Name: Vasilina Orlova: On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
Uploaded: 2024-05-07T23:59:22.930Z
Duration: 18 min 9 s

The works that are centuries-old might not be the ones to which we turn in our daily troubles or for the last insights into how to live our lives. However, such works can also be a source of consolation. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca has been an extremely influential text that amassed libraries of interpretations and influenced every vein of thinking from Stoics to nihilists and from anarchists to libertarians. Can we be so bold and naive as to attempt a reading of Seneca's work today and perhaps even derive something from ourselves from it? I would argue yes; influential and old treatises are as open to a new interpretation as the latest bit of the breaking news.
The worldview in On the Shortness of Life is perhaps negativist in many respects, but it can also be liberating. For example, the remembrance of our own mortality is what gives us the freedom to ground ourselves in the present moment. Remembering our mortality frees us from the considerations of what is to come in the future and from the obsessions with the past. Seeing that the current moment is the only moment for us in which the action is possible, we can interrupt the determinism of our own thought and step into an uncharted territory.
On the Shortness of Life is also potentially frees us from the idea that we must chase success, seize the day, evade the fear of missing out by always being in the heat of the moment. After all if whether you seize the day or not, the day passes regardless, then what is the point of chasing the opportunity? The idea of the fleetingness of our pursuits and their ultimate futility can be antithetical to the post-protestant ethics of working, getting things done, checking the boxes with marks, and attaining goals. However, at the same time, the recognition of the fleetingness of the moment can also be paradoxically freeing. Perhaps ultimately, the elusive happiness does not depend on one's accomplishments but rather on a sense of being content with the remembrance of one's mortality.
https://youtu.be/kCdg8LwJHeQ
#Seneca #consolationofphilosophy #coaching #lifecoaching 
You can book a session with me here: https://tl.page/vasilina-or

Life Coaching

I am a life-long student who is on a way to discovery, and I love to share these discoveries with others. Born in Russia, I have lived in London and currently live in New York City. I have moved through countries and continents while amassing degrees and writings, and I have published the work about my journey in Russian and in English. As an anthropologist, I was always curious about people and the way they live. I have taught introduction of anthropology, expressive culture, and photography courses in academia as either a teaching assistant or assistant instructor. I am teaching creative writing now. I have learned how to inspire and be inspired through a continuous journey of teaching, writing, and learning. In our life coaching sessions, we will be reading, writing, talking, and discovering things about ourselves and our goals in life.

Vasilina Orlova: On the Shortness of Life, Seneca

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The better you know what you want in life, the greater are the chances you will get exactly what you want. Overcoming setbacks and becoming the freer and happier version of yourself could be done in a helpful conversation with a life coach. The areas I am specializing in are the struggles of academy, breakup, how to learn from a breakup, de-cluttering, and unleashing creativity in writing and art.

Some of the works I have enjoyed over the years are Esther Perel, Marie Kondo, and Jennice Valhauer. Allowing the insights of these and other brilliant thinkers into your life with a life coach guiding you through discovery would be beneficial to everyone.

I have a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology, with a specific interest in auto-ethnography. I am currently teaching creative writing, specifically, auto-fiction, in the Creative Writing School online (in Russian). Part of my work is helping to unleash creativity in people. Writing is a part of what we do, as writing can be liberating and helpful. Doing art is another part of what we are doing on our journey. In conclusion, I work to help minds in art, psychology, and relationships.

I had an excellent experience learning from Vasilina how to improve my writing process, and in starting out on a new chapter. She is attentive and experienced with many aspects of writing. I would recommend her services highly. 

New video: https://youtu.be/bz74-Jrdxjo
For a writer, publishing their works is extremely important. No matter what genre you work in, no matter whether you write fiction or non-fiction, poetry, or anything else, the only way to go to the reader is by getting your writing published. Publishing the works can be compared with the process of making the water boil, where one globe of air is one publication. The coming into being as a writer (or anyone else, for that matter) depends on whether you can make the water boil--have enough publications, media appearances, mentions, or what counts--events that constitute you as a professional when it comes to public professions, writer being one of them. For an actor, a globe of air in boiling water would be an appearance in a film, for an artist, an exhibition, and for the writer, such an event is a publication.
The process of publishing your stuff involves rejections, and sometimes, the process involves a lot of rejections. Lucky writers can escape that, and in fact many would boast that their period of rejections was either insignificant or even absent. However, many, including uber-successful writers, such as J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, told us the stories of their rejections. And in the current world, I would assume most writers probably go through at least a short period of rejections, or can recall rejections they received. When I say current world, I refer mostly to the process of submission of writing and receiving feedback, that is currently transformed due to technology, less interpersonal, potentially allows for more submissions (compare the need to type a physical copy and uploading an electronic file into a system). But as submissions have the capacity to increase, I would assume that the rate of rejections is also increased, or at least it is high.
In other words, most writers face rejections, and whether they can "make it" as a writer often depends on whether or not they are capable to withstand the initial barrage of rejections. When we receive rejections, we tend to not tell ourselves "this writing might benefit from more work" but rather "I am not a good enough writer." "I am not a good enough writer" is an absolutist thinking that does not particularly help a writer to advance. Encountering rejections, dealing with them in a constructive way, using them to improve your writing, using the negative feedback to improve your writing and ultimately continuing to write is something one can wish upon young writers. I am a firm believer that whether or not writing projects come into being (whether they are published) depends mostly on the time and effort you are willing and are able to devote to them. Often, a writing project is a lifetime endeavor: publication is not the end of the life of a writing project, after publication comes conversation, presentations of your book, further advocacy for your work and for your cause, but that is a topic for another conversation.
I keep my time open to those who want to work on their writing projects with me as a coach; https://tl.page/vasilina-or is the link on TakeLessons where you can book a session with yours truly. I must say I enjoy greatly working with writers, and I am proud of the progress writers make. Sometimes even in awe as to how people advance their projects when they are just given a little bit of a space to talk about it. I am hoping you are having a great day, and you are in a safe space mentally, spiritually, and psychically. Take a good care of yourself, and I'll see you in my next video.
#writing #coaching #coach #lifecoach #writingcoach

Vasilina Orlova: Rejections and Publishing Your Stuff, Writers and Rejections

In this video, I give a brief overview of how I am related to academia before outlining some of the difficulties that academia usually entails and then I speak about these difficulties: https://youtu.be/C9SFhwPAzFg Among potential difficulties in living around and being in academia are tight timelines, demands to be productive, rigid genres of academic article or grant proposal, the possibility of some toxicity accumulated over the years in various encounters as related to writing especially, but also in all sorts of ways, burnout, tight budgets, being in a situation of delayed adulting / protracted status of the student. I generally had a very happy experience in academia, thanks to my peers and professors, and I hope more people can say the same about themselves than not. However, our collective experiences of excitements and discoveries, reading and writing do not diminish the circumstances of the outside world. To such circumstances of the outside world, I relegate the changes that academia is currently undergoing.
The academy has arguably never been a place of meritocracy; I can understand and acknowledge this even if the academy treated me favorably. By the changes academia is undergoing, I mean that academia objectively produces many more academics qualified to do the job than there are places for academics out there, be it teaching or research positions. Additionally, the tendency that is part of the changes in academia is a growing reliance on temporary contracts rather than long-term commitments to scholars. Of course, in an over-saturated market, the employer has a possibility to choose between a wide range of freshly minted Ph.D.s who want to make a career in academia. One of the choices being routinely made is universities hiring for temporary contracts of one-three years with few possibilities of continuing.
However, assuming that an academic who has just gone through highly theoretical training and made themselves aware of the extensive literatures on highly obscure topics will have a lot of choices outside of academia, or that these choices will be as satisfying as imaginary professorship position, is also a fallacy. More often than not, a path to a new you even with those much touted "transferable skills" that in reality are not so transferable is a convoluted path. "How to become a writer or a scholar you wish to become?" is one of the questions I open my time for discussing with you on an individual basis. Some are thinking about leaving academia in this moment, and some are thinking about committing to it more fully, which probably means a path of extensive writing. You can book a session with me to talk about your personal trajectory here: https://tl.page/vasilina-or - I do coaching in various areas. The areas I previously outlined are my approaches to writing, decluttering, and breakup, and this is finally the video about my fourth direction in coaching, the video about my approach to coaching in academia. I am hoping you are having a great day, and you are in a good place mentally, psychically, and spiritually. Feel free to connect, like and comment on my video; this way I know that it makes sense for me to record more. Love y'all!

Vasilina Orlova: Academia Coaching

I am continuing outlining my approaches to coaching in the areas that interest me. My current areas of interest are unleashing creativity in writing and art, decluttering, breakup, and academia. I have already uploaded first videos on unlocking creativity in writing and art and on decluttering. The current video is devoted to my approach to the breakup: https://youtu.be/G4SekZC0vxw 
My approach to a breakup is that the goal of our engagement is to assist you in returning to your autonomy. To return to your autonomy, I propose to be doing the following: make somebody a witness to your pain and do a lot of journaling. We need to accept that every emotional pain requires a lot of time. No skipping of some stages are possible. Ways to speed out the emotional recovery exist, and they include sharing your pain with a witness and a journal. To experience pain for about two years after the breakup is normal. Roland Barthes kept his Diary of Mourning, writing every day about the death of his mother, for two years. 
At the moment of breakup, a person experiences a lot of pain that is coming from a lot of different sources. Some of the sources of pain are a primordial horror of being ostracized by the society. Other sources of pain are the imaginary worlds of the future that were supposed to be unfolding from a relationship. Yet the other sources of pain are all other experienced rejections, including professional rejections, that are coming together as an avalanche at the moment of the breakup. All these sources contribute to the pain of the moment.
I invite you to share your journey with me at https://tl.page/vasilina-or - as a coach, I strive to be ethical at all times and preserve confidentiality of my clients. If I sense that you require an attention of a therapist, I will refer you to a therapist. My viewers and readers are the active co-creators of my content: by the amount of attention, I measure how important or interesting a topic is, and how much it is of help to others. For me, currently, it is important to know that what I am doing is helpful to others, so if you feel like this video is helpful, like my video and subscribe to my channel. Thank you for all your attention; I greatly appreciate it, and I hope you are having a great day! I will see you in my other video, hopefully in a week.

Vasilina Orlova: Breakup is a Form of Heartbreak

Dear friends, I am aiming to post a video a week, and my new video is about unlocking creativity in art: https://youtu.be/LPYrbwS-yW8 I am sharing details about my own art preparation and what I learned from it. One of my teachers was Luydmila Skubko-Karpas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Skubko-Karpas - a marvelous and underappreciated artist who lived in Russia and had a period of emigration in France. I have not mentioned it in the video, but she taught me to lose the edges of the objects while painting and sometimes even while drawing. Objects do not have to have clearly defined edges; they can dissipate into the room and blend in.

I have not had a systematic training and art, and, like many artists, I am facing and confronting a lack of my technical skills while painting. However, I would argue that our technical deficiencies are not the reason to quit doing art and deprive ourselves from the enjoyment that the art could bring. We often approach art from the place of unrealistic expectations about ourselves, whereas a greater and a more productive way would be to approach art from the place of humility. At the same time, lack of skills does not mean that we cannot say a new word in art; after all, contemporary art could take an infinite number of forms. You are allowed to lavishly borrow from recognized masters, such as Matisse or Rothko. If you say that what you do is art, there is no higher authority in the world that has a word over what you are doing. Nobody is better positioned to declare that what the artist is doing is art than the artist, and nobody can tell the artist that what they are doing is not art.

Art can be very prohibitive in terms of skills, time and effort that are required to learn how to art, and also due to the high prices on the good materials. The thing that I learned in Andriyaka Watercolor School is that, paradoxically, the poorer is the quality of the materials that the artist is using, the greater must be the skills to compensate for the poor quality of the materials. For example, it is important what kind of paper you are using to do your watercolor on, unlike with writing, for which you could use about any napkin. Of course, if you are a genius (and I am not saying you are not), you could get away with whatever. However, if you are an artist seeking to enter that state of mind where you think of yourself as an artist without much of an inner conflict, you would do well obtaining quality materials for your art from the beginning.

Other tips are the same that I described in my video on writing: allow yourself to write/paint, seek the company of those who paint/write, do not make writing or painting into a choir but nevertheless do it regularly, do an exhibition/publish your stuff, and so on. I am offering my time for those who might want or need my one-on-one assistance; you can book a session with me at https://tl.page/vasilina-or to work on your projects and on unleashing your creativity in a more focused manner. I think everyone has an unlimited potential to be creative.

Like my video and subscribe to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/vasssilina

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn as well: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasilinaorlova/

I hope you are having a great day!

#art #creativity #lifecoach #unlockingcreativity

Vasilina Orlova: Let Us Have Our Share Of Joy By Doing Art

In my new video, I am thinking through the importance of the creation of the archive for a writer. To partly summarize and partly expand on what I was saying, writer creates an archive throughout his or her life. We only know the writer from what the writer publishes. We cannot have access to all the insights that the writer does not publish. Archive is hidden from us, but the writer can return to the archive and revisit the writing.

https://youtu.be/JnxqTHCCK8s

Often, contemporary writers produce an endless stream of first drafts that they publish instantaneously on social media. We are hoping that our next first draft is going to be magically better than our previous first draft. However, if improvement is happening by producing an endless stream of first drafts at all, then such an improvement is slow and accrues over a great period of time. By contrast, writing is more efficiently perfected by revisiting the first draft and making a second draft out of the first draft. The more time we can return to the same draft and fix infelicities, the better is the result.

A lot of writers find their first drafts hideous and are prone to the wishes to destroy the first drafts or tack them away from view. The produced writing will benefit if the writer returns to it and works with it. Some things that make you cringe in your writing can be struck down. Other things that you like about your writing can be left as is. You can build on what you like. You can get rid of what you don't like. These things may sound simple, yet sometimes even more experienced writers overlook them, I find from my observations.

You can book a session with me at https://tl.page/vasilina-or to work on your writing project in a more focused manner.

Like my video and subscribe to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/vasssilina

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn as well: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasilinaorlova/

#writing #writingcoach #lifecoach #editing

Vasilina Orlova: The Archive of the Writer and the Importance of Keeping the First Draft

Decluttering: Why to Declutter and What is Clutter.

I was inspired by the talk by David Kessler I just attended to finally record the video I was going to record for several weeks now about why it is important to declutter and bring order into your space. I hope you enjoy it.

https://youtu.be/JKUTeb8v9oQ

I am sharing some of my thoughts about decluttering and the space where we are living. The key ideas are that decluttering is counter-intuitive because from the time immemorial people tried to keep and acquire possession, rather than getting rid of them. However, our possessions, the things we surround ourselves with, the objects act upon us. They affect us. Therefore, we must control what is getting into our circle of attention.

Intricate storage systems are not the answer, as Marie Kondo would insist, rightly. Storage is not an alternative to discarding things. Not only organized storage takes roughly the same space that the not tightly organized things take, but creating the storage also takes your time. Time is the most important things that we have. Objects and taking care of them are not more important than our time.

One of the points that I am making is that decluttering does not have to lead to minimalism. While minimalism as an interior style steers off clutter, having things does not constitute clutter by default. The dead unusable matter, an agglomerate of things that dissipates into the noise somewhere in the corners are clutter. Things that bring you joy aren’t clutter, even if you have a lot of those things. Some things we have to have, such as books, but to have necessary books we must also have space for the books.

Other works I mentioned: Nagisa Tatsumi The Art of Discarding and Jordan Peterson Twelve Rules for Life. Thank you for your attention. Let me know what you think; like my video or comment if you feel like we need to continue exploring the topic. As I said, what I pay more attention to will partially depend on you. If you are inspired by the idea of decluttering, you can book a session with me at https://tl.page/vasilina-or I am looking forward to seeing you again. I am enjoying recording these videos, and I hope you are enjoying your day. 

Vasilina Orlova: Decluttering

In Order to Have Something Written You Have to Know What You Are Writing: https://youtu.be/6lE_OqceJsg

In continuation to our previous video (https://youtu.be/bfhOOQiA7HU), I am offering to writers to think about what they are writing. Rather than writing a chain of notes on social media or in a journal, we can think about our work as a work that has a certain design. For a novel, you have to think through a set of different questions than a set of questions to think through when you are writing a non-fiction project.

Some of the questions that the author would benefit from asking while writing fiction are: what characteristics does the character have? What does the character go through? What changes occur to them? What is their conflict, and how does the conflict culminates? What would be the resolution of the conflict? What is a broader message that you want to send to the world?

Some of the questions that the author would benefit from asking while writing non-fiction are: what is my research question? What is the significance of me answering this research question for others? What is at stake of me answering (or not answering) this question to humanity? What is the answer to this question? What hypothesis am I defending? What kind of evidence do I use to bolster my argument and make my case? If you are writing fiction, you are not going to write non-fiction, and when you are writing non-fiction, you are not (well, hopefully) going to end up with fiction.

Certainly overlaps between fiction and non-fiction exist, but the overlaps are a topic for a separate conversation. If differences between forms and genres of writing sound like a too serious commitment, continuing taking notes and deriving joy from notes are valid. Let us reaffirm all sorts of writing. However, in order to have something written you have to know what you are writing and commit to returning to that file.

Book a session with me to explore what you want to write at https://tl.page/vasilina-or - I can walk you step by step from the idea to publication. The algorithms exist, and they are known. We don’t have to reinvent anything, we can simply avail ourselves to what is already out there. Like this video, leave me a comment, and feel free to subscribe to the channel. I am hoping to record a video on decluttering soon, in the fulfillment of my initial idea to offer coaching on unleashing creativity, decluttering, and breakup. And academia! I did not mention academia in my opening video on life coaching, but I want to include academia as a venue for an exploration. Later, I will narrow down the number of topics, once I understand which ones are of more interest to others. I want my life coaching endeavor to be people-driven. People have a voice here. See you!


In Order to Have Something Written You Have to Know What You Are Writing

This video is going into the realm of tips on how to write. To summarize, clarify, and expand on what was said, 
1) consider writing and editing to be two separate tasks; you have to allow yourself to write and suspend your inner critic; you cannot edit while writing - I mean, you can, but better to avoid editing while writing. You can edit later. 
2) to get a motivation to write, you have to become a part of writing community. The writing community does not have to be face to face or in person and can be half imaginary or even consist of you twenty years later, but the writing community has to exist. 
3) to write, you have to read. There is no way around reading. Reading does not have to be a daunting part; you can read what you like. 
4) writing is the only thing that opens doors, apart from resources that we might not possess, such as money and connections. Therefore, it is helpful to get into a habit of writing.

#unleashingcreativity #writing #howtowrite #creativewriting

Vasilina Orlova: How to Write

I opened my time to people, and I am inviting you to book a life coaching session with me on the website Take Lessons https://tl.page/vasilina-or - it can be online, and it could be in person if you are in New York.

The areas of interest right now for myself as a coach are: 

1. Decluttering (Mary Condo is a big name here, and I do recommend her first two books); 
2. Relationships and, in particular, breakup; 
and 
3. Unleashing creativity.

I might lean into one of these first identified directions as we continue a conversation into this direction.

In the video, I touch upon how life coaching is different from mental health counseling field. I am currently pursuing my master's degree in mental health counseling, in addition to my previous degrees. There are considerable differences between mental health counseling and life coaching, and I am not touching on each aspect, merely acknowledge that there are differences.

Vasilina O.

Vasilina Orlova: On the Shortness of Life, Seneca

Vasilina's Life Coaching videos