The beginning
Six years ago, when I arrived in the UK, an idea came to me that has stayed with me ever since: House of Transformation. To rent land - ideally with a house, with a lake, somewhere in the UK or anywhere else - and invite people there who want to change their lives, who want to quit addictions - alcohol, tobacco - change their diet, live surrounded by other people who have already been through that process. To build it together.
This idea didn’t come out of nowhere. I had arrived in a foreign country, in a place where I had to start over, and I think it’s exactly in a moment like that when a person sees most clearly what they were missing elsewhere - a community of people who genuinely want to change, not just talk about it. House of Transformation was never, from the start, an escapist fantasy for me - it was a concrete image: a place, land, people who work on themselves and on that place at the same time. That combination - physical work building something real, and inner work on oneself - always felt to me like the most natural path to real change.
Where I am now
After six years I’ve been through a lot in life, and I know a bit more about the world and about myself. Right now I’m in a place in Spain, but the terms of my stay are unclear, and it’s not entirely clear where the money for it is supposed to come from, who funds the project. I still have financial problems, and I’m starting to understand where they come from.
I don’t know how to value my own worth, or the worth of what I do for others. Even here, where I currently am, I repay my stay through work - woodworking, construction, building, repairs - but my work is countable, and I have no idea what my stay here actually “costs.” This is a lesson for me, because I should be able to talk about the value of this exchange, so that everything is clear and transparent. I want to do that - maybe even today.
It’s a strange feeling - being able to calculate exactly how much time and work I put into fixing a roof, a structure, or a piece of furniture, while having no idea what a roof over my head, food, or a place to be are worth. One side of the equation is hard and countable, the other is soft and unspoken. And it’s exactly that imbalance that kept me, for a long time, from noticing how much this lack of clarity on my part was really costing me - not only in Spain, but throughout all six of these years.
Why this happens
Many elements of this state of affairs were never explained or discussed at the very beginning - mistakes or gaps in clear communication. Sooner or later, this causes problems in relationships, and over time these become hard to straighten out, and sometimes even unpleasant.
Is this difficult? No. It requires openness, maturity, a clear way of communicating. All it takes is to ask: how much does my stay here cost, how much per day - and to value my own worth: how much does my work cost. Compare one against the other, determine what for what and how.
Does it have to be this way? Of course it does - if I want to avoid things left unsaid, and want clarity in life with others, but above all with myself.
I see now that this isn’t a one-off problem specific to this one situation in Spain - it’s a pattern that repeats across many of my relationships and projects. I start something with enthusiasm, with trust, assuming that somehow it will sort itself out along the way - and “somehow” almost never sorts itself out on its own. It waits for someone to name it out loud. And this time I want to be the one who does that first, instead of waiting for the lack of clarity to turn into resentment.
What won’t let me rest
This situation, this lesson, is something inside me that won’t let itself go unnoticed. It gives me no peace, no joy, it sits at the back of my mind, waits, builds up, weighs on my heart. And these decisions are like gates to another dimension, to another reality and another way of life. That’s maturity.
A dear friend of mine once told me, in a conversation, to allow myself abundance, to trust. But today I asked myself: who or what am I supposed to trust? God? Or maybe myself - and take a step forward, now, here, because after all, no other time exists.
I think that’s exactly what maturity is about - not having a ready answer to that question, but simply having the courage to ask it, and then taking a step before the answer becomes fully clear. Waiting for certainty is comfortable, but it’s exactly that waiting that keeps me in a place where uncertainty can pile up for years.
Healing
My friend told me that his passion, or purpose, is healing people. And after a month spent in this place, I see that I myself, with his help, have started to heal. One of the stages of that healing was understanding that my time and my skills are my fundamental value - one that genuinely reflects the current state of my life, where I am, what I have, and what my relationships with the people around me look like.
A state of having is a state of mind, because everything in my life is a direct reflection of my state of mind. If I decided within myself that I’m not worthy of abundance, or of anything at all, that state realizes itself in my life in line with my beliefs. If I hold different values within myself, those too must be realized, because that’s the eternal law of creation. So in this context, a change in my beliefs, and in the way I express them in my life, must result in a change in my surroundings and in the whole frame of my creation.
My friend was right - he helped me understand this precisely through the situation I found myself in, being in this space together with him. The lack of clear-cut agreements started to bother me, so that I could see it outside of myself, in my life. Now the question that remains is what I’ll do with all of this next.
Defense mechanism
I noticed a direct connection here to addictions. If I don’t want to move forward on some topic out of fear of the consequences, I subconsciously escape into tobacco or alcohol. That’s a defense mechanism, one that gives me a provisional sense of safety, based on the idea that what’s stable and known is safer than what’s unknown. In this case, the mind creates likely, hypothetical scenarios of the future - an image of the conversation, its consequences, and so on - to check whether there’s any threat coming out of it, and how to defend against the stressful moment ahead of time.
It’s the very same mechanism the whole piece started with - people escaping into addictions because the unknown seems more dangerous than the known, even when the known is destroying them. I see now that I don’t need to look for this far away, or in other people. It works exactly the same way in me, just in a different form - not in a bottle or a cigarette, but in postponing a conversation I’m afraid of.
Postponing the decision, the conversation, its consequences in time, and escaping the present moment into a momentary shift of consciousness through tobacco, alcohol, or even food - that is a subconscious escape from responsibility.
The conversation with my friend about valuation
I once asked him about this too - I told him I have trouble valuing my own worth, that I don’t know how to price myself or what I do. He suggested checking the market, using various AI models, for average prices for similar services in a given area. I considered that an idea I already knew, but the question still remains: okay, but how do I say this, so that the conversation is substantive, straight from the heart, and actually results in a clear situation.
Because a number alone won’t solve anything. I can know the average market rate down to the last coin and still not know how to sit across from another person and say it out loud. The market gives a reference point, but I’m the one who has to find the words - words that don’t sound like a demand or a reproach, but like what they really are: a request for shared clarity, between two people who care about the same place.
And so I come back to the same question I asked myself earlier: what I’ll do with all of this next.
Summary
I believe that this time and this place, and all the conversations with my friend, everything I heard from him, every word, every stage of my transformation, put together a plan for implementing my healing in such a way that my understanding came out into the open and allowed me to see clearly the weaknesses hidden within me, the dilemmas, the belief programs I can now work with openly, with an open heart. Time will tell what came out of it, but now I know that I was afraid of the conversation, afraid of stating my own worth and representing my own expectations.
I owe all of this to my friend, to this place and this time that brought me to these insights. I owe so much to others, which I keep saying, but mainly I owe all of this to myself - because it was I who dared to take this step, this understanding, these insights, this reaching into the depths of my own being, in order to accept and understand it.