Month: May 2008

Creating Confidence

Faith is a force you command. You have the power to put faith in something or someone. When you do we say that you believe in an idea or a person.

Confidence is the feeling you create for your self by investing your faith in something or someone. Oddly you can create this feeling of confidence even if the idea is a lie or the person you believe in is a fraud.

A spiritual warrior is aware of how his or her belief in something can create a false sense of safety.

Practices for spiritual warriors in Self Mastery

Mother Sarita

Mother Sarita and don Miguel RuizToday Sara Macias Vasquez left her body behind and journeyed into the Spirit. We know her as Mother Sarita. She is don Miguel Ruiz’s mother, an amazing healer, and a Spiritual Guide to many. I had the pleasure of her company many times. And every time was an inspiring example of unconditional love, passion, and faith. In her ninety’s she has more passion about life than most people I know. To witness her presence each time was a gift of life. She was 98.

Raised in rural Mexico, she learned ancient Toltec wisdom from her shaman grandfather, and passed this wisdom on to her son, author don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements). In 2007, Mother Sarita was inducted into The San Diego Women’s Hall of Fame for her contributions to healing and teaching, and for her role as an influential mentor. Her message “Si se puede,” (Yes, it¹s possible) was an inspiration to many. Her courageous and loving spirit will be greatly missed.

(Born January 8, 1910; deceased May 22, 2008)

Her Spirit, her teachings, her wisdom, passion, and Faith will live on in her many students, children and grandchildren, including don Miguel, and his sons.

She lived beautifully, and her dream lives beautifully in many.

Thank you

What is the Mitote?

The Mitote (me-toe-tay) referred to in The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz is a lot like blogs on the internet. People are pouring out the thoughts in their head and filling virtual cyberspace with opinions, ideas, rants, and their personal knowledge. It is an overwhelming volume of words that other people read, form opinions about and then write words about them in their blogs. Then more people read those opinions about opinions and write their opinion.Very seldom do any of these add any real value to one’s life. Even when good writing has a chance to have an impact, the reader isn’t likely to hold their attention and awareness with it long enough to have a real impact. Their undisciplined short attention is overwhelmed against the onslaught of more information and opinions to surf.

In the same way the mitote in the mind is like those layers of opinions. It is the cacophony of voices that make up the incessant thinking in your mind. The world of your imagination is filled with opinions, information, description, rants, judgments, and victimizations.

It has developed such a momentum that when you will your self to be still long enough and step back from them, you can’t help but notice them. You will likely be surprised at how loud those voices are. And usually right after that moment of awareness where you detach from the mitote and observe it, you form an opinion, or make a statement about what you observe.

And in that moment of forming an opinion or making a descriptive statement about the mitote, you have just lost your attention to the cacophony and contributed another layer.

Spiritual Journey

One of the common misconceptions is that your spiritual journey will be filled with angelic experiences.  Blissful openings of your heart, quiet epiphanies, and overwhelming moments of unconditional love inspire us to take action steps towards our personal freedom.  The assumption is that these experiences will eventually lead to enlightenment where you can sit in the lotus position and magically float three feet above the cushion below you.

Yes these beautiful loving experiences happen.  But they are not the only experiences to happen.  Very often your spiritual journey will be one humbling experience after another.  In those humbling experiences your self importance is exposed for the bloated self image that it is. Then your beliefs about your self and your self images are pierce by awareness and crushed by truth.  You are humbled when you realize that you had believed such illusions and lies for so long in your dreaming slumber without awareness.

If you journey further you realize that any early hopes of grandeur at enlightenment and mastery turn about 180 degrees.  You discover that humble service to your fellow human being in the manner of love and compassion is the life of the enlightened

Personal Power

There is often an interest to acquire more personal power.  This approach becomes a common trap in a spiritual warrior’s path.  The desire to gather personal power is often a compensating strategy for that feeling of not being powerful enough.

When you gain personal power based in this motivation your “I’m not powerful enough” story is being fed.  Gaining personal power becomes a remedy that doesn’t address the source of the problem, and can even makes it bigger.

Turn your attention to your desires, and the fears, beliefs, and self importance that spawn them and you will have a chance to become free.