Spirituality, for me, is the manifestation of life, the notion that we are all interconnected as a whole. It is a state of awareness of our existence as part of a diverse organism; in that sense, the manifestation of life is fluid and unlimited: a vibrational continuum of cosmic energy.
Spirituality is also a state of consciousness and openness of life itself.
I spent most of the time of my current life trying to be what I thought I was supposed to be: a good woman. For me, this has been a real struggle; most of us experience similar conflicts while trying to be something that we are not. We spend most of our time trying to meet what our families, friends, partners, lovers, society, religion, and culture want us to be. We live our lives through this difficult lens of our own image and how we should look like. Women especially confront a deadly quest: To be good, nice but not too nice; beautiful, soft, the “weaker sex,” needy, dramatic but not too dramatic, not too intelligent, or too sensitive and forget about having an intuition that speaks to you. Actually, being too intelligent, as a woman, is very inconvenient, and I assure you it is a painful path to follow. To survive, women should remain quiet and hidden. And above all, you should not shine too bright. Your power must be diminished, dissimulated, and shy. A woman shouldn’t be too visible because it is dangerous: you can get caught and burned alive. Women are allowed to be good but not great.
When I experienced death in the first person after my car accident on August 28th, 2015, I changed by ipso facto. That crash was a symbol: a wall that I hit to find myself. I suddenly woke up with a clear understanding of the short time we have. During the recovery process that lasted 8 months, I reviewed all aspects of my life: relationships, experiences, emotions, thoughts. I sat down in front of myself for a long time and faced my life, what I liked and what I didn’t like about it. I found myself dying by living in automatic pilot, striving to please others, and deeply sad. I lost the will to live. I felt emotionally numbed and completely alienated. I renounced everything: My financial security, my image, my home, my family, my friends, my work of a lifetime. I didn’t have anywhere to hide anymore. I was nude and vulnerable, standing in the uncertainty and the unknown. I knew I wanted to change and live my life following just my heart.
I wasn’t seeking any meaning, any purpose but the experience of feeling alive in fullness and in serenity. Everything changed for me after that experience, and just by taking one action in the right direction, the entire reality reconfigured. Another dimension opened. I transformed and grew in the process of healing, and I found myself. I encountered the genuine me that could see through and go through anything, but mostly I saw the fullness of my own life. I decided to trust my intuition and my body: to trust my Self, committed to its truth. I experienced physical pain for a long time. My body holds the memory of all that trauma. The body, this sophisticated machinery we inhabit for a while, feels right away when something is not right. At that moment, my mind, soul, and body were utterly unaligned, entirely out of tune. The content of my mind was one reality separated from what my soul really wanted. I was dissociated and detached from my body. I was living in conflict and contradiction.
The spiritual path is a choice one makes by will or by need. It is not necessarily the easiest path to take but the one that is necessary for you to be aligned deep inside with what you have to do. And every time an oracle, a mystic, a magician, a wise, crossed my path to deliver the message about doing what I have to do, I always asked myself: “but what is that, that I have to do? I don’t know what it is. Please, tell me!” And the answer was always the same: you know what you have to do. I struggled for a long time trying to find a concrete answer to this enigma to arrive at the fact that there is no such thing as a word that can express that what it is. It is true; there are certain expressions of existence that can’t be put into words. But one feels it. Some part within yourself tells you that, and you vibrate with it. That miracle happens every day with what you eat, what you say, what you do. So yes, we do know what we have to do and what we don’t, all the time. But do we really listen?
Our skin, our stomach, feel the vibration within everything surrounding us, and they react, liberating chemicals and building energetic tension for our muscles to contract. Our whole system speaks. We need to come back and remember this forgotten language of nature. We need to go out of the numbness and the insensitivity. The very first person to look at is ourselves because we are permeable—everything affects us—as we affect everything. And the same happens with everything else that exists. Some strings vibrate at the same rate, creating harmony, and others in opposition, creating dissonance. This is nature. Acceptance and resistance are the fundamental steps in the dance of balance. And this is key because, to keep the balance while interacting and being open, we need to build acceptance and resistance.
In acceptance, we are receiving or giving input to something pleasing to ourselves. We take it in. In resistance, we take a definitive position before something that is coming in opposition to us. We are closed to it, and that coming doesn’t get in. Then we have other “instruments” that help to compose our personal music: sensing and feeling. The body senses the vibrations within space, originating electrical and chemical responses that give rise to our emotions, and this process of digestion is what we call an emotional state. If you observe yourself when you are feeling an intense emotion, you will discover that it is a wave. It starts, it reaches a cuspid, and it declines. One doesn’t feel love just for a millisecond. The intensity of the emotions can make us feel a rush, a peak, like a high voltage that starts and ends quickly. And it can make us feel a profound unlimited extension, like an ocean. But feeling [love] is always a process that takes some time and travels space. If we pay more attention to what we sense and feel, we can develop a good sense of acceptance and resistance— a good balance. This translates into more harmonious thinking and actions and knowing when to say yes, and when to say no.
Sometimes, we accept what comes to us in opposition, and we let that wave in. It means hard times because we put in place a process of digestion that will have the same curve: it will start, develop and peak, and end. But it will create unbalance. We create Sickness and suffering when we say yes to something that we know we should say no. Sickness and suffering come from energy imbalance in our bodies and minds. They mean there is a conflict, a “clog,” and the energy can’t flow anymore. All the forces within nature constantly happen despite how conscious we are of how this symphony works. If in awareness, we learn how to remain calm when we face chaos, be patient when we face uncertainty, quiet when instability comes, and in freedom when limitations appear, we are creating harmony and balance. When these alchemical processes happen and when we are conscious of it at the point that we imprint intentionality to our actions, the wave we are creating expands, having an impact beyond what any of our senses can reach. At that precise moment, we realize how inter-and intra-connected we all are with life as a whole. This is the experience when we recognize our Self in our Selves. When I confront a difficulty like this, I always ask myself what this experience has to teach me, what life is trying to tell me. And I love to listen and learn. So, I sit down with my eyes wide open, staring at my fear until the fear reveals. I literally sit down and speak with it while in meditation, and I accept the pain I am experiencing and let go, breathing. The pain looks to yourself and shows you precisely what you have to let go, so you can transform the fire into the air, the water into the soil, and grow.
Being part of the force that is nature and belonging to a broader and bigger system like the cosmos means that when you get stuck, causing the system to experience a sort of “clog,” change will hit you. That is the beauty of life and the system we are part of. It autoregulates and regenerates itself like the skin heals when you cut your finger. You can find yourself alive by choice or by force. But you will face life, even if it happens at the last minute before your death. You will understand, sooner or later, what life is about. Living and dying are the two most intense experiences we will ever have, so you have to be gentle with yourself. Kind. Spirituality starts within yourself and with yourself. Are you kind with your body, your emotions, and the way you speak to yourself? Or are you constantly creating jails, violence, chaos, slavery, guilt, and greed? The space of pain is a very lonely and isolated one. It is the space of fear and insecurity, the river of doubt. In giving freedom, love, and justice to yourself, you give freedom, love, and justice to life. It changes it all. Suddenly, the whole reality transforms in front of your bare eyes, and you start perceiving the magic type of life. There is no attachment, fear, no limits, no gurus, no dogmas. All those elaborations are just fantasies. Fantasies we create because we don’t know how to live in nature using our energy and power for the only purpose of life: to live. Nothing else is necessary.
When you face your own death, everything changes forever. You never look at life the same way you did before. The way you exist is now very different: you have a different sense of time and space and another gaze. I went through a long period of time where I had to figure out what I would do with the rest of the time I have in my current life and which kind of relationships I wanted to cultivate with everything surrounding me. So, I quit my job, and I moved to another country to do what I love.
When I was resisting pursuing what I love, what moved me on the inside, I felt like I was dying. I felt very depressed, lost, and exhausted. I was sick most of the time. I didn’t want to listen to myself, and I also was angry and impatient, creating a mountain of denial trying to bury this pulsation coming from my inside. And it makes sense since my whole life, I was finely trained to be good and perfect but never great. A woman of “90 degrees”, too afraid of doing something wrong, of making any mistake or fail. I was living in this contradiction, knowing that if I didn’t make a change to respond to my call to flourish, I would remain without knowing what life can really be and live as I really am.
