Author: nataliebotero

Has the Universe of Surprises ever dawned on you in the midst of spinning your emotional wheels? Here we are: we are trying to get something accomplished, something falls through, somethings come up for someone else, and we, as spiritual warriors, start to wonder what it means. What is the “Universe” trying to tell us? Or perhaps, what are we telling ourselves and others? What is key to cracking the code is Generosity.

Giving and receiving breaks barriers.

The point to life is to live in relationship, and there is never a limit to that unless when we think there is.

There’s always a more to what we know about each other, and we can get comfortable without knowing there is richness to every person. So reactions to people cause us to grow. Take every opportunity to serve and learn the fellow person around you.

It’s really about not accepting shallow judgments and allowing the negative to take over. How much judgment there is in the mind is at times unavoidable. Do we as a people have anger lingering perpetually inside of us? It’s the last emotion we allow ourselves to talk about because it feels unsafe and has consequences within our relationships. It’s seen as the dividing factor between us. Our minds can become consumed by resentment. There is a convenient adrenalin in holding an enemy image in the mind that fosters blame and fosters a reason to react. Emotional survival and the grapple for safety are hard impulses to overcome when anger has been buried under the rug for so long. The reason may lie in not asking the fellow person around you what they feel and how they are affected, in general. Decisions are made past that concern, decisions are likely executed from inside an insulated world. Diversity challenges us to overcome our own internalized phobia of ourselves around the different. Diversity is the only fact of existence. How can we remain cut off in life without anger imploding individually and hence collectively?

If you want to change the World, explore the opportunity for opening to a hard talk with someone.

If we can sit in our discomfort, willingly balanced uneasily on tinder hooks for the time it lasts, you’ll gain so much stamina to face reality and become a person that others can go to. What is painful is the person who can’t face their reality and must live dissociated from the truth of who they really are and their effect on others. A lot of us who know these persons can be protecting them from facing their pain, thus enabling their delusion to continue. I think a policy of telling the truth and exercising boundaries as a skilled person is extremely beneficial for the village.

How do we reclaim the village?

Our potential for suffering can be minimized by expressing ourselves and being listened to, and in turn, making the effort for others to be heard without reacting. The root of the village’s existence lay in the cause of anyone suppressed, the working poor and the destitute all over the world, the stigmatized, the spiritually impoverished. They themselves, the conversations of enemy images always literally transforming to an image of them that is free. Who doesn’t break the law but cajoles it?

I’ve been loved. I must give back.

We can call ourselves to the empathic give to action; To practice opening your call to expression and expanding your emotional literacy through the effort. Self-empathy is allowing space for this ambitious flower to open. Think of it as you’re having tea with your mind and a listen to your heart. You’re inviting a friend to sit with you and talk next. Letting the creative perceptions, thoughts, words, emotions divested from prayer engage in rapport building with those you normally avoid because of previous conflict. Trust and live the process out. Sustain communication as long as you can. Withstand awkwardness and embarrassment, if you must! You are putting feelings into words, and actually causing a rumble in the Universe of Surprises yourself. Humble beginnings and owning them as an expert. And giving of yourself with concerted effort. The result is the regenerated feeling of sovereignty over your own inner being, respect for the other’s opinion and feelings, whether you agree with them or not, and a reverence for your inner self and that of the other’s.

“Beautiful is not often recognized as an event like this.”

Natalie Botero, M.A.

How Do We Listen?

We begin with the basic stances to listening. What it takes to really hear someone and be heard. We want to listen and attune to a style of empathy that non-verbally conveys to your listener that what they are saying is extremely important. That we care about the other person’s way of thinking and want to hang on every word, illustrating too that this is the effort we are willing to make. It takes an effort to get out of one’s head, one’s ways of thinking, assumptions about how all things should be, etc. Growth comes from the point when you cannot go anywhere else but out of yourself. We need others to keep ourselves from going off the deep ends of our own minds, to see clearly, and to win. Win not in the way of competition or dominance, but fullness, happiness and joy as a social sentient human being craving to contribute outside of oneself.

Communication skills to enhance personal enjoyment in relationships is fun learning of the use of insightful words to capture your delight in the art of conversation. More fun, more laughter, more peace, clarity and solutions. Even after a conflict, tension, outright blowups, you will see that people generally tend to want to deescalate and return to emotional homeostasis. We also want our words to be potent and easily understood, and we want to feel the inspirational fullness of meaning from our own words.

Marshall Rosenberg, PhD., the godfather of Nonviolent Communication, or Compassionate Communication, often wrote poems and sang songs to illustrate the powerful peace of potent words. I tried my hands at these below:

“Listening with Empathy is an art. Gone to its deepest, it is a transformational healing at the core. It is a  portal that the heart created, no greater, no lesser than the way you are. Begin where you’re at, grow big and start small.”

“Taking footsteps to connection inside this day and age, brings our cultural language to the NVC plate. We want an understanding of our human needs and feelings, and one we all share is the human desire for a peace break!”

Empathic listening first simplifies the theoretical into a force for the practical and the actual transformation of feeling, taking the attempt to transform the cultural conditioning built into our language from a “faults and defenses” paradigm to a “no fault and transparent” love for one another.

AFFIRMATIONS IN EMPATHY

“The guidance will come guaranteed, every morning and every day. I have an unlimited storehouse of ides to survive.”

“By letting go of hard feelings, I am cutting dependencies from people’s influences that don’t affirm me anymore.”
“How I perceive Divine Guidance is through using the imagination.”

“Make the job description your own. People in the workforce have tough limited circumstances. Employers who can recognize each employee’s strength and utilize and acknowledge them can by placing them in the right capacities.”

“We want to be known.”

“Connection happens in the recognition of who we are and the simultaneous recognition of the other.”

“We are shifting the mindset and learning the secrets of the Universe in the new ideas of this age.”

“The inner workings of prejudice. There is a payoff to judging others, a way to define ourselves as individuals by the contrast. There is a reason for judging, and we all judge.
Love is the most powerful force in the Universe.”

“What is the process like of developing a strong ego, finding a Self, taking your power back and the purpose of anger?”

“There exists an outlet for all of us to express our truth, heal our hurts, and work with our thoughts to know what we think. In us is a safe place for expression so we can hear our own selves, enlightening ourselves to how much we already know. Do not feel embarrassed by learning new things. To become who you are by expressing yourself in a non-judgmental space, we can teach each other to hold space for each other.”

“The best thing about a person, I think, is their willingness to learn and how open their mind is.”

“My outer life reflects my inner peacefulness. I am healthy enough to solve my own problems and have enough challenges to keep me alive! I’ve got my motivation back! I don’t need to struggle but I have to go through the struggle to find my freedom.”

“How do we explain terms like Love and Oneness? What can we hold onto that explains our Oneness to each other? How about knowing that we all have Universal Human Feelings and Basic Needs. Everyone on the planet does. And everything we do is an attempt to meet a need. Because we all want to be happy and not to suffer. Every one of us does not want to suffer.”

“Our three main Spiritual Needs are for Wholeness, Self-Acceptance and Connection.
How do you really Love a Human Being? Through three things: Acknowledgment, Attention and Affection.”

“What are our different ideas about God from our different cultural standpoints?
We are here to experience diversity and develop ourselves through the contrast and to create unity.”

“Every human being has an energy field and imprints in their energy field that can be felt. We draw experiences to ourselves from the imprints that are bound by the thoughts we think. The root of those thoughts are in what we think about ourselves.”

“Deconstruct those externals that have become internally ingrained abuse. Every person on the planet is here to heal some sort of self-abuse.
Your freedom is in knowing yourself. This is waking up!”

Everything and every relationship in your life is all directly related to your relationship with your mother. Your mother is your first relationship and experience of life. Your mother is your connection to your Soul.

At the beginning, we both were good people. Then at one point we changed into strangers. The first impression of each other may have been intuitive and slightly inevitable, so there from the passionate bit came the fear of losing each other. It was either becoming a death or you as my sole lover. Now I have the freedom to get to know Myself better.

We are on a different path and very capable of moving on. I know my capacity is there for me, but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t focus on my mother. I hope for peace that we’ve moved along. Now, what I really wanted all along—entertaining myself with a good long period alone.

As humans, we are in a Realm. We essentially feel the separation of abandonment. And when we fell, the deeper the Hell, but eventually the better was Heaven’s revelation.

I will never have the poverty of a Breakup again.

HEALING THE MOTHER WOUND MEDITATION

• List all of the positive and negative qualities you think your mother has…..
• Then reflect on what of those you react most strongly to. Let yourself feel your feelings, including feelings like grief and anger..
• Next… imagine your mother as a little child… think of how her childhood was like….think of her mother and their relationship….
• Let’s talk about her wounds, sacrifices. If you are a man, what does this bring up for you? Do you think you have paid for that just by being a man?

MOODS

I have several friends. They like to often visit when I’m alone. Intrusive, yes. The most uninvited guests. They’re flimsy and flighty like stress on my strong body, and they have many times displayed their strength, cried in artistic temperaments, flipped from pity to arrogance, heightened the senses, dressed up like defenses, and darkened the day.

……why do moods always have to be so obnoxious?

(At least they don’t stay.)

TRAUMA

I hid an entire trauma. A very big one.

It sat on my shoulders and pressed my temples. It was shy to life, so it clung to my enjoyment of it, made my world a someday.

I hid an entire trauma away from my family. I took it aside, asked, “Why do you ride? You are not a walk in the park. I could’ve died.” As I asked it the truth, which seemed very convoluted , it tucked itself in, I shook and I screamed. It burrowed exactly into my self esteem, and would not let me hide……..and I can’t hide it after all, I’ve tried.

PAIN

Today only, and tomorrow only, I sit with pain, the holding of it which is lost on me. Pain is pain when I touch another human’s hand. How I long to touch pain that is as deep or as soft as a hand.

FANTASY

Remember, wishful thinking is not a warning. You just return to someplace distant, then to escape to someplace warmer, where the foreigners are different. Your body flies above the realistic, then brings itself back, because when you’re bored you can’t resist it.

GRACE

Only when something is lost.

HUMAN BEAUTY

We are beautiful for the simplest things. The things we are unaware of. Like, the way we look when we’re eating, how our hair falls tussled at the ends at the end of the day, our different ways of meandering things, our faces when we’re sleeping, our immediate reactions to news, our repetitive sayings when we finally do the talking, every um and ah of receiving, when being quiet, yawning…….you may know.