The Slow Death of My Old Self
How I learned to work with the power of the universe.
When I was a child, children were invisible and silent. I grew up among adults who already knew everything. They knew how a child was supposed to eat, dress, think, and above all, how not to respond to adults. I wanted to speak my mind and do things the way I liked, but I was afraid of adults’ reactions.
Before going to school, some adults in my family taught me the alphabet and I taught myself to write my name and a few words. Sometimes, I browsed the newspaper, but it was too long and tedious and the ink made my hands black. Occasionally, I glanced at the pages of Superman and other comics magazines my brothers hid under their mattresses. Comics magazines were diabolic trash banned even for adults.
Once in school, I learned to read and write. I never saw a book until the second-grade teacher took our class to the school library. The librarian read a story and invited us to visit her anytime. However, I never had free time in school to visit the library.
My adults had told me I had to go to school to have a better life than theirs, but the school for me was the chance to free myself from the adults in my life. However, I sat in class and was as invisible and silent as I was at home. I slid under my desk when the teacher asked questions, even if I knew the answer.
I learned everything my teachers taught me, but I lacked the motivation to shine. One day in fifth grade, I found a Reader’s Digest and read it from cover to cover. A story about the Incas fascinated me. It described and had pictures of how the Incas performed trepanations. It praised the brain surgery skills of the Incas and put them above the medical skills of the Old World at the time of the conquest of the New World. The trepanations were mainly a religious ritual.
A few weeks later, our history teacher announced the topic we would study next: The Inca Civilization. I listened to her, longing to hear about the trepanations. After two weeks, I wondered why she never mentioned them. A light bulb went off in my head: I knew something about the Incas the teacher did not know. I raised my hand for the first time and said, “The Incas were more advanced than the Old Word. They performed trepanations.” I recited what I had read in Reader’s Digest.
The teacher acknowledged the importance of the trepanations. My classmates dropped their jaws and their eyes almost popped out of their sockets. Magically, my success repeating the trepanations story inspired me to keep talking. However, I raised my hand only when I could comment on something I had read in Reader’s Digest or any other magazine.
I grew up in a Catholic family. Nobody was fanatic about religion in my family. All the kids had to be baptized, learn the religious rules, and receive the first communion. Going to mass was not mandatory.
I developed a concept of God different from the three-persons-in-one idea the Church taught me. An idea that I accepted but could not imagine how it could be possible. For me, God was a powerful spirit that made happened everything I asked.
This spirit saved me from expulsion from high school the day the Principal called me to his office. I had been skipping the last class in the mornings to see a boyfriend. I entered the office, convinced the spirit would protect us from the Principal’s intentions to ruin our lives. The Principal blamed my boyfriend. He suspended him for a week and did not even talk to me.
This spirit stood next to me in the darkest times of my life. It gave me the strength to wipe my tears and continue moving forward every time I had a setback.
This spirit stood next to me in the brightest times of my life. It celebrated with me my graduations, my wedding, the birth of my daughter, and other significant events in my life.
However, even with this powerful spirit next to me, I always feared talking and expressing my ideas and opinions.
In the 1990s, I read many articles about the mind-body connection. Studies mapping the brain and body activities using brain imaging showed that the mind-body connection existed. One important connection is the feedback loop between the brain and the tongue that enables speech.
A light bulb went off in my head again: I can visualize the connection between my brain and my tongue to enhance my speech. Every day, I visualized the connection like a white thread between my brain and my tongue. I mentally repeated, “I am connecting my brain and my tongue to make my speech eloquent and spontaneous.”
I felt increasingly more confident about saying what I was thinking. Sometimes I even got in trouble for speaking without thinking. After three years, the need to visualize the thread faded. I talked with confidence after I stopped visualizing the thread. I even interrupted other’s conversations when I found it necessary. I supported this progress by joining Toastmasters to experience the pressure of speaking in front of an audience.
This time, not so magically as with the Incas story, discovering something related to the brain changed me. It transformed my invisibility and silence into self-confidence.
The confidence developed during these years empowered me to overcome the challenges of changing careers, raising a family, and embracing professional growth.
Going deeper into the mind-body connection, I came across the idea that “You can do anything you set your mind to.” In the beginning, I set my mind on habits I wanted to develop, such as showing to meetings on time and relaxing before going to bed. Arranging the world around me to get to meetings on time was more challenging than scanning my body from head to toe to relax and fall asleep.
Later, I set my mind on desires that required the cooperation of forces outside my mind. For example, ensuring a spot on a lane to merge on time before missing a highway exit or a table at a busy restaurant without making a reservation.
Every morning, about one mile before the exit on the highway I drove to work, I visualized a spot for my car to merge on time to catch my exit. Every time I wanted to go to a busy restaurant, I visualized a table available for me. The results were not consistent. I got the spot and the table randomly.
Unhappy with these results, I kept researching. I found a missing part: visualize a desire and simultaneously give for granted that it had already happened. The second part required absolute confidence in the power of my mind. The results improved but I still missed reaching my desires here and there.
The final piece that made the results consistent came when I shifted my perception of God as a spirit outside me to a force within me. This internal force synchronizes my desires with the forces of the universe and co-creates the universe around me. Shifting this perception is the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.
Everything crumbled at the beginning. Confusion paralyzed any attempt to abandon a belief that had been the guiding post in my life. Doubt clouded my mind when I thought of comparing myself to God. My desire to overcome any challenge in my life directed me to put aside everything I knew and repeat the mantra, “The power of the universe is within me.”
The need to repeat the mantra faded gradually. As the certainty that the power of the universe was within me grew, the need for the mantra faded.
The secret to always get my desires granted is the power of the force within me that makes the universe grant my desires. I invoke this force no matter how small or big my desires may be. Now, my results are consistent. If I fail, I know I failed to connect my desire to the power of the universe, or I discover that my desire was not aligned with my best interest.
My old self is dead.
Like in the boiling frog fable, my old self was slowly transformed by: a mind-opening story, the awakening of the brain-tongue connection, the belief that “You can do anything you set your mind to,” visualizing a desire and simultaneously giving for granted that it had already happened, and the mantra “The power of the universe is within me.”
In honor of my old self, my new self shares this story to encourage people to continue looking for ways to transform themselves into self-empowered beings.