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 know if you know, but I’ve been doing therapy for a while, and I’ve also been doing meditation, and this came up to me and I want to do this exercise. I want you to tell me, with all your honesty, what are the three things that you think are my strengths, and what are the three things that you think are my downfall. You don’t have to explain much, you just have to label them. And I will really appreciate it. I will not respond to this email. I will probably delete the email afterwards, because all I want to see is—I want to see how I respond to that. Thank you very much. Blah blah blah.” Sent the email. I got a lot of responses. And this is where I learned that when people respond to you or react to something you say or do—it’s not about you. It’s about them. Because they’re projecting something on you. it is about how they relate to the question. But hear me out. This was fun. So I got a friend that just responded like: “What’s wrong with you? You’re getting me very worried. Why are you asking this type of question?” And I was just laughing, saying like: wow, this person doesn’t want too deep [lol]. But hey, you know, that was his response. It was a he BTW. Then I had a removed cousin—t
