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We live in an incredibly fast-paced, online world where it is so easy to confuse contact through texts – likes – attention – and status, for real connection and love.

The most powerful companies with the smartest people make us spend as much time as possible in their apps and platforms at all costs.

We are told from all sides that we need something outside of ourselves for an ultimate feeling of satisfaction. Attention. Consumption. Entertainment.

We get dopamine shots all day long. We are sleepwalking.

We so often live in fear and that limits what we can experience in our lives.

We hide away emotions, put on a mask, and something is brewing under the skin with which we actually begin to identify.

The negativity is getting stronger.

In compensation, we think that we will be happy when we get to a point in the future where we will have more of something like money, attention, status and stuff.

But it is never enough.

Image courtesy of stevecutts.com 

When you realize that whatever you achieve will never give you the ultimate satisfaction and lasting happiness you seek, you have to find a different way to solve this.

The era of superficiality is over

Always wanting to score more likes and followers is PASSÉ.

Needing attention and external appreciation is a thing of the PAST.

Empty statuses and hollow facades are OUT.

Power, control, coercion and obligation will get you NOWHERE.

Ego, self-centeredness and anything other than the truth is OLD FASHIONED.

The era of superficiality is over

A different wind is blowing in the world, with need of:

  • Self awareness
  • Real connection
  • Depth
  • Vulnerability
  • Authenticity
  • Sustainability

And in this – empathy, openness, the truth, daring to express love, and letting the heart speak – are: IN.

Would you like to...

be able to be present every moment and make conscious decisions with the right intention?

I’m Julian

Julian van der Wouden - Vita Florentis

I always wanted to become a pilot. And it worked out; I was able to fulfill my boyhood dream at a very young age.

But now I am an entrepreneur. Because there is something else, I have always wanted to achieve. Just as ambitious and much more important, and without needing a license.

Namely, living from the heart. Awareness of emotions; feeling and expressing, but not identifying with them. Vulnerability as a strength. Always putting the truth above discomfort and daring to be honest, even in socially challenging situations.

Not exactly something I did from a young age. Expressing emotions and letting them flow – from strength, self-awareness and gratitude – was not something very natural for me.

Terrified?

After I had seen an extraordinary documentary on the phenomenon of ‘coffin therapy’ in South Korea, I flew – as a passenger;) – to Seoul to experience it myself.

And in the 6-hour and confrontational seminar there, something changed.

You become liberated.

In the light of the end, you realize that you have nothing to lose. All facades and masks disappear. Everyone has to expose themselves. Gone are the ego and pride. Gone too is fear, for things that don’t matter in the end. What remains is your true self; and you can feel that in your heart.

The experience I had in South Korea, which is unique in the world, was so extraordinary to me that I wanted to make it accessible to everyone.

So, I bought six real coffins. Just like in South Korea. But people turned out to be TERRIFIED of coffins. Of course, no one likes death. So subconsciously, you want to stay away from it. It is just too confrontational.

It took me years to find the right form for this. Meanwhile, I was also hit hard financially by a series of earthquakes in a property project I had just started as a developer in Accra, Ghana.

That, plus naivety and blind faith in a business partner who also was a friend, meant that all the money I had saved all my life and invested in it over the years, plus borrowed money – all together more than half a million euro – had now suddenly completely evaporated…

Catastrophe.

But I never give up.

The person we want to be, we define in moments of challenge. Actions show which choice we have made. And that action requires a strong and conscious mindset.

All my life, I have been interested in personal development. In why we do what we do. How incredibly irrational our actions are and how you can train your mindset and behavior so that it serves you.

In the midst of all the setbacks, it motivated me to hear that more and more people said that I held up a mirror to them, which was something they found to be very inspiring and valuable. Because it allowed them to take the step in life they needed to take.

Through which I discovered that this is something that I seem to do naturally and learned:

“Your life is not about you.
Your life is about everyone else whose life you touch.”
Neale Donald Walsch

Until, over the years, I heard it so often that I simply could not ignore it any longer. It was as if the Universe insisted on it, while I actually preferred to stay in my comfort zone.

Like a Jonas who was eventually seized by the whale, I found the key in combining the two things together:

  1. The life-changing, unique experience in South Korea.
  2. My apparent talent as ‘Mr. Mirror’.

I have combined these two points and upgraded my special experience in South Korea to a much more accessible, but also more complete form, with a key role for real connection and integration in daily life.

And so, after a lot of hard work, patience, constant challenges but never giving up, Vita Florentis (Latin for: Flourishing Life ) – The Last Hour Experience was born.

A flourishing life is a conscious life. In which you grow, flourish and live life as you would again with conscious intention.

It is my calling to wake you up from this numb life of stimuli and patterns, and bring you back to what really matters.

An experience parallel to a methodology that is scientifically underpinned1&2 and amply supported in practice.2

The ultimate mirror:

The Last Hour Experience.

And I can’t wait to let you experience it too. Because it is very accessible, but it does go very deep. To the core. Like my experience in South Korea.

In THE LAST HOUR EXPERIENCE, I take you on a journey through your life: what if it really ended in an hour? What if this is your last hour? How have you lived then?

That requires being awake. To have a strong consciousness. To live presently and to be conscious of our time. To really do what we do with 100% conviction.

I want to help you with that awareness. And I am going to ask you some questions about your life.

Because if you don’t know what questions you will be asking yourself to evaluate at the end of your life, how can you live consciously and purposefully every day for what really matters?

It may be confronting for you. But it can also open your heart to all the beauty that life can offer you.

You do not have to go to South Korea for it. Nor do you have to undergo a 6-hour seminar in Korean, with a real coffin at the end. (And if you do want to experience a meditation in a real coffin, I would also like to hear from you. Because that would make you quite unique:)

But no, you can do it now, safe and comfortable behind your computer. I will guide you. Put in your earphones, or put on your headset, because I will talk you through it step by step.

All I ask of you is about an hour during which you can participate in peace, without being disturbed. Then it will be a special experience for you:

I do this by daring to confront you with the truth. You will look in the mirror of your own life.

The essence; your heart.

We break the biggest taboo: we begin with the end in mind.

We get the insight that all the love we really long for in the end is already present in us and it just wants to flow.

How? By the congruence of heart, body and mind. In other words: feeling, doing and mindset.

That ensures authenticity, live from the core of who you really are. Without being stuck in the past, an emphasis on the future, or acting out of fear.

But act with power from your heart. And that is only possible in the now.

As a result, we have such a strong YES that we can easily say no to all the irrelevant distractions in our path.

The experience saves you

  • ✗ Not saying what needs to be said in time. Not realizing it until it is too late
  • ✗ Stress, because you can see ‘the bigger picture’ from now on
  • ✗ Destructive conditionings, obsessions and patterns
  • ✗ Not knowing what you want and what is important in your life
  • ✗ Wasting the most precious thing you have –your time– on the wrong things

And this is what it gets you:

  • ✓ Invaluable self-insight
  • ✓ Knowing what you really want in life
  • ✓ Focus
  • ✓ A powerful lever to make decisions that you just can’t seem to get around to
  • ✓ Turning decisions into ACTION
  • ✓ Purposeful life every day for what really matters to you
  • ✓ A great ability to put things into perspective; better at zooming out
  • ✓ Seeing razor-sharp through the facade and all the noise and stimuli of life
  • ✓ Much more time, because you see the illusion of all superfluous things
  • ✓ Letting unimportant things (that seemed so important before) slip away, and thus significantly fewer worries and stresses
  • ✓ Living from gratitude
  • ✓ Inner peace; rest in yourself
  • ✓ A fully meaningful and flourishing life for you

Ok, how?

Simple. By clicking on the Experience button below. Because that is all there is to it.

I’m not going to ask you to leave your e-mail address here and then spam you every day. Like on every other ‘sales page’. I am not a fan of that either. And, like me, you receive more than enough e-mails (and stimuli) every day.

No, here on this page you see my product and my offer, and that’s it 🙂

An authentic offer from my heart, with the best intentions.

If you want to sleep on it, fine. Save it, and come back to this page when you are ready.

And if not; then it’s just not meant to be.

I know that sounds a bit rebellious but that’s who I am:) otherwise I couldn’t have made this for you.

But I challenge you seriously; the end does not always come when you are ready either. Not always. That is why I ask you; think carefully about my offer. Even if it is confronting for you. Especially when it confronting for you…

My offer:

  • ✓ Price: €97 for The Last Hour Experience; an investment in yourself
  • No strings attached; one-off so you are not tied to anything
  • ✓ I give you a money-back guarantee. Just send me an e-mail; I don’t make things difficult.

If you buy now, you can decide when you want to participate in your Last Hour Experience. It does not expire.

Remember: this life has a deadline. And your future is getting shorter and shorter.

Do you dare to confront it?

With yourself? With your own life so far?

ASK YOURSELF:

IF IT ENDS FOR YOU NOW, HAVE YOU LIVED WHAT YOU REALLY WANTED TO LIVE FOR?

BONUS:

After The Last Hour Experience:

  • ✓ VITA FOLLOW UP – “What Do I Really Want?” (e-book & audiobook)
  • ✓ VITA FLOW – 11 Invaluable Life Lessons (e-book & audiobook)

An approximately 1 hour-long digital workshop, in which you participate all by yourself, whenever it suits you.

I will guide you step by step through a reflection on your life. The experience will be framed as if it is your last hour alive. You will ask yourself: “how have I lived?”.

Put in your earplugs or put on your headset, make sure you cannot be disturbed for at least an hour, and you will have a special experience!

For anyone – age 18 to 99 – who wants to live consciously, who is interested in personal development, who would like to grow and who is not afraid to confront oneself.

This does not alter the fact that everyone can also have a unique personal motivation to participate.

For instance:

  • ✓ You are searching for what you really want in life.
  • ✓ You want to establish a deeper connection with yourself.
  • ✓ You want to overcome your fear of death, to stand more powerfully in life.
  • ✓ You want to be deeply connected with a terminally ill partner. To empathize with what it is like to have little time left and to come together more powerfully through shared understanding.
  • ✓ You want to prepare for your own death.
  • ✓ You want to be spiritually connected to a deceased loved one that you still think about every day.
  • ✓ You want to say goodbye to something or someone, which you have not managed well before. Really being able to let go.
  • ✓ You want to make a lasting change in your life and you are looking for a powerful and effective tool to do that.
  • ✓ You want to give your relationship a deeper, unique extra layer. (For couples who can talk openly about the theme of life & death.)
  • ✓ You don’t necessarily need the deeper dimension behind it. You do it mainly for the challenge and for an adventure. You want a special – even unique – experience: ‘do before you die’…
  • ✓ You have heard about it from other participants, or have been personally invited, and are curious to experience it yourself.

Every person can have their own unique motivation, just like every person will have their own unique perspective of the experience.

We are only satisfied if you are. There is a Money-back Guarantee on the course. Without difficult questions.

In other words, you are satisfied, or you get your money back. It’s that simple. Of course, I don’t think it’s happening, but if you’re even the slightest bit unsure about whether this will work for you, then you can now rest assured.

This is an online course. You can get started right away.

You have unlimited access. After your order you can start immediately. You will then always have access to log in to your account and read everything you want.

The experience of The Last Hour Experience itself is intended as a one-off event. As soon as you are all set and press the start button, it will start for you.

You determine that moment yourself, so even if you only want to start in a few months, or want to start the experience right away; it’s all possible without any problems.

You can make the experience as spiritual or religious as you want and even for those who don’t see themselves as ‘spiritual’, the experience can feel spiritually significant.

It seems as if more and more people are becoming ‘spiritual’ based on how often you hear this word. Since mindfulness has become an established phenomenon, this word has also become commonplace. It is derived from the Latin word ‘spiritus’ which means: (in the) spirit.

It’s a matter of semantic interpretation what that means. If you see the mind as a “life force” – the distinction between an inanimate body and a living human being – we are all “in spirit” and thus essentially all spiritual beings.

What is certain is that everyone has a different perspective when talking about a ‘spiritual experience’. It concerns the experience of one’s own mind, or one’s own consciousness, and is therefore often very personal, although spiritual experiences can also be shared.

How spirituality fits into the life and death theme of The Last Hour Experience:

No one knows for sure what exactly death means and where we go after death. Purely physical recycling of atoms into stardust, or a timeless first-class journey of the soul?

Looking at death from two sides:

  1. Saying goodbye to life.
  2. The question; where do we go – as in: our consciousness, our soul, or our spirit – when we have died and our body has become lifeless? ‘Is’ there anything at all after death, or is there just ‘nothing’.

The Last Hour Experience is largely about the first point.

Everyone has a personal belief about death, even if that is atheistic or agnostic, so we leave point 2 up to your interpretation.

The fact is that, no matter what we believe, we cannot be fully sure what is going to take place behind the real divide of life and death.

Saying goodbye to life is possible at the very end, at that limit, but who knows how much time we have been given and whether we will consciously get around to the final farewell? In fact, we say goodbye to life a little bit every day.

Goodbye sounds heavy, but it can just as well mean: celebrating life. Being aware, enjoying, experiencing, and living out of gratitude.

Because if we don’t consciously celebrate life, commemorate it through moments of silence, it becomes a hectic, colorless and monotonous whole. An empty life.

So that means life is balancing between two apparent contradictions.

Day after day, because you can hardly live every day as if it were your last, but also not pretend that you will have eternal life.

The same field of tension applies to life as a whole, because that is what life is: walking a tightrope between living and saying goodbye.

In The Last Hour Experience we apply death, which is – whether we like it or not – a fact of life, as an incentive to a very conscious life.

Conscious to the individual pixels of day-to-day life, but also for seeing the bigger picture. Because all those daily individual pixels ultimately form the image of your life as a whole.

Your life as the sum of your days. Your personality as the sum of your thoughts. Some nicer, some less. But the whole is what counts.

And during this life you can do a lot about how you will die later. Not even physically – although health and vitality obviously play a major role and the influence you undeniably have on it – but especially mentally.

How have you lived your life? How did you develop yourself? What memories did you leave behind? Who were you as a person on this earth?

Facing these kinds of questions, and feel – not just know, that’s intellectual – but consciously experience and appreciate that life in this form has an end, can be a spiritual experience for sure.

Then you will benefit a lot from it.

Make easy choices and you will usually have a difficult life. If you dare to make difficult choices that go outside your comfort zone, you will usually have an easier life.

You learn and grow and become stronger and more complete. Have more experience and references and can interpret and put things into perspective more quickly.

Paradoxical: by regularly stepping out of your comfort, your life will not only become more fun, but also really more ‘comfortable’. Because you are armed with an arsenal of experiences, problems become relatively much ‘easier’.

Problems become challenges that drive even more growth. You achieve things in life that you previously thought impossible.

If you continuously live limited with the unwillingness to go through temporary pain and always choose comfort – the easy way – you will not develop yourself into who you could become.

Difficulties are precisely what defines character and what shapes us. Not if everything always goes smoothly, or goes via the easy way.

It gives you self-insight about what life is really all about for you. And more importantly: it enables you to apply this knowledge.

This can give you the ‘solution’ for everything ranging from new insights in your life to avoiding regret at the end of your life.

Regret when it is too late. Regret for the things you should have done differently. Because you pursued the wrong things.

Out of ignorance, stuck in patterns, or dulled by comfort and numbed by an excess of stimuli and entertainment.

This regret may be the result of a deeper problem, namely: the link in your life between knowing and doing.

Only the latter leads to results. Knowing is relatively easy, but actually doing it – constructively and sustainably – is another.

Being really consistent, in a way that serves you and your environment, is the challenge of life.

Everyone wants the end result. But who wants to make the effort?

(…) to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know. Stephen Covey - The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

But it is even more: for much will surface that you know unconsciously, but not yet consciously. Because it was hidden away.

Underneath all the noise and stimuli of this noisy, fast-paced time.

In addition to a great willingness to take action, you will also gain valuable new self-insights.

Suddenly it is much easier to make choices. You can filter better and say ‘no’ to something with a smile, because you know you have a much stronger ‘YES’ to something that really matters to you.

Without fear of missing out.

All this in order to live now, as you would have done afterwards, and to avoid regretting it when there is no more time to do things differently.

When we say goodbye, we are of course first and foremost confronted with the farewell of a loved one. It’s about the life of that very person and saying goodbye to that one person.

And that brings out feelings…

But in addition, we often cannot escape the fact that two more things happen:

Seeing death literally stops us for a moment.
In the hubbub of everyday life, it confronts us with the finiteness of everything around us. We realize once again very clearly how transient and relative everything really is.

What are we always worried about?

In the face of the big things, our daily worries suddenly become futile.

But whatever happens and whoever falls away, no matter how great the pain; the world is always spinning.

And because everything is always in motion, including everything in ourselves, standing still is not an option. We have to move on. The insight of the relative often disappears quickly. Until we are stopped again…

The death of that loved one simultaneously holds up a mirror to us and confronts us with our own finiteness.
Because there is no distraction from a deceased person who deserves all the attention – after all, you are now central – we can use The Last Hour Experience to discuss these two aspects much more powerfully and give it the attention that this requires.

Our own life, and its deadline.

This purely personal application, without distraction from people around us, creates a very pure confrontation with yourself.

Suddenly there is silence and you look straight at yourself in the mirror.

What do you really live for?

Through this unprovoked confrontation, without a sad cause, you can go deeper and face and heal the fear that lies beneath each personal goodbye.

This ensures that the relative that we normally only see for a short period of time, is something we can continue to take with us. Not from a nihilistic perspective, but from a pure knowing; a keen awareness.

Every day and every moment being aware of the relative and at the same time doing the daily things with gratitude and conviction.

Seeing the world as a play in which we just play a role. The role of life that is assigned to us in the sense of the body in which we are born and in the given place, and the role that we ourselves interpret as actors of life.

A real goodbye indeed; not physically but mentally.

A farewell in the sense of mental detachment. Breaking free from fear and coming to the point under the daily emotions and thoughts. The omniscient consciousness within us. Under our ego and the limited vehicle that our body eventually turns out to be.

Combining that detachment with daily passion and love seems like a contradiction in terms.

Yet that is possible if we are aware of the temporary earthly life and can fully embrace that truth. In that knowledge, live our lives with passion from our hearts. But at the same time dare to say goodbye at any moment to everything that earthly life entails.

Because the things that really matter may transcend everything that death takes from us in the moment of physical goodbye.

Regret usually comes because we didn’t have enough action awareness and that insight is suddenly there later on.

The Last Hour Experience brings out that awareness in you. To the life of now. How? By shifting the context from the end to the present.

Regret can also relate to self-blame. The perfectionist variant of our moral conscience. The greater our idea of ​​the feasibility of man, the more we can blame ourselves.

Because: the more feasibility, the more possibilities, the more choice, the less happiness.

This causal connection is illustrated in a humorous but painfully confrontational way in the TED talk: ‘The Paradox of Choice’. In which psychologist Barry Schwartz shows that more choice increases our expectations to a point where they can only lead to disappointment.

In this day and age there is more choice than ever. Everything seems possible. All information is available in no time.

That applies to dating (apps) but also to what we want with our lives. Study, career, mean something for others.

Lots of choice can lead to stagnation; not choose at all because we are paralyzed by all the options. Sometimes it’s nice and easy when a decision is made for you

In addition, we are less likely to be satisfied, because satisfaction with a decision is reduced by the number of options that preceded that decision.

Apart from the fact that more choice leads to increased expectations, this is also because we now consider ourselves responsible. We made the decision ourselves.

This ensures that later on we will always be able to think gnawingly: “What would it have been like if….?” and: “There is probably a better option. Let’s search/swipe further for a moment.”

Is there something that can be done about this? Yes. Fortunately.

Everything starts with awareness. When we see the pitfalls above, we have knowledge and that gives us freedom of action.

We can then see that it is a choice which reasoning we normally follow fully automatically in our head, and link it to the (feasible) options that lie ahead of us.

Then we see that feasibility can very well in harmony with happiness.

That we do what we can do, but are also allowed to make mistakes. That everything is a learning process and the trick is to adapt to the circumstances in which we end up on our life path.

For this it is important to do the necessary self-reflection.

We offer you the pinnacle of this with the experience of The Last Hour Experience.

We all know: life can run totally unexpectedly. We plan everything and ‘would have liked to do so much more’ – later – but life sometimes determines something completely different.

We fooled ourselves.

Just an illusion.

The truth is that our life has a deadline, so the most precious thing we have is our time.

But we do everything we can to ignore our finitude here. Because it raises uncomfortable questions:

· What have you always wanted to do, but put off doing again and again?

· What unfinished business should you be taking up?

· Are you leaving something on the table in your life?

· Did you spend enough quality time with those you love?

· Who do you still owe a ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you’ to if you are being honest with yourself?

· Do you consistently do what really matters to you?

· How are you remembered? What will you leave behind?

Thinking about the finiteness of our physical life can sometimes frighten us.

But the truth is that accepting and embracing the deadline of this life can actually liberate you and make you more aware and happier.

In what way? By going back to the essence. Everything is already in you. All the happiness. Everything you long for. But because of the noise of everyday life, we forget it so easily.

Because constantly – through countless apps, the media channels and advertisements – we are told that we need something. Another purchase. More approval. Distraction. All in endless forms.

And that also works. Very briefly. But it’s just treating symptoms. And the danger is that it is so addictive that it keeps us away from what does work for us, and what really matters.

What we get in life will never make us truly happy. What matters is who we become along the way and what we share and give. Nobody can take that away from you and it gives lasting satisfaction.

Because when you feel good about yourself, live consciously and realise your own ambition and potential, it spreads like wildfire. Your positive energy affects all those around you!

Only then can you really make a difference. Sometimes just by your presence. You have much more influence than you think.

But then we need to know what matters. What makes us grow and consciously focus on that.

A life on autopilot – in fear of the truth and without clear intentions – will leave us stranded everywhere, except for what matters.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel yourself. I will take you step by step in an hour.

Only when you press “Start” do you put your hour into operation. The moment you have the peace for it and are mentally ready.

You can read why now, more than ever in this day and age, in Blog 3.

You can read the why behind the experience in Blog 4.

"Because (…) death helps to make a last hour infinitely meaningful" Søren Kierkegaard – Danish philosopher

¹ Schwörer, B., Krott, N. R., & Oettingen, G. (2020). Saying goodbye and saying it well: Consequences of a (not) well-rounded ending. Motivation Science, 6(1), 21–33. 

² Based on “Dignity therapy”, a form of therapy which has a fantastic research base and is widely applied in clinics. Click here for further explanation.

Source of quotes 1-4 from Kierkegaard in the FAQ pictures: see the bottom of the FAQ page

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