, you’ve got to check it out. I mean, there’s so much magic all around us and you know it’s just up to us to wake up to it.

Julie Hilsen: 14:38

And I’m not saying I’m awake all the time. I have days where I mean yesterday I was nosing a book, like trying to figure out a health concern I’m having, and I just felt so defeated and so uninspired. But wake up and you have a new day and I found some answers. I went through some. I say sludge, it’s like it’s a sludgy day, it’s. You know, I found some answers. I went through some.

Julie Hilsen: 14:59

I say sludge, you know, it’s like it’s a sludgy day, it’s just going to be. You got to pick up your feet and just try to keep moving, but just give yourself an opportunity to have the light of the next day and then, you know, on a personal note, Rudy shows up and we’re like, we have this connection from across the globe and we can, we can connect with the spirit of spirit of helping humanity and I mean, I’m so glad, I’m so glad yesterday was rough and today’s a wonderful day, and that’s. You know, we’re going to go through that. That’s what we came here for, this relativity. So thank you, thank you everyone contributing to this, because I know my spirit guides are helping too.

Rudy Daniel: 15:38

I do want to touch on your point because I think it’s important, because a lot of people that go on this path of spiritual kind of enlightenment or spiritual path or trying to understand their higher self there’s a lot of names for that so a lot of people get high on that. And because it’s really easy it’s really easy to get high on that once you see the magic in life you’re like, oh my god, I didn’t see it before. I have to tell everyone and you know, and you’re so excited about it, and and then you go on the worst ego trip because you are trying to be, you know, as holy as you can to show other people that you’re so high and you know they’re missing on something and when you have a bad day it will destroy you mentally because you, you will try to push it away. You will say it’s not me, I’m not that negative person. How you know? How can it be? And and I don’t want to be around negative people and I don’t want to have negative thoughts.

Embracing Mindfulness and Present Moment

Rudy Daniel: 16:40

And this is a trap. People cling to high states of consciousness and then trying to push away the negative side. But if you explore that as an explorer, if you’re interested in these kinds of things, you will soon realize that the positive and the negatives are of the same thing. So you must have them all together and, as Jung tried to explain with this shadow work, that we need to embrace the dark side that we have, and this is a part of the game. So, a bad day, a good day, the, the. The spiritual path is not about getting high, is about getting free. I think that ron does that at once. It was beautiful. And getting free is free from all kind of experiences, good or bad. You just accept them all as they come and you live the moment.

Julie Hilsen: 17:41

And it takes a lot of trust to tell your ego that it’s going to be okay. You don’t have to have a good day every day, and yesterday I was like my husband couldn’t do one single thing right. I was so annoyed with every single thing he did and didn’t do. I was just like I’m supposed to unconditionally love my husband all the time, and I was like I am not there. I was like Julie, what are you supposed to see in this? So fun, I’ll make it up to him, Poor guy.

Rudy Daniel: 18:18

Well, it brought you the beautiful gift you have behind you.

Julie Hilsen: 18:22

Right, he did, and yeah, he’s, so he’s more intuitive than he realizes. But that’s OK, I’ll show up in that part of it. You know we all have our jobs to do. Oh, my goodness, so gosh. I mean I just have so many questions. How, um, do you have a practice that you do every day to to try to find your presence? Um, whatever, whatever that is. Like you said, some days it’s it can be more challenging, but, um, you know just as far as you’ve come. I mean, I don’t know how old you are now, but you started this path in your 30s.

Rudy Daniel: 19:03

You don’t look much older than 40, but I was 39, like two weeks ago, so okay, so last year at the 30s club next year I’m coming to to the 40s club, which is exciting. Next year and coming to the Florida Disc Club, which is exciting.

Julie Hilsen: 19:18

Yeah, it is exciting and you find, as you connect to the magic or the higher frequency whatever you want to call it, the things that bring you hope and joy and authentic expression, however it looks for you, those things make you feel younger, they make you feel more vibrant, and I always tell people that’s your clue, you know if it sparks you, whatever it is, that’s your clue. And to trust. Trust that because it’s a unique thing to you and I did want to celebrate. You know how you’re showing up, but how, what is it? What’s your favorite spiritual practice to get in alignment? Or, besides, probably your app. What did you feel was most important to share with? Like the mass, because you know helping the most amount of people find their authentic self is probably pretty important to you. So I want to let you share?

Rudy Daniel: 20:20

For sure. I mean where I am now and what is the message I will share. For someone who is just beginning this journey would be a bit different, because it might come across as something more advanced. If I, you know, say, just follow my lead, which I would say, because I think that once a person claims to be a teacher, he’s hooked and he’s clinging to some sort of knowledge. And I will be always a student of life, I find it much more enjoyable. So I will say that when you are starting out with the idea of mindfulness, you should first understand what is mindfulness.

Rudy Daniel: 21:05

For a lot of people, mindfulness and meditation is the same word, and I just want to introduce mindfulness in a bit more accurate way. I would say. So mindfulness would be the backdrop of all the practices that people might call spiritual practices or psychological practices. It’s being full of mind or being mindful, as the word itself suggests. Meditation, for example, is an ancient tradition originated from the East, in India, and practiced in most of the Eastern countries, which is a method of mindfulness. So meditation and mindfulness are not the same thing. So when a person wants to practice mindfulness, they could practice it in various ways. I would say pick your favorite thing to do and be aware of it while you’re doing it. So if you like to cook, so when you’re cutting the vegetables, give it a second and look at their texture, smell them, try to imagine where they came from, appreciate the distance they did when you take a bite, notice the textures, the smells, the tastes. When you drink your coffee, don’t just devour it. Hold the coffee, smell the aroma, feel the warmth of the cup on your hands, appreciate the moment. So these are small things and these small things gradually becomes bigger and you start noticing everything in a different way. So I would say that now I don’t have any specific practice per se, because I just enjoy life to the potential of my mind, but I don’t practice anything specific. I enjoy very much doing a meditation from time to time or doing positive affirmations, which is a great thing to do Nowadays. I don’t do it to improve myself, because I understood that this is not the purpose. I do it because it’s fun and it’s getting me excited about life.

Rudy Daniel: 23:27

But for a person who’s just starting out, just find the things you already love to do and just be there when you’re doing them and you will notice with time crack in reality. You will see that, what you are doing them and you will notice, with time, the crack in reality. You will see that what you are doing is much more profound than what you thought. We can do it in a robotic way, you can cook in a robotic way, and then the food itself is kind of tasteless, isn’t it? It’s kind of. You know, it’s not very well looking on your plate, but if you are doing it mindfully, it will be a dance, it will be beautiful, and then you eat the food that you cooked with intention and it will be great, and some people would even go as far as to say that it will be much healthier for you. So you know, I don’t want to be scientific about that right now, but I think there’s a lot of sense in that, because what you do with intention is very powerful. So if you eat with intention, you drink with intention, you walk with intention when you’re having a conversation with your good friend, be there, be mindful of them, of what they’re saying, be mindful of the things around you, and eventually the mind will turn on itself and be mindful of itself. And this is where you see the crack in reality. But to go there you must go through the simple things, not with a go-get-it attitude, not with I’m trying to improve myself and be my higher self, but just this simple act of being aware, being presence, which is our essence, this is our being.

Rudy Daniel: 25:06

You know, I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine. We like to kind of bounce philosophical ideas around and we were talking about. I asked him can you remember yourself as a five-year-old? And we try, you remember yourself as a five-year-old, and we tried to remember ourselves as a five-year-old and, except for memories, we couldn’t. So I can say, you know, from the age of five my body has changed dramatically. I don’t look like my five-year-old self and my psyche changed, meaning my mind and my thoughts and my perception, my taste and so on.

Rudy Daniel: 25:40

But the one thing that hasn’t changed is the awareness of myself, is the sensation of self, is the sensation of I am. It’s always there, it’s always there. So in essence, all you have to do is look into it. It’s always there for you, it’s always available. But with time, as you said before, we are getting all these fast dopamine hits and we are kind of used to being distracted all the time by society, by work, by family and eventually by our own mind, that we become prisoners inside the most effective prison in the world, which is the mind. And to break out of the prison, you cannot do it with force, because the guards are very fierce and they know you better than anyone. So you must do it with love. You must not do it with force, you must do it with love. You must not do it with force, you must do it with love to see the profoundness of life. That would be my message for everyone, starting now.

Julie Hilsen: 26:49

That’s beautiful, that total immersion in being yourself and being exactly where you are and not striving to be something different. And that mask that you’re saying is that effort that you think you need to have. You need to show up in a certain way to be valid, and the truth is, you just are. You are because you are and you be because you be. It’s beautiful. And when you’re talking about cooking or whatever you like, whatever brings you joy, whatever activity, whether it’s hanging out with your pets or painting or walking or whatever, that is, that total presence to me is sensuality. I mean, you can have a sensual experience, being completely present in anything you do, and you just decide and then wow, if you can show up in the world as this present, sensual being, uh, you’re, you’re creating so much joy and and that’s a huge and and that’s a huge, that’s a huge um example, it’s a huge ripple effect. And it’s just by you taking pleasure in what you like to do what. And it doesn’t have to be like a sexual thing. It can. It can be as simple as washing dishes, like you know, the suds on your hands. It’s just a beautiful. There’s little rainbows in every little bubble. I when’s the last time you looked at a bubble and I can remember my five year old self loving bubbles, you know like. Or even spitting watermelon seeds, like why don’t we just spit watermelon seeds out of our windows anymore? And then we’d be planting watermelon, you know. So just getting back to that, that childhood, you know curiosity and just you know I adore that. And how many accidents could be avoided, how much mental illness could we avoid Just being completely present. Because that’s when you get.

Julie Hilsen: 28:55

When you end up re-rendering someone is because your your mind’s in eight different places. You’re not thinking about the car you’re driving or the wonderful road you’re having or the beautiful sun. You know like all these things take into account if there’s rain. You know, if you’re watching the way the puddles are on the road, you can avoid hitting a nasty, you know, puddle that could make your car spin out. I mean, there there’s, there’s a million benefits of being present and I can’t think of one detriment. I really can’t.

Julie Hilsen: 29:28

I mean so I just love how you put it and and I just I can’t help but appreciate how we’re representing yin and yang a little bit Like you’re complete. You’re how we’re representing yin and yang. A little bit Like you’re complete, you have your tattoos and your black shirt and I’m here with my flower of life and my white shirt and I just adore that. We think the same way but we’re coming at it from different places and I just I honor, I honor your journey in that and I appreciate how far far I’ve come to, because I used to label and be you know, I used to associate with all my labels and I’m like why there’s? No, I’m not, it doesn’t do anything for me to give myself a label or my friends or anyone I see I agree, but you know it’s, it’s a part of our Western kind of thought that everything is divided and labeled.

Introducing Mindfulness App Affirmate

Rudy Daniel: 30:28

And when you look outside of yourself and you see a person, so there’s a million labels that you can label them. You can label them by gender, by age, by their beauty, how smart they are, are they happy, what kind of job they have, status, position, so you can look at a human being from a million different perspectives. And all of these perspectives are just drama, just masks. Drama, just masks. If you deeply look into a human being’s eyes, you will see eventually yourself looking at yourself, and this is where a true connection comes from and compassion comes from and true understanding comes from. And the opposite of that is all these moral pursuits that we chase through our history, especially Western history, when we try to impose our ideas on others in the name of morality and the name of God, and all these human created ideas that have nothing to do with what we are talking about are just, you know, ideas. But when you look into someone’s eyes deeply, you can come through a different point of view of true compassion and understanding, and no matter what the circumstances are, because eventually you’re looking at yourself when you look at yourself, you’re filled with compassion.

Rudy Daniel: 32:05

It’s kind of the way that you look at your children. You kind of see yourself in them. It’s very easy to understand for parents. This is why we love our children so much. We see ourselves in them. So if we do that with other people, the people that we call others, them, you know. So when you do that, you kind of see, oh, that’s not them. That’s actually like me and it’s very easy to relate and but for that you need to be aware and to be present for this space to present itself for you.

Julie Hilsen: 32:53

It’s always available, like you said, but you need to see it is so much stronger than the false flags and the labels that are the fear, the control that’s laid upon us. We have these overlays in our Western society of this and we’re here to question and move past them, and I think we’re getting closer and closer and I know the next even. I just heard this astrologer this morning. The next five years are with the, the way the universe is set up. The next five years are going to be huge for humanity to expose lies, and it’s going to.

Julie Hilsen: 33:33

She even said it’ll be impossible for us to lie. We’ll have to, like, correct ourselves if we lie. And wow, we wouldn’t be lying to ourselves, because when we lie to someone else, we’re really lying to ourselves and we’re deceiving ourselves. Like you said, we’re looking at ourselves in their eyes and we’re lying to ourselves, and I love everything that you said. And would you want to share the name of your app again so that people, if they’re interested, they can go, and I’ll put a link to your website. It’s a beautiful website. I was on there earlier.

Rudy Daniel: 34:14

Thank you, julie. Yes, and thank you for the opportunity, by the way. So the name of the app is Affirmate. It’s a powerful mindfulness tool for short and engaging mindfulness practices for busy people and for people that are really not familiar with the context and the cultural background of meditation and find it hard. This is the place to start and maintain your mindfulness practices, and we just released it three months ago and there’s a new version coming up and we would love you to go and test it out. It’s on iOS and Android stores and if you have any feedback, you can drop a feedback through the app for the website. We’re very open me and my amazing co-founder and trying to do good, trying to make some positive impacts in the world, and thank you for this opportunity to share it thank you so much thank you,