I queue like so many others. She barefoot. It is a long line of friends, grateful faces, welcomed glances, reconciled stories. Each of these people will receive a hug and a moment of hospitality.

An impression becomes certain: at the end of this long meeting with Daniel Lumera and the musicians  Manas Trayati , a “clean” energy has nourished the environment and its inhabitants of the moment.

His speech “Sound and breath in the practice of meditation” has just finished as part of the YogaFestival in Milan: Daniel Lumera , in fact, is an international reference in the practice of meditation . 

The study with Anthony Elenjimittan, direct disciple of Gandhi, soon led him to deepen the themes of education for awareness and cooperation for peace.

In 2013 he is the only Italian researcher selected to contribute to the publication of the World Report on Higher Education of the UNESCO Global University Network for Innovation . 

He is the creator of the International Day of Forgiveness , an initiative in line with the academic and social research activity and with the deep path of personal growth: hence the creation of the My Life Design method , an applied awareness training course to the school, hospital and prison world. Among his books, 21 days to be reborn , The way of lightness  and The cure of forgiveness . 

It’s time for both of us to put their shoes back on.

Care, diet, gift economy: does everything find an order?

I believe that well-being, health, passes through the understanding of a lifestyle that touches all aspects of experience-existence.

Let’s start from the concept of diet , indeed, of food: for many people it is simply a kilocalorie contained in a sandwich or in a pasta. But that’s not all. 

Foods are thoughts , foods are emotions and foods are relationships: certain relationships nourish us deeply. Thinking about food, let’s think about the diet: there are emotional diets, there are mental diets, there are relational, spiritual diets. 

And in the diet there are moments of fasting : silence, for example, is an important mental fast . Just as sometimes a relational or digital fast would be necessary to detoxify us from the media. The concept of food expands, pervades our life. Furthermore, food is also the light of the sun , therefore our relationship with nature. 

From here we can deduce that a person can also eat well, but if he then has terrible relationships, obsessive thoughts , he will not feel healthy anyway. 

Certain emotions such as constant anxiety , the feeling of helplessness, resentment, anger or feelings of guilt are not cured with the salad. I believe that a culture of awareness is needed : opening the mind to a new concept of well-being, of knowing how to live, reconsidering what quality of life is. 

There is a physical food, a vital energy food, a food related to the quality of our vital energy, an emotional food. We ask ourselves what emotions and feelings do we “eat” every day? Fear, resentment, resentment, anger and boredom or sympathy, empathy, gratitude, peace, happiness and joy? Are there these elements in our emotional diet? They should. 

Some emotions, however, seem to be suggested to us by the society in which we live.

This company sells happiness and sells joy , but what it actually sells is an ephemeral sense of fleeting satisfaction. It is not happiness that comes from being: it comes rather from having or not having, from doing or not being able to do, from appearing or not being able to appear. 

This is a fake food, it is as if I wanted homemade pasta and then I buy a sub-brand of a sub-brand of a radioactive Ukrainian flour substitute because they tell me that that is pasta. The same happens with happiness, they drugged us, massacred us . 

Happiness is a food that comes from the awareness that we are alive right now . From the miracle that we are irreproducible and unique should come a sense of enthusiasm, full happiness and joy.

These are superfoods that we should eat every day, but there is no education in awareness. 

A revolution in the concept of food.

One study (Bruce Tainio, 1992, Cheny State University, Washington, ed ) considers the vibratory frequency of the human body in relation to its health . The frequency of the human body in a healthy condition ranges from 53 to 73 Hz while when you get sick the frequencies are reduced, down to the zero of physical death.   

According to these data, foods can be detected according to the vibrations they emit : the meat would produce 0 vibrations; the products
of the earth from 0 to 15 Hz, with fruit from the tree you get to 30 Hz. Then there are foods with a very high frequency such as cocoa and algae, up to 300 Hz. 

Still, some studies have found that the body’s Hertz go down when you have a negative obsessive thought or when you have a negative emotion and when you are angry. We are working to rethink food in this key, high-vibration foods to rebalance dips : of course, it is a hypothesis on which to go with lead feet but it would revolutionize the concept of food: we would be more or less
vibrant people and we would tend to be people that vibrate in joy, in love, in forgiveness.

We will look for those vibrations through food, relationships, prayer, meditation and silences. We will look for contexts , then, to raise our vibrations and be happier. 

Can we imagine a society of forgiveness?

We have created the economic man , who must make profits and numbers at the expense of everything and everyone, the man who doesn’t care if he buys radioactive flour, as long as it costs less. This man has to make a profit.

This same man, on the other hand, could reverse the paradigm and create wealth starting from the quality of his own knowing how to give . The challenge is crazy: it is right to create prosperity, it is not wrong to live well, but the challenge is to create well-being starting from what it is worth, from how deep and powerful your knowing how to give is. Give time, space, friendship, intelligence, love, presence. This is the gift economy. 

An example that concerns me . I entered the prisons because I wanted to verify these words “The last will be the first.” I understood that this thing had to happen first of all in myself, who are the last for you, for me, in this moment? moment and put them first in your life, at least for a while, for a moment, and see what happens when you put the last ones first. 

When I entered the prisons I believed that I could teach these people something. Instead, the opposite happened. Different stories: of pedophiles, of murderers. I wondered who I am to condemn a person for an action that took place at a certain moment in his life. With the “Free inside” project we made ourselves available to these people , we meditated together, breathed together, forgave together. 

I am not in favor of punitive justice , punitive justice does not work, numerically it does not work and it has been demonstrated: the recidivism rate in Italy is very high, 7 out of 10 prisoners return to prison 4 to 10 times. What security are we talking about? We are not educating these people: just think that we spend around 140 euros per prisoner per day, of which only 11 for education. This is madness, especially when we are faced with stories of people raised in disadvantaged situations, life has already punished them and we continue to punish them. I am for reconciliation justice . 

You talk a lot about forgiveness. But what relationship do you have with the word “sorry”?

It is not so much the word, but how we inhabit every single word. We should be our words and instead I can now say “dear” and hate you.

Sorry and forgiveness are two wonderful words in my opinion . Apologizing puts you in a position of availability, the moment I ask you for forgiveness I tell you “I put myself in your hands”; and it is a gesture of reciprocity, of admission, where the fact of having made a mistake is no longer important. Yes, I am telling you that I was wrong and I am also telling you that all in all making mistakes is good. 

It depends on what we make of the mistake. If the mistake becomes an opportunity for
growth, that mistake becomes blessed . We learn wrong, error is part of evolution. Asking forgiveness, I am asking you if we want to make this mistake a reason for union and growth together. Sorry is a poem .  

Your hardest forgiveness?

I got to know him very deeply in 2005 because everything collapsed: my relationship, they fired me, I had to close a training center, I got sick and friends – because I was depressed – isolated me. 

I was living in a state of extreme pain and the more I tried to get out of it, the more gangrenous everything got. I thought I’d never get out of it again. But one night I did a very powerful thing . 

I sat in my meditation room: I had never done such a thing and I began to thank the pain , to thank the loneliness, I thanked my very deep sense of helplessness. 
I kept saying thank you by asking “I don’t understand why you are here, but I understand that there must surely be a reason for my highest good and I want to trust in life”. Always addressing this pain I continued “Do you want to stay here forever? I welcome you, I accept you and I say thank you ”.

Then I started crying like a baby and forgiving myself because in life I had rejected the pain . I had refused death, I was not living. I had to decide whether to live angry, pissed off with life and with God, or to give thanks.

Saint Francis teaches this, he went to a rich and opulent church and asked for permission to be poor. What a revolutionary figure this person is! Forgiveness is a universal, millennial value : I studied it in Catholicism but also in Vedic culture, there are expressions of forgiveness in the Indians of Brazil, there are traces of forgiveness that are 4,000 years old, 2,000 before the Judeo-Christian culture . For this reason, I think it is still worth investigating.