Your NameLourenço de Azevedo
Email Addresslourenco.azevedo@regenerar.pt
Cohort AssignmentCohort B (Americas, Online Intensive)
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?

After I started to study Chinese Medicine in 1998 and after some preliminar integration in the following 10 years by using its five main tools, Acupuncture, Massage, Herbs, Chi Kung and Diet along classes based on the Macrobiotic Philosophy I started a personal search in two paths: One for a healing language that could encompass a transcultural approach not only related to eastern cultures but a universal one and two the path of prevention.

This search got more and more tangible as in 2017 I published a book that merges the Chinese Classics regarding of life with the seasons, but using this principle of transcultural approach that can be read anywhere without any previous knowledge of the eastern culture. It sold so far 3500 copies.

This shifted my way of working and my interventions as keynote speaker and teacher as I traveled in the direction to answer some of this questions:

- How much it costs for an organism to stay alive, person, family, corporation, country, planet and how this process can be not only sustainable but regenerative?
- How can you delay as much as you can the second law of thermodynamics, that state that every closed system enters entropy, how can certain fresh information added to that system can make a diference?
- And how personal sustainability can create change in what environment you operate?
How can being sustainable by yourself you can contribute in the other spheres of your life?
- Can you build your own medicine and thrive? Can you teach it?
- ...

I created this name for my profession that is the sum of what I do now, but this profession doesn't exist Human Sustainability and Regeneration Advisor.

So my primary work is based on three fronts:

1. Consultations that aim to create an understanding and a curiosity for life that foster transformation.

2. Classes about the book and about how can you deal with some of the questions above.

3. As a side dish I started to develop a subscription based platform (in Portuguese) that offer to the user movement practices based on Chi Kung, Recipes plant based and seasonal and habits according to the seasons?.

2. What role do you see as yours to play?

I see my role as a facilitator in therms of resources, that I accumulated and intermingled in this more than 20 years and that I can provide. It goes form physical core resources, movement, diet and healthy habits to organisational resources and maps that can bring the subjects to a better understanding where they are and where they want to be in a more fulfilling way to their lives.

3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?

There is a missing link in therms of how this can be put to practice and served in a way that can be better absorbed.
This missing link in my part is lacking because of maps or language that still din't got to the transcultural point that I'm searching as explained above.

My path as been also a solitary path, some hundred students have been graduated from the Chinese medical school in Lisbon since the school exists and I've been the only one that doesn't practice massage or acupuncture as a profession and focused more in the prevention, food and movement. If this can seem utopia to my colleges ~ the prevention side, I believe that this is possible when I saw your course.

4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?

If before 1998, when I started to study Chinese Medicine (CM) I believed in a more schizophrenic way of being that you engage in several lives all in boxes, my search is that this boxes becomes more and more a unified landscape.

With CM I really found a way to merge what I do and what I am. My life and what I believe defines my work, and my work inspires me to be a better person.

We are five at home, me my wife and 3 children, 4, 13 and 15 years old. This is quite a community already. I know that it's not my words that make them change, but my actions, so I strive everyday to this coherence in body, mind and speech.

5. And for professional growth?

Working more in community and finding pears that can support each other, creating networks that can be pathways to share and create new combinations and collaboration of information and solutions that can benefit who search for them.

Also I can't make what I do profitable, I know I have knowledge, I have thousands of hours of learning and teaching in this more than 20 years, but I can't as a freelancer access my value, charge for it in a sustainable way, and transmit this need correctly, so there is here a quest for better communication of what I do and charge for my work, how I can deliver it honouring both sides? - Maybe because my profession doesn't exist đŸ˜‰. I feel that I'm closer and closer but not there yet.

6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?

Like I wrote in question 1 there is my Chinese Medicine (CM) background, that was expanded also with a Japanese Acupuncture post graduation and advanced studies, and the contact with some inspiring teachers in therms of Chi Kung, acupuncture and diet.

I only started study (CM) at 27 years old and before that I refused myself to enter any university because there was no subject that would draw my attention. I lived many lives until I got to CM that goes from analyst and programmer of computer systems, having a band and playing in bars, to middle school genitor and back pack traveler. To be honest I don't know what was most important, but every part of my life I feel that brought me to the next stage creating useful stepping stones to progress in life, this is still true now.

7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?

I've been educated in the Catholic religion, I even taught Sunday school after the mass. Then in the Chinese Medical School manly in the Chi Kung I met Taoist and Buddhist lineages and all that is associated with it. I tend to focus in classics like the Bible, The book of Tao, Buddhist Sutras, Yellow Emperor book of internal medicine, I Ching, Rumi, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Claude Larre, Elisabeth Rochat. Contemporary authors - Jon Kabatt Zin, Gabor Mate, Tich Nhat Han, Sam Harris and Seth Godin.

8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?

Writing a book about the seasons and investigate about them this last two decades I ended up connecting them with a way of self development as an exercise of understanding that impermanence exists and the tendency to observe this process as something I like or I don't like. I like cold weather but not warm weather, I enjoy the wind but not the moist...

There is this invitation to observe to develop equanimity about the processes of change that is in the seasons, but also in the human life seasons and even deeper at each moment as the four seasons rise and fall at every moment like a wave,

In human realm, traditionally it is said that we sign a contract with heaven before we are born.

In this contract it states what will be your role with humanity. It also states that if we honor that contract we will get heaven support that sponsor our ventures related with what we signed in, if we don't follow this contract we have no support from heaven.

We can have a glimpse of this contract when we do something that's easy for others but for us is hard - it's not then in our contract, maybe for someone else.

Or, we do something that for others is hard, but for us it looks easy - maybe that's our contract.

I believe that life is about finding this easiness in what you do, no matter if it looks awkward or hard from the outside.

If it brings you a smile on your face then keep going.

You see this with the runner's faces, some look that they are about to die and some they look that they are really playing and enjoying the process.

Humans play here the role of discovering themselves and understand what makes them align with their purpose and dream.

Date CreatedJanuary 17, 2023