Episode Details

Me, Me, Me, Me

So the other day during the session I was having with Mark, I was telling the story—reminds me of my mother, but it reminds me more about how I relate to myself through others. And I have Leo ruling my seventh house. What does that mean?

I spoke last week about relationships, so: relationships are ruled by the sign that is on the Descendant.

So the way I relate to others, in a very Leo way, it’s all about my self-validation. It’s about shining in the relationship, or as my mom would say: me, me, me, me, or in Spanish: yo, yo, yo, yo, yo.

I think she was probably the first person, along with my father, that witnessed that my relationships were very self-centered. And as I said last article, I use the surface of a relationship—something, a person, or thing—to reflect and to project an image that I want to see, so I can integrate a part of myself that is on the other side. And once it’s integrated, that’s the goal.

But sometimes, still, even knowing all this, I would project something that I feel is lacking—or that I have in excess. Like, for instance, I’m very critical about something, and then I just realize after a while that, oh boy, I’m just speaking about the same feature—but I have it, but I have not integrated it. That’s why I see it in the other.

Anyway, let’s go back to 2004, probably 2003–04. I had started doing a lot of meditation, and I had found teachers, and I was in this joy trip of like, wow—silencing my mind is something I didn’t even know you could do. So I was enjoying it.

But as much as I was silencing my mind with all these Buddhist meditations and insight meditation practices, I started understanding what the Buddha said about, you know: first become aware of your breath. Then become aware of the felt sense. I want to talk about that felt sense later, because I don’t think I really understood that until later on, when I got into the work of Gabor Maté.

Because it was very abstract for me—to take care of my senses, or to pay attention to practice. And then it was like: be aware of your emotions. And that was where I was refocusing, because that was the main reason why I started asking some teachers to guide me that way—because I was very emotional—driven by my emotions. Since I was little, I didn’t have any distance between them and what was happening. I just didn’t know how to respond. I was always reactive.

And mostly with the Moon in Scorpio—emotions are very, very extreme. They’re like either: oh yes, or oh no. There’s nothing in between. So it made me very radical about many things.

So I’m doing these meditations, and I start quieting my mind, and starting to understand my emotional body. What was the practice? The process was like, you know: focusing on the breath cycle. And then—I’ll say it again—I did not understand very well the felt sense. I kind of knew what they were talking about, but I did not experience it. Because I would jump immediately to the emotion, and I would stay with the emotion. But I would label it, like: anger. Anger. This is the way it feels to be angry. That was it.

But even just doing that for a while made me acquire so much insight about what was going on. So I started getting very curious about how I was so reactive. And one day I decided to do an exercise. And there was no social media at the time, only email—the way you connected to people that cared for you.

So I remember I just picked like 20 people around my life—whether they were people I worked with or dealt with, or family or friends—and I decided to ask them. I remember the subject line was: “I will never ask for anything, and this is the only favor I will ever ask for. So feel free to do something about it, but if you don’t want to do it, just don’t do it.”

So I wrote: “Dear blah blah blah, I don’t k