Bear Talk

You never truly understand what life feels like or could possibly offer until you’ve experienced death.  Sure, it isn’t the most pleasant topic to talk about, but let’s face it: Isn’t death inevitable? For each and every one of us?  Unfortunately, one of our dear family members passed away not too long ago - and we were shocked. How can someone be so full of life one day and suddenly be struck by death on another? It seemed so random...and so unfair. But we realized, that’s how life is.  So it made us wonder, what would happen if one of us actually died? In this podcast, we talk deeply about death and why it’s so important to embrace it. Because not only does it make you appreciate the life you’re living, but it also makes you become even more determined to live it well. 

Gender stereotypes suck.  Why should women sacrifice their freedom and independence to become housewives? 

Why should men be criticized for expressing their feelings and emotions?  Why should we feel pressured, every single day, to fit in with what we don’t really believe in? It doesn’t make any of us feel any better about the life we chose to live, which is why we’ve decided to question these gender stereotypes. After all, we believe that everyone deserves to be happy and to live freely without being judged.  And we hope that, by sharing our past and self-development, you’ll be able to see a greater opportunity to becoming even happier and fulfilled - that’s if you decide to take on and challenge these existing gender roles and expectations. 

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been getting better and better at balancing our lives together - making time to relax, making time to learn, working on our own projects, working on our projects, spending time with family, getting in a good sweat. But we weren’t always like this.  Somewhere, somehow, we’ve stumbled across the idea of setting a system to manage our day-to-day lives. It might seem restrictive, you might say, but actually it has brought us more satisfaction and free time (strange how that works, huh?) than we had anticipated…just because we’ve done what we needed done.  And so, in this podcast, we’ll talk about how we set up systems to make sure we’re both headed in the right direction. This is something we’re still hashing out with each other - it’s not solid yet - but at least you’ll get to see, in real time, how we work with each other towards setting a system that’d help strengthen our relationship further. 

10 years ago, we were naive.  We thought by being in a relationship, you had to sacrifice most of yourself - including your dreams and desires - to make your partner happy, to love them no matter what. But after going through a few stressful years of self-disappointment and dissatisfaction, we realized this wasn’t right. Relationships shouldn’t be skewed to one person’s happiness, it should be equal. And so, in this podcast, we talk about how we overcame our past relationship struggles by sharing with each other what we believe (and have done that) could lead to a healthy and happy relationship: Making time for each other, learning something new, coming up with surprises (small gratitude notes, flowers, gifts)…there’s more but this is just the start.

If there’s anything we wish we could’ve cultivated early on, it would’ve been self-awareness.  Why? 
Well…if you can stop yourself midway to ask why you feel a certain way, why you believe in what you believe and do what you do, you can then move forward towards becoming a better person, because by then, you’d already know what you need to work on and how you’d like to live your life. \ But how does one build self-awareness in the first place? In this podcast, we talk about a few ways of building self-awareness by combing through our past and pinpointing certain moments and experiences that’ve helped realize who we could be. Our favorites include: asking why, meditating, reading books, journaling/writing a diary.   If you have any other ones that’ve helped you become more aware, please let us know - we’d love to give it a try. :) 

We traveled around Southeast Asia for 3 years - 2 years alone, 1 year together - hoping it would resolve the stress and unhappiness we had felt living to society’s expectations. It did. But somewhere along the way, we discovered something far more important: Traveling isn’t an escape, it’s a journey that changes you.    It makes you realize that there’re millions of opportunities living another lifestyle, that you can feel fulfilled despite not having much, that the majority of people are kinder than you think. We’re very grateful to have learned so much about the world, about ourselves, that we believe traveling is something everyone should do more often - not just because it would widen your perspective but because it would give you a sense of inner peace, something we all want but something we all struggle achieving.

It’s been three years since we started doing intermittent fasting, and while it’s been a difficult journey trying to get our minds and bodies used to eating during certain hours of the day, we feel great!  We have more energy. We have more time. We’re more resilient to hunger. But the most important reason why we both do intermittent fasting is because we want to stay young longer and to train our minds to adapt quickly to difficult conditions.  Studies show that when you put your body under stress (like intermittent fasting, high-intensity exercises or cold showers), you force your body to remove weak and damaged mitochondria - the powerhouses of the cell - and create new stronger ones. And when your mitochondria are in top shape, you live and look longer.  Isn’t that what we all want?  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What kind of intermittent fasting do you guys do? 
 16:8 intermittent fasting. We fast for 16 hours and eat for 8 hours. 

When do you eat? 
12-8pm Do you workout while fasting? Yes! It’s actually best to workout during your fast because it forces your body to access fat stores for energy and autophagy - the body’s way of cleaning out damaged cells and proteins in order to regenerate newer, healthier ones.  What do you eat during intermittent fasting? Anything, really. This isn’t a diet to us; it’s a lifestyle where we could eat whatever we like as long as it’s within our 8-hour feeding window.  If you have questions about intermittent fasting or would like to know more about our experiences with IF, just email us: [email protected]

When people try to imagine what minimalism is like, they often think about throwing away 95% of their stuff, having one of everything (from chairs to cups to spoons), or using the cheapest option for their everyday needs.    But that’s not how we see it. Minimalism, to us, is a lifestyle. It’s about cultivating a sense of fulfillment and peace of mind when we invest in things that we truly enjoy and feel is worth the money. It’s about enhancing the quality of our life, each and every time we get the chance to spend on higher quality things. Less is more, and we’re both grateful to have experienced what it feels to be a minimalist.    If you want to know what it’s like to be a minimalist, try tossing away five things of your choice and spend more money on something that you really want, that you think will enhance the quality of your life.    Give that a shot and see how it feels.

We love kids, but we don’t plan on having one any time soon. It’s not because we’re scared of going to the hospital during this pandemic and getting possibly infected or because we don’t have enough money to raise one, but it’s mostly because we’re not ready. Many of us tend to have kids just because it’s expected of us, because we’re getting old and it might be too late.   But the thing about having kids is that it’s a HUGE life decision, more so than getting a permanent tattoo or getting married. Because once you have them, once they’re released into the world, you can’t ever take it back or revert to the way your life was.    Right now, we’re both trying to live each day to our fullest, discovering along the way who we are, who we could be, and the potential we have within. Until we’re accomplished what we’ve set ourselves to do, we won’t be having kids.   But we’re hoping one day, we will.

In this podcast episode, because of this whole Corona virus pandemic, we wanted to talk about family - why they matter even more, what we'd do for them and our own little ways of showing love towards them. It's something we haven't really discussed with others, other than ourselves, but we're hoping by being transparent on this podcast with each other, our family will see what they really mean to us.  On another note, thank you AGAIN to mom and dad for giving us this opportunity to run our first REAL podcast. Having better mics makes the world's difference, and being able to talk about how we feel about family and getting married a few days before lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic was a ton of fun. These kind of conversations happen naturally between ourselves all the time, so being able to turn it into a podcast to share with others is something we're super excited we get to do.