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I am OPTimist: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Monika Bravo
I am OPTimist. I am not willing to be defined by a few words—what I do is a living journey. I am a multidisciplinary artist, empirical polymath, writer, evolutionary astrologer, libertarian/Bitcoiner. My philosophy integrates Eastern, ancestral, and cosmological traditions with psychological inquiries, praxeology, and Austrian economics, emphasizing liberty, value, resources, and self-worth in the quest for individual and societal service. I create public art commissions and immersive environments, facilitate dialogue, and explore freedom, shadow work, myths, natural law, Bitcoin, and the architecture of time. This podcast is a reflection of my living and individuated journey. If you are curious, there is much more to explore in the About Me section.
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- 2 days ago5 min
Synthesis as perfection rather than pursuit
Hi. I can’t believe how fast this year is flying. We reached the solstice.I am very happy to share that I am relaunching my website.This is a soft launch, because I still have to update a lot of projects, and I will do that in due time, without going into crazy crisis mode.I wanted this to come from a very personal place.I started designing websites back in the 90s, learning code and creating these environments, or experiences, because I wanted to create something that didn’t have a corporate feeling, something more like a process of creativity, a process of work.And this time is no different.Of course, there are menus, and there is text, and there are illustrations, but it is more like the experience of understanding, or peeking into my reality, into what my world is.The last time I changed my website was exactly ten years ago.That is a long time.Before that, it changed every three or four years, as I was trying to keep up with the amount of work that I was doing, because I have had a long career as an artist.And that was something else that really happened here, being able to realize how much work I have produced.Even though internally I feel like I am in an identity crisis, because the whole world is in one, it made me realize how blessed I am for being able to have so much talent, and to practice it in so many different ways.And I am not speaking from an arrogant place. I am speaking from a humble place.I know that the talent I was given by the grace of the Gods has found ways to shine, whether it is through public art commissions, which I have completely been devoted to from 2017 onward, and that was purposefully done.I left the gallery slash museum world because it was something I was no longer identifying with, and it was no longer resonating with the person I was at that moment.I was in a state of flux as well.But before that, even before I started creating artwork, I was a photographer. I was a black-and-white photographer.And that work you won’t see here…. For now. Around three decades ago, I went to see a psychic. Before I moved to New York, when I was a black and white photographer, she told me my work was going to be known for color. I laughed. I liked black and white photography. I did not like color. She said, I cannot tell you when, but that is going to happen. You are going to become very well known because of your color. People are going to hire you because of your color. And here it is: I cannot do anything without so much color.How can you put together Austrian economics, Bitcoin, evolutionary astrology, human design, and public art... with philosophy, harmonics, somatic practice, trauma, fascia, breath work, and humming?How do you do that?Well, I do it.I have been able to synthesize my life with all these subjects that are important to me.Obviously, the artwork is the base, because it is the one I have been practicing for longer, but I also feel that without evolutionary astrology and human design, I wouldn’t be in the place I am here.I went through a crisis after 2015, 2016, and it was through these systems that I was able to make radical changes in my life.And I promised myself then that if I was going to come out of it, I would always be available for other people to do readings, which I do from time to time.And I love reading charts, because the people that resonate with my readings are people that come for very specific purposes, and there are no coincidences in life.So I love serving that way.Another factor that is very important is education.I come from a family of female pedagogues, and I was taught to teach whenever I love something.So that is what it is.I have been facilitating study groups. I have created courses that are self-study, and also one-on-one with me.And there are two ways of interacting with this page.One is by curiosity, kind of losing yourself in what I have done.The other is if you are looking for something specific, maybe you will find it.So here you go.Those are my kind words to you today.P.s I have been considering looking at my archives, going back before 2012, all the way to the eighties. And I have also been thinking about creating a feature where you can own one of my works. This will come in the next few weeks. I will let you know when it is ready.ENTER STUDIO OF ENDLESS IDEAS There is a new moon in Gemini falling in my fifth house.It couldn’t be better timed.So, with the Gemini state of mind, I leave you with your own curiosity.My website is relaunched.A synthesis of thirty years of work.Everything I do is an art form —including this website.Cu
- 1 weeks ago11 min
Ideas->ideologies-> IDENTITY
Another improvised rant Have a great week 😍listening to 👇* This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.monikabravo.blog/subscribe
- 2 weeks ago8 min
To resonate with abrupt energy
This week, a fast recorded message, impromptu, unedited, with real life background noise.Such is life!Beautiful & messy.—//-I forgot to mention the north node is in gate 55 and Venus now on gate 39 create the channel of emoting- play your favorite songs loud and allow the body to provoke deep emotions either dance or cry or both lol.Jin shin Jyutsu chart.Monika Bravo I AM OPtimist îs a FREE NEWSLETTER This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.monikabravo.blog/subscribe
- 3 weeks ago0 min
Silentio
There is a big silence between words because there is a lot of space in my emotional body.I do not want to talk about it. I want to feel it.I am in reset. Calibration mode.Feeling a shift. Now understanding more this period we are in, which is not about waiting but about small movements with purpose. The energy is moving, and when the energy moves, everything else comes along.A smooth surface offers no challenge. Evolution needs contrast and right timing. I am calibrating between the gaps.I’m learning that true boundaries aren’t about defending—they’re about resonating.~Monika Bravo, THE CARTOGRAPHY OF AWARENESS 3I AtlasMonika Bravo I AM OPtimist îs a FREE NEWSLETTER This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.monikabravo.blog/subscribe
- May 11, 202613 min
IT IS AN OFFERING, NOT A SACRIFICE
Do you know the difference between a sacrifice and an offering?I think we have gone a little bit cuckoo with the word sacrifice. You know, in essence, it comes from the word sacred, but it has been devoid of an important part of that sacredness that is transformational. Therefore it is lacking in full meaning.Sacrifice is the action of consecrating. So what is it that one is consecrating without using a transformational part that has disappeared in the meaning of it? Now it reads as something you have to give up. And when you have that energy of giving up, you tend to hold on more to it.I tune more to the word offering. I have this image of a Buddhist altar or even a Christian altar, and you light a candle. You offer something. You decide to become aware of what is at stake in the relationship of what you are looking at, that you are willing to extend, you are willing to care, to bring and carry forward. It is a relationship to something bigger.So letting go is the dissolution of it, is the dissolving, is the surrendering to a new relation to yourself in those matters that comes from understanding that what you offer transforms into this new realm.I am offering myself time as a wave that determines clarity when it has completed its function. It is not time like Kronos. It is more time like Kairos. It is the right timing so I can gain clarity. I am also offering myself space. Not a place, but leeway, in my body, my mind, a space within my emotional vessel. It is a territory I never gave myself because I felt the urgency to always be there for others.I am not being pulled by anyone or anything at the moment. This time and space that I am offering are very balanced, slowly being absorbed. They are not judgmental. They possess no urgency. They are just there contracting and expanding.I have been very interested in fascia work. Fascia is what holds the water in the body, and it requires some tweaking in the neck and the pelvic floor. And so this adjusting, this flow of movement is rotational. It is like the earth. We rotate around the sun. We rotate around the galaxy where we also self rotate. And we have pretty much a binary body where we have almost two of everything, with some exceptions, like the liver. The liver is the organ that detoxifies. It is also the one carrying anger. And I wonder if I have been carrying a lot of anger as a Manifestor/Initiator that needs to be expressed in a way that it does not break, but it actually informs my field of where I am not willing to do a so called sacrifice, but where I am willing to offer space for my own unfolding. From the TCM perspective, anger is the energy of the liver, not necessarily the organ per se, but the energy of that circuitry. And in my case, it is about understanding that that anger as an emotion has the potential for evolution. If I understand its frequency as something that is driving me to move into another direction, breaking away the stagnation. Now it could be sensed as an activated reaction, or can it be initiating an awareness as a response? So that is where timing comes in. Whereas space and time expand, contract, and calibration can take place.Fascia operates through what is called tensegrity, a word coined by Buckminster Fuller from tension and integrity. It is a structural principle that the body maintains its form not through rigid compression like a building, but through a continuous balance of tension and resistance distributed across the entire fascial network. Both the flexibility of the geometry that tensegrity brings and the crystallization of water live inside this structure, because it is a matrix inside our body that carries an emotional archive. The mechanics operate through a closed kinematic chain, mechanical loops where each part influences the position, the motion, and the stability of all the others. Kinematics is geometry in motion. The molecules of water get absorbed and at the same time dry out because there is no mobility, there is no circulation, and this membrane stops resonating with the rest of the body. And it is in that dryness, where there is no circulation, that the body keeps the score of trauma in its geometry.This is a big question for me in these days, because I am questioning those parts of myself that need to go because they do not offer me any potential for evolution. They have served their purpose. They have emanated. They have transformed themselves. They have metabolized.And so I am questioning my sense of value at all levels. The places where I trust blindly, the places where I mistrust behind me. The places where I could be completely wrong.There are two words I bring right now: control and definition. How can you support and define something without having to be controlling, but be on top of it, which is different. How to create a fluid, flowing state of circu
- May 6, 202613 min
Called Down to initiate in Year One
One of the things that I am deeply in contemplation about is what identity really means. Do I need to identify as a person? As my gender? As my vocation? Just as a human being? Or as a polymath that has so many different variations depending on which angle I am willing to serve and to express in that given moment. "I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars." Jorge Luis Borges — The Garden of Forking Paths, in Ficciones, 1944SYNTHESISWhat is converging in my life right now is the recognition that everything I have been building interiorly for a long time is slowly ready to move into the world, and the steadiness I feel in that recognition comes from the quality of the interior work itself, the untangling of the chords that shaped me prior to choosing otherwise, the freeing of space that was previously occupied by patterns that were never mine to carry.I feel blessed because I have been meeting with Mark Jones for 18 months steadily to support the navigation into my psychic untangling. Any chords that defined me are now being freed by the space. It is human action at its best, far away from being an effort or hard work.Who is Mark Jones, you may ask? He is the astrologer and psychotherapist whose books and teachings have accompanied my understanding of evolutionary astrology for a long time, long enough that I waited for many years before I felt ready to receive a reading and direct transmissions from him. That moment arrived in 2024. We met for the first time in mid-October 2024, and a couple of months later I knew I was ready to commit to a deeper working relationship. These are conversations where the chart serves as a living map and you are always the territory, always interior, always personal, always asking what is actually driving this, and what would it feel like to stop being driven by something that was never yours to carry in the first place.My Pluto in the 8th house requires this kind of work, it cannot operate on the surface. It is important to have a guide who can hold the depth without flinching, who reflects what is said with precision and returns it with a quality of witness that makes it possible to see something that was previously too close to be seen clearly.Trust is my middle name Inner trust is my inner and outer authority Trust is the architecture of my value “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” Jorge Luis Borges — A New Refutation of Time, in Other Inquisitions, 1952FACTSI had my solar return last week. My Sun is in Taurus in the 3rd house, and within days of that threshold, Mercury is returning to Taurus and Mars is returning to Aries. Venus follows, returning to Gemini in the 5th house. Four personal planets resetting within the same window the new solar year opens. The entire personal field seeds itself again from the beginning, all at once, in the first days of year 5.The full Moon landed exactly on my natal Moon in Scorpio in the 9th house, and it formed a Finger of God [YOD] with Saturn and Venus as the two base points pointing directly to that Moon. A Finger of God is a precise convergence, two inconjunct lines meeting at an apex that has no choice but to receive what they are sending. Saturn and Venus both in quincunx [150° aspect] to my Moon in Scorpio meant the full illumination of the emotional body arrived through a double adjustment from structure and from creative value simultaneously. This was a full calibration, a precise demand from the chart that I receive the instruction the Moon was carrying at its own natal degree. My Moon rules my North Node in Cancer in the 5th house. The evolutionary direction was lit completely at that moment. From an uncomfortable body sensation, to small calibrations, to mutations that slowly become transmutation.The transiting nodal axis is sitting on my natal Uranus in Virgo in the 7th house and my natal Saturn in Pisces in the 1st house. The nodal axis crossing both of these simultaneously means the evolutionary pressure of this moment is landing directly on the axis between personal identity and encounter with the other, on the structure I carry as self and the liberating impulse that has always moved through relationship. The nodes on Uranus and Saturn together are asking what authority looks like when it has been freed from the conditioning that originally shaped it.Transiting Uranus in Gemini in my 4th house is squaring that same nodal axis. Uranus in Gemini in the 4th house is l
- May 1, 20262 min
Recalibrate
"Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."~Italo Calvino, Invisible CitiesWorth without witness... is that what value really is? Fire, then form. To go forth in trust, things I left behind. The uncomfortable angle of a quincunx is a pressure that is nameless. The space is generated to tweak slowly. Fearless in a dream as the snake tilts the lid, raw impulse unleashes an emergence. Profound perception: the light goes through the door identifying with nothing. An invitation arrives in a timeless location carried by curiosity. Intensity comes through at the apex. Structure finds the timing of action. Value emerges from what was and will be said. This is the calibration point. It requires time and space to tune into something new.Happy full moon in Scorpio! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.monikabravo.blog/subscribe
- Apr 22, 202611 min
My Renaissance
What has initiated has been taking shape as it grounds. This is Taurus season. Full moon in Scorpio on May 1st, a lunation as when I was born 62 years ago, happy solar return to me. Living with a Scorpio moon in my 9th house has made me seek for deep truth, only to realize after a long journey, that it emanates from within. There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes with understanding that something new is emerging from within.My body has been recording this passage sometimes as tension in the fascia, the membrane that holds water while binding muscle and bone together.This is a beautiful membrane that is allowing fluids and flow at the same time.It is like a breath that wants to go deeper, as it aspires within the rib cage and then slowly releasing, making space for what is new.This is a feeling pulled in more than one direction at the same time, but the interesting thing is that the orientations are not what matters; what matters is the flow, aware, aspiring, and exhaling.This is a new sensation of the self that has slowly been metabolized in the last years but now starts being shaped.Even though I do not have a final definition, I can sense it in the body; it comes here first, so the threshold is here.The discomfort I feel is how my life is composting and metabolizing itself.It is not discomfort in the sense of pain; there is no pain, there is no emotional pain, there is no physical pain.It is just an adjustment that has to happen on a moment-to-moment basis.It is productive and real, and even though I am speaking words, the resolution is not in the mind or with logic.It is more the adaptation of this flow on a moment-to-moment basis, with the body at its center.I will say this is a Renaissance being born again from the inside out, as I carry everything that I have learned, surrendered, and lost, while none of the definitions built around it can comprehend what is transforming. I love this French word borrowed into English somewhere in the 1800s. The Italian artists who lived it first called it “rinascita,” rebirth. And yet, it was not a return to innocence. They were returning to what had always been there: the human body, the direct study of nature and anatomy. Somehow, a return to the classical forms, but seen with new eyes.To be born again is not from nothing but from a full weight of everything already experienced. Time is teaching me to enjoy every moment, as mysterious as I can appear to others. There have been times when I went through the process of trying to explain myself, like in my first book, The Nature of My Reality, which, when read out loud, was my own echo. I realized that the mystery of my individuation was best kept as such. I did not need to explain myself to others, but I did.I come back to the natural posture of someone whose depth cannot be compressed into a stage format, a place of performance, nor to a category that defines and limits at the same time.It is through the experience of knowing, not knowing, and trusting the divine that allows this persona to be sensed but not grasped, like water through the fingers, what stays is the essence of the felt sense not the density of the water, fluid, flowing, gone.Compression of that kind multiplies confusion. What is actually present is a synthesis, and a synthesis does not fit inside any container built to hold a single discipline. The process is the emergence of an insight, a poem, a reading, a vector, a color, a shape, a moment in time. A synthesis is the process of integration that begs to be lived and not to be ingested through the mind.The new cycle is learning to trust that: acting from discernment on a moment-to-moment basis rather than from a fixed identity, allowing the creativity to be the truth rather than the explanation of it.Right now there is a configuration in the sky called a Yod, a finger of God. Two points of concentrated pressure converge into a single apex in my chart. One point carries the plutonic energy of deep transformation of evolution happening at the level of identity itself as it rises on the Ascendant. The other carries the energy of a new face: new ways of initiating, of being supported, of communicating what I know through structure.Both of these pressures are pointing at the same place in my chart: Uranus in Virgo in the seventh house, the planet that rules my Ascendant. The planet that governs how I meet the world and what liberates me from within it. At the same apex, the South Node of the Moon is passing through, asking what has run its course with a lot of discernment. These three together produce a sensation I discover in this body: with no pain. It is a threshold that needs to be adjusted at all times.A lot of stuff that I have been doing last year is detaching myself f
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About I am OPTimist
I am OPTimist. I am not willing to be defined by a few words—what I do is a living journey. I am a multidisciplinary artist, empirical polymath, writer, evolutionary astrologer, libertarian/Bitcoiner. My philosophy integrates Eastern, ancestral, and cosmological traditions with psychological inquiries, praxeology, and Austrian economics, emphasizing liberty, value, resources, and self-worth in the quest for individual and societal service. I create public art commissions and immersive environments, facilitate dialogue, and explore freedom, shadow work, myths, natural law, Bitcoin, and the architecture of time. This podcast is a reflection of my living and individuated journey. If you are curious, there is much more to explore in the About Me section.
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