by Anton Ivanov
My ninety-day daily practice with the four temples has a prehistory, and in it I planted the seed of the version of myself I live in now. Everything began in 2014, after my bankruptcy and my return to Bulgaria, and it goes on to this day. In that period, close to ten months, I had enough time to look back over the life that had brought me there.
Later I wrote a novel about four people who do what I did, only in ninety days and with a map I did not have. Alex is a fitness coach with a strong body and an empty home. Elina is an empath who feels everyone except herself. Victor is a CEO with panic attacks he hides behind forecasts. Sofia is a seeker who lives in the invisible world and cannot pay her rent in the visible one. I gave each of them one of my own temples. Here is what the practice did to them, and what it did to me.
The temple of the body
The first change I made was in the temple of the body. I understood that if I went on with my old habits in this temple, I would not last long. I changed completely every habit connected with my body: the way I ate, the time for physical activity, the time for sleep and recovery, the time for walks in nature, the feeling of all the signals my body sends me, and full synchrony with those signals. After I had made those changes, I saw the result six months later: from 135 kilograms to 85. It was not only an outer effect. It was an inner change that gave me back my vitality and energy, my strength and endurance, and gave me the push to go on with small, daily steps.
In the novel, Alex has the opposite problem. His body is perfect and it is all he has. On day ninety it is autumn, and he runs in the park in the morning with no hurry and no record, just breathing. An old man who reads his newspaper on the same bench every day looks up, surprised, because Alex has greeted him; nobody there ever had. Three months earlier Alex would not have seen the old man. His friend Dani has opened a small gym where he trains people who want to hear themselves, and Alex comes twice a week and stands outside the locker room when a father cries in it.
The temple of the emotions
The second change, and the harder one, was in the temple of the emotions. In this temple I felt that I had set no borders for whatever was pulling at my energy, which I believed was inexhaustible, but the truth was different. I gave myself wholly to everyone’s problems and solved them with all my devotion, without stopping to think who would hear and solve mine. The reckoning was a turning point for my emotions: without a limit on other people’s expectations and projections, I was robbing myself of the energy I needed to be in balance with my own emotional life. This took me a lot of time, years, before I brought it to one hundred percent. Sometimes I went back to my old emotional patterns by myself, but with time I overcame them.
Elina is the one I gave this temple to. On day ninety she tells the others about a conversation with her mother a week earlier. Her mother said, “You were always good. Why are you becoming selfish now?” The old Elina would have apologised, explained, felt guilty. Instead she said, “Mum, I’m learning to be whole.” Her mother was silent for a long time and then said, “Maybe I need to learn that too.” Victor, listening, says that is more than any therapy. I think he is right; I needed years for a sentence that Elina found in ninety days, because she practised every morning and I was only surviving.
The temple of the mind
My third temple was for me both a god and a self-destroyer. A god, because it showed me what the power of thought can create. A self-destroyer, because it showed me that without control over all the thoughts that rush at you, you become a conductor of self-deception. For this temple, time showed what was good and what was bad.
Victor’s story on day ninety is about exactly that. A new board put him up against an older manager who gives categorical forecasts, numbers nobody can guarantee. Victor said, “I don’t know, I’ll check.” The board split in two and he did not get the position. Two of the board members wrote to him afterwards: when you launch your own company, we want to be among the first investors. Three months earlier he would have been crushed. Now he sees that the path opened, only in a different direction. That is the mind as a god and not as a self-destroyer: it tells the truth about what it knows, and the truth brings something the forecast never could.
The temple of the spirit
My fourth temple opened a world I had been sceptical about, before I understood the truth that the invisible world is real and alive, as real as the three-dimensional world we live in. But it also showed me this: without action, relying only on dreaming about the life we want, we remain in the illusion of self-deception.
Sofia lives in the invisible world from the first page. Her ninety days are about the other half of that truth, the action. Her mother visits her apartment and sees a budget on the wall, a calendar, the bills arranged in order, and says, “You are not my Sofia anymore. You are someone else.” Sofia answers, “Mother, I am your Sofia. Only now she walks on the earth. And because of that, now I will survive.” Her mother leaves. Sofia does not blame her: “She taught me signs. She can’t expect me to stay there forever.” It hurts, and it is necessary. I know that scene from the inside.
Balance
In the end I understood that if I reach balance in the four temples, I live a full life and I find myself: whole, authentic and real, with all my dark and light sides.
The four in the novel reach it at a corner café on a Sunday, with no notebooks and no laptops. A waiter of about twenty brings the coffee with an exhausted face; he is studying economics because his father wants it. Alex and Victor take him aside for five minutes and Victor gives him his number for a meeting next week, to hear what he actually loves. Elina says that this is the whole mission: not on a stage, not in a hall, at a random table in a Sunday café. Victor had expected a moment of completion, like the end of a project. There is only a next step, and one more, and one more. Mastery is not reached. It is lived.
That is what the ninety days gave my four characters, and what the long way round gave me. Today, every morning, I begin with silence and time for myself, about thirty minutes. I wake at five, when the rest of the world is still asleep, and in that moment I first create my protective sphere, and then I listen to the first thoughts that appear in my mind. Then I build the mental architecture of the day, with gratitude for everything I have designed, and I live it through as if it had really happened. After that I give time to moving my physical body, and time to listening to a frequency for activating my sixth eye. When I finish with that, I give time every day to audio and podcasts on personal growth, on enriching and improving my own version.
I drive a truck across Europe during the week and write on the weekends at home, and the four temples ride with me in the cab. Nothing in them is finished. That is the point.
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Anton Ivanov is a Bulgarian author living in Villarcayo, Spain. He built a company, lost it, went bankrupt, moved countries and now drives a truck across Europe. The Four Temples of Destiny, his first novel, follows four people through ninety days of daily practice with the body, the emotions, the mind and the spirit; the English edition is out on 1 December 2026. The first chapter is open to read at fourtemples.com/en/chapter-one/.
