I am OPTimist

byMonika Bravo

ArtsVisualReligionSpirituality

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 cu...

Episodes(40 episodes)

Four Questions and a Nap

Hey, I sat down and I wrote two articles a few days apart. Just when I was going to start recording, I’m like, “Mmm, this doesn’t feel right because there’s something that has shifted in me. Every time I want to say something, do something, or create an awareness of the relationship I’m having with the thing, situation, or person, I’m asking the same question:Is this solar? Is this coming from my heart? Does this need to be spoken? Does this need to be published?It’s not that I became a dou...

Published: Jul 25, 2026Duration: 8m 50s

An Ongoing Wavelength of Change

BE BOLD 7/13/2025I just woke up, but I have this sense that things are moving underneath and between. Whatever calm I thought that was, there is some turbulence underneath. One that shows me that indeed things are different, and more undulation calls me to surge again.This is between the real waves of the ocean hitting, the long ocean swell that leads me to adapt, to calibrate. Some of the tides are just moving along, so I am floating, surfing, yet I have to maneuver, step by step the wave of technological change, responding with...

Published: Jul 17, 2026Duration: 10m 5s

“In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.” -Italo Calvino, Invisible CitiesI woke up this morning with the word contingency in my mind. So after breathing a little bit, I started to decipher its etymology and the meaning of how this beautiful word, which root...

Published: Jul 10, 2026Duration: 4m 9s

THE AUTONOMOUS LOCAL ENGINE

BUILD ONCE, OWN FOREVERI am very excited to launch this today. It came to me unexpectedly, and now that I think about it, I have been building toward this for a while.THE SCOPEThis is a highly selective study group (or a self-study, or 1:1 option) of two to five people who want to build a local database and dashboard that runs entirely on their own hardware.This architecture operates on a low-time preference. Modern tokenized platforms charge you for every single query, action, and refresh...

Published: Jul 6, 2026Duration: 3m 51s

The bicentennial catholic nun

In 1976, I came to the United States of America to spend the summer. The funny part is that my mom, after my father died, decided to hire a Catholic nun from the United States. When I said “hire,” she actually sought an agency to see if there was a nun that could come and live in our house so we could practice English while my mother was working and would help us with our homework.Alas, that didn’t last very long because we drove the nun, Sister Mary Hubert, crazy. She was probably around 55 years...

Published: Jul 4, 2026Duration: 8m 53s

The body’s silence as whispers can be slightly heard.

IWhat we inherit from our family is not only material. It is the nervous system, the fear, the patterns carried in the body across generations.Giving the body enough space to feel them, making a different movement, and finding the order of love is how we begin to receive.IIWhen I am sleeping, I am not in my body. When I wake, I land softly. Looking around. Breathing. Feeling. Being.I know I have said very few things these days as these are emotional and body experiences.<...

Published: Jun 27, 2026Duration: 3m 29s

The Hungry Ghost Liberates Itself

There is a figure in Buddhist cosmology called the hungry ghost. It has a vast, distended stomach and a throat so narrow that nothing can pass through. It is always reaching, as it has never felt fed. I did not know for a long time that I had organized a significant portion of my relational life around that figure. This time the story shows the same wound from a different angle, the degree itself rather than only the pattern, and the figures who have stood on that degree before.I am very touched these days...

Published: Jun 21, 2026Duration: 23m 10s

Multiple Brains, Zero Subscriptions, one Artifact

There is a sense of freedom that connects everything that I create, which mirrors how I think, and what emerges belongs to me, running on my machine, answering to no one else.My telos is a local operating system that reflects my intelligence, my synthesis, my accumulated understanding across every domain I work in, maintained by my own hands.My methodology is low time preference applied to infrastructure. I invest the time once to understand and build something correctly, and then it runs at zero ongoing cost, zero dependency. The upfront cost is attention and...

Published: Jun 17, 2026Duration: 10m 20s

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 di...

Published: Jun 15, 2026Duration: 5m 19s

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

Published: Jun 6, 2026Duration: 11m 59s

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<...

Published: May 30, 2026Duration: 8m 16s

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...

Published: May 23, 2026Duration: 59s

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...

Published: May 11, 2026Duration: 13m 37s

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 Ga...

Published: May 6, 2026Duration: 13m 38s

"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...

Published: May 1, 2026Duration: 2m 18s

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...

Published: Apr 22, 2026Duration: 11m 46s

Aries stellium season is here; a rare concentration. The energy is intense, and so is the opportunity to observe the speed of things on a moment-to-moment basis. New Moon conjunct Chiron on the 17th, wishing you take space for your individual self as you integrate your peace within. Stability grounds through what you value, while crisis reveals where your leverage is thin, as it also shows where perfection is inexistent. The Fool moves with risk and rhythm, sometimes feeling butterflies in the stomach while leaning into the unknown and trusting it. I am sharing this beautiful song...

Published: Apr 15, 2026Duration: 8m 42s

The Shape of the Space I Did Not Know I Needed

What happens when you leave space for yourself? You don’t do it in just one day that you cross off the calendar and cancel your appointments, so you decide to go out for a walk and keep walking the whole day without caring about the things that you’re leaving behind. No. I mean something more profound than that. What happens if you take time and space for that part of yourself that didn’t even know it needed that space? It needed that time. What happens? Something marvelous happens.It feels like the space...

Published: Apr 9, 2026Duration: 15m 59s

Willfully Ignorant

We are in the age of new beginnings after the several new/full moons this year that announced both dissolutions and brand new pastures. Pair the eclipses, the equinox and with the Saturn and Neptune new cycle, the upcoming weeks will show us an opportunity to show up and finally step UP to our new individual ways.2027 is approaching and although it is not a prediction, ‘cause we are already wary of it, the cross of planning is closing. When Uranus finally enters Gemini at the end of April, and Jupiter moves to Leo this summer while th...

Published: Apr 6, 2026Duration: 29m 4s

Who is da fool?

## Core RealizationI saw the truth of my own delusion.I was projecting and I was having a relationship with my projection and with my own shadow. What I wanted, like the kind of relationship that I was expecting, is something that I created in my head.It was a transactional thing. It was me trying to equate everything that I poured into the relationship and say, hey, you're not doing your part.The big awakening came when I took away the light over the surface and switched the focus towards me.That was the shift!<...

Published: Apr 1, 2026Duration: 10m 0s