First Glimpses Towards My True Nature

Many time we have heard that mind creates and affects our reality. I want to share with you a personal experience that hugely changed my life and motivated me, more than ever before, to stay on the path.

Picture Taken by Me in Lanzarote

During my teenager years I have developed patterns of behavior that were negatively conditioning my life and that have caused me great amount of suffering. Part of me knew that there was something wrong with me, that whatever I was doing was unhealthy but I did not know how to break the circle. I did not feel like talking to anyone and even though I believe was evident from the outside, I never received any invitation in trying to fix this problem. This behavior, that I will described in a moment, was literally sucking my energy out and it represented a huge obstacle for me in facing normal life issues. It somehow messed up my performance at school, relationship with friends, with my parents and of course with my self-esteem. I became really introvert, unsure about my possibilities and capabilities. I was feeling like in a box where my abilities of moving and shaping my life were extremely limited.

I spent years, almost 24/7, engaging in different mental and physical activities that I could not stop. I constantly had repetitive thoughts running in my head, I had obsessive needs to check out on something, to arrange and keep clean and in order my environment, I had mental and physical rituals that I had to follow to relief stress and anxiety with a constant fear on my tail that something would have happened to me, I had to follow specific behaviors to neutralize negative emotions. What was keeping me trapped in this patterns was the absolute terror that something could have happened to me or others if I had not followed carefully whatever my mind was saying. I was afraid that I or worst others could get hurt, get disease, get seriously ill. The level of fear was so strong that I would have never challenged and confronted myself with it. My behavior was a way to keep everything in control trying avoiding any serious consequences. Needless to say this was only an illusion and I was simply a prisoner of my own mind. I honestly do not know I could mentally and physically survive in this mode for so many years.

In my 30s I was talking with a dear friend of mine that suggested me to read a book of Anthony de Mello called “Awareness”. At that time I was doing my PhD in Genève and I had already started some readings about spirituality and self-improvement so I was open enough to order and read that book. In this book there was a reference for another book called “Summerhill” by Alexander Hill that caught my attention. The book describes an innovative way how to educate children since their early age and in a chapter it was mentioned that a rigid and authoritarian education might lead to obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD) during later stages of life. It was the first time I actually could give a name and a form to what was enslaving me. I personally knew that that kind of behavior was unhealthy but for some reason it never occurred to me that that might be a known disorder, that it could be a pattern that I have learnt and not intrinsically “mine”.

That same day I read as much as I could about OCD and I was shocked about how much I could fit in the description. Whoever wrote that post sounded as if he knew me for decades. That night (a night I will never forget) I went sleeping and I had this thought: “How is it possible that someone that does not know me at all, that never met me in life can describe me so well?”. In that specific moment, in an instant, a separation occurred. The “I” that was associated to those specific behaviors disappeared instantaneously and a more lighter and happier “I” was left. I remember that I had to stand up because there was an incredible amount of energy released in my body and I recall screaming “Holy shit, holy shit”. From that night I never ever had the need to do anything I was doing for almost 15 years.

What happened was that for years I thought to be literally part of my mind, the inner voice within my head. My mind was shaping my reality but as a nightmare and since there was a total identification between mind and what I was calling “I”, I could not help keeping acting along this line. Mind and myself were glued together and I was totally unconscious to be run by thoughts. I honestly feel blessed to have had such a bad time because it allowed me, later on, to become more conscious about my true nature and the reality I am living in. People might have a chatty mind but the thought that “we are not whatever we think we are” will never occur to them. Let me repeat this crucial point: your true self is NOT what you think you are, rather your true self becomes and takes the shape and form of whatever you think you are. You are shy if you think you are shy, you are great if you think you are great, you are incapable if you think you are a incapable. This concept might sound obvious but taken to the extreme it will threaten your own life. This realization will challenge your belief to be ultimately a man or a woman, to be a human being, to be someone or something distinct from anything around you.

When the separation occurred, one part of what I considered to be me was gone but there was still left a sense of identification in being someone. Some assumptions, beliefs, ideas about who I was were still present. Further work had to be done to get to the absolute truth about my true nature. This experience was only a tiny sip (even though for me was huge at that time) compared to what a more profound awakening entails and it has revealed me only a fraction of the immense power of mind in creating our reality.

I wanna leave you with a really short video that got my attention when I first stepped into spirituality. My first understandable reaction was: "This guy is full of bullshit". After few months I had to admit that I was the one full of bullshit.

Here the link (right button to open it)

I feel like I have shared enough about me and I think it is now time to start talking a bit more specifically about spirituality and how to start this amazing journey.

Thank for reading guys and see you next week!