How It Began

Life takes interesting turns when one least expects it. In my case, it started when I was young as I sat atop a boulder on a mountain ridge, looking out over the desert in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Wide-open plains lay before me, surrounded by the vast mountain peaks of the Hindu Kush range of the Himalayas. I sat cross-legged, absorbed in the view and in my thoughts. Such magnificent thoughts I had, not knowing yet what the world had planned for me. My future seemed so far away that it was inconsequential to what I was doing at that very moment. Chin propped on my hands and elbows on my crossed knees, I contemplated why I was on earth. At the ripe old age of nine, I reflected on life.

Life was good for me. I had no reason to complain. I had freedom to go where I wanted, come home when I needed to, explore to my heart's content, and be who I wanted to be. What a life I had!

Then it all came crashing down. My family had to leave Afghanistan and come to the United States, and everything changed for me. Gone were the idyllic tranquility, beauty beyond measure, and my laughter echoing over the high desert plains and through the mountains. No longer did I spend time outside in tune with nature. TV now held my attention, and I entered into a world of make-believe — a make-believe that others created for me. I was enthralled.

Life became focused on integration into a society that did not know I was different, unique, and amazing. This life demanded conformity, rules, and procedures that if you were unaware of, became rather painful in their forced compliance. Life became hard for me, and my beloved plains and mountains receded into the background of my memories as I was forced to contend with the everyday world and life on the streets of San Francisco.

As I recount it now, it wasn't terrible, but it sure was a life change for me at that moment back in time. I'd thought the streets of San Francisco would be paved with gold, as the storybooks told me, but instead, I had to walk around and skip over dog poop on the sidewalks to avoid messing up my shoes. This was life in the city, a life to which I was very unaccustomed to.

For a child, first impressions are important because they shape what is to come. If life treats you harshly, you gain a worldview of suffering. If life is gentle, you gain a worldview of graciousness and compassion.

In the beginning, life for me was very gentle and gracious, showing me that harmony and balance could abound in the natural world. That which seemed harsh and impersonal, under the surface actually had compassion, meaning, and beauty in its "primal-ness." I understood that world. What I needed to understand was the world of humans. Laws, both hidden and obvious, were to be my education from the time I set foot on American soil at the impressionable age of eleven.

As a child, I carried a few precious belongings in my backpack: my briefcase, a first-aid box filled with precious gemstones I had collected in the desert and from the local bazaars; my guidebook to life, Little Pilgrim's Progress, a book that I borrowed from a friend and never returned; and "Me," my thoughts in my heart and my soul, the "I" that accompanied me everywhere. Armed with my backpack of precious visible and invisible belongings, I went to school. Although I didn't realize it at the time, this period was the beginning of everything for me.

Today, looking back through the long telescope of time to the start of it all, I realize that the Universe took me on a trip of a lifetime, the one we all called the "Human Experience." And what a ride that was!

Consider this: a kid, born of Filipino parents into a diplomatic life in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the Cold War, immigrates to the United States days before the Russians invade Afghanistan and at the same time, Iran becomes an Islamic state under the Grand Ayatollah. She moves to the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley as a teenager, later falls in love with a handsome South American right out of high school, marries him, and sets up life in Bogota, Colombia. She then returns to the States, a woman newly divorced, and becomes an entrepreneur who ultimately turns into a venture capitalist — only to lose it all due to a debilitating illness that disguised a spontaneous kundalini awakening that rocket-launched her on a spiritual journey into the great mysteries of the unknown — and now she's written a book! Whew!

My life — encapsulated into a paragraph.

They say when you reach age fifty, the Universe allows you to begin your mission because having completed your survival training as a human being on earth, you are now ready and able to do what you came here to do. As I type these words, I am fifty years old.

I have tried to write this book many times over the years, but each time I sat down, an anxiety would wash over me, writer's block would erupt, and countless hours would be wasted as I squirmed in my chair in frustration.

Recently I sat in the dentist's chair, having a filling put in, when the title of this book swam into my consciousness, and I knew that it was time — time to share what I have been given.

How Me Found I: Mastering the Art of Pivoting Gracefully through Life is an intriguing title, a koan, perhaps, or to the uninitiated, possibly an example of bad grammar. To those in the know, it's a secret decoder ring for the treasure hunter in all of us. Life is like that — a constant discovery of meaning and application of that meaning to life, to gain understanding, focus, and value in your ongoing discovery of life as it unfolds; while you turn in continuous wonder, marveling at what life offers you from every direction.

It takes a while, of course, to realize that is the treasure of being here — the ongoing continual discovery of your partner in creation, the Universe, God, or whatever name you choose to apply to this invisible collaborator, the other that is constantly beside you.

Life is beautiful that way. Once you realize what has happened, the mystery is solved and peaceful stability and harmony returns to what always seemed to be a chaotic uncontrollably random life because now you know. You really KNOW, and that sense of knowing becomes a cloak of armor that guards you against the meaninglessness of life's incidents, traumas, and harms. Meaningless because all situations have meaning but you need to connect the dots and now you can, because you KNOW. How cool is that?

Love is a funny thing. There is romantic love, friendship love, familial love, and then there is the great love of Agape. Funny how words can be so descriptive and obvious at times. As I write this book, my mouth is agape in wonder and amazement at how divinely everything fits so well together.

In my case, I had to learn how to love myself to the point of self-absorption and then learn how to release it to learn how to love others. This is the great balance of life. From inertia, a pendulum begins its swing from the stillness of the center to move back and forth between two opposing directions. It oscillates from the polarized extreme of each outside edge of a continuum, ultimately coming to rest back at the middle of great equilibrium. Then it begins the movement again.

I believe that life is this journey of understanding. First, you learn how to love yourself to the point of self-absorption, Ego-minded; and then you learn how to love yourself through the eyes of others in service to others, Heart-driven. It is truly a dance of receiving with appreciation and a giving of gratitude, and quite a dramatic relationship at that.

In this chapter, I will explain the salient points of the mystery of love. After all, that is what everyone is seeking, is it not?

Funny how both Life and Love begin with the same letter. They are so intertwined and interconnected. Without one, the other cannot exist. But which leads and which follows?

Love to me is an algorithm. It actually means something — a formula to follow, an exact science, and there is an art form to that specific science. There is man's interpretation and then there is Nature's interpretation. I will attempt to explain Love from Nature's point of view because that is how I solved the mystery of my Life.

If you break down the word, "LOVE", each letter has a meaning, a purpose, and a symbolism that activates something hidden within your internal coding that waits for understanding and activation. The purpose of this coding is to experience life as you originally were programmed or encoded to experience it. However, human beings, in their great arrogance, invented the override switch, and Ego began to dictate what the experience needed to be. That became your actual experience of life, a corrupted version of an otherwise perfect program.

You will learn in your journey through life that LOVE's first letter, L, is a geometrical symbol for space accumulation in the three-dimensional world that we live in. In other words, it is the accumulation of your memories as you experienced and remember them. Each leg of the L is an expanding line extending in two directions, up and out. These vectors indicate an increasing volume of space contained between the two lines. Yet, as with a sudoku, the L also stands for "levels" of frequency. The higher the energetic level of frequency at which you vibrate, the more expansive your life becomes. Conversely, the denser the frequency at which you vibrate, the more contracted a life you will experience. Simply put, L is the natural model of you as a spiritual being experiencing human life in 3-D form, consciously cataloged through an expansive collection of memories, indexed by an ever-evolving set of belief systems.

The next letter, O, gets more complicated because the O is actually both a koan and a kakuro, a meaning within a meaning, a puzzle to solve. This is where people can trip up and misunderstand the application of this particular letter's meaning. The O stands for time applied cyclically, yet it is also the ordered description of expansive radiating movement in a rippling effect of undulating waves of energy, spiraling out from a center point. First, it stands for time; second, it stands for an expansion of form; and third, it stands for inherent order. When you put the three together, the O is about the omnipresence of angular rotation in implicit order and timeliness. It is the natural model for growth, the expansion of memories plus conscious understanding or awareness. It is the omnipresent "constant of change" in a perfectly organized Universe.

If you are starting to catch on, the first word that may cross your mind with the letter V is vectors. Vectors of time plus memories equal what?

The V symbolizes both vibration — everything vibrates — and a krystic spiral format, the upward expansive movement of growth emanating from a core center, the fulcrum of experience and divine understanding. It is the natural model of balanced equilibrium. From here, we make sense of our experiences, and our memories serve as the validation of that understanding as we progress through our lives. The V has a hidden meaning because it looks static or two-dimensional, yet if you examine the bottom of the letter, it is anchored; and from a higher than a 3-D perspective, it indicates that it can move, turn, pivot and rotate, thereby creating an indefinite number of circles. The hidden effect of this symbol is that it also stands for vortex, the movement of energy in a toric fashion to form a funnel-like effect. Like a hurricane or a tornado, there is a peaceful stillness of space residing at its center and dynamic chaos churning at its outer rim.

The V stands for experiencing life in the Now, the present. It is the dynamic interaction between your inner and outer worlds. It is power and torque, the firing of the catalytic engine of your being. It is the natural model of movement and vibration.

And so we arrive at the last letter in the word, E. What is so important about this letter? It's been said that the true measurement of anything is what is at the beginning and at the end. Everything in the middle is simply the bidirectional act of moving from one to the other. In this case, the E stands for everything, and it contains a double entendre because it actually stands for "Everything is energy, and energy is everything — the end." Pretty cool, huh?

We are all made of energy, the very material and fabric of creation. From energy we are formed, and into energy we dissolve. Life is a constant change in state of form, and energy is what flows into and out of form. Even the material object you are holding in your hands as you read my words consists of energy vibrating at a denser level of speed. Energy is everything, and everything is energy. The best and most important letter is always saved for last.

So let's put the algorithm together in an equation of a simple sentence, "Life is the timely pivoting of expansive, rising, vibrating energy transforming into and out of form."

This is why LOVE is the driving force, unconsciously or consciously, in every person's life.

What about FEAR? Is that not the antithesis of LOVE? Well, yes it is, but FEAR is simply an acronym, nothing as sophisticated as an algorithm or a code. It is simply a representation of a simple phrase shortened to look important or made easier to remember. FEAR commonly stands for "False Evidence Appearing Real." Isn't that another statement for Illusion or Make-Believe?

Why does everyone focus so much on Fear, and why is it the controlling, dominant emotion from which everyone operates from? Without Fear, your Ego cannot mature. Without fear, the personality does not grow, change, or develop. Without fear, earlier experiences lack correlation. We live in a dual-system existence; 3-D is a dual system dimensionality of understanding. That means duality requires a counterpoint to the original point. In other words, polarization is two poles standing apart from each other in direct opposition, with space and distance between them. How can you learn about LOVE unless you have a counterpoint to move from?

From where do you move to get to the truth? You have to start from somewhere. Fear happily serves that purpose. So the dynamic movement from one focal point, Fear, to the other focal point, Love, is the grand experience of your life. Everything is measured along that spectrum. Movement is simply about direction, speed, and velocity of awareness between the two endpoints. As you move, how aware are you of your movements? That awareness translates to wisdom from the intellect, with your emotions becoming the barometer or thermostat of awareness. It is how you proceed along the "V line", the expansive rise and the contracting fall as you move out from the center point to everything in between.

Fear also acts as a brake in movement; it is what resistance is made of, thereby creating the friction between two desires. Proper application of this friction is translated into torque, tension strength, power, and accomplishment — growth. Improper application of this friction translates into stagnation, tension stress, failure, contraction, paralysis, and ultimately death.

The only constant you can expect in life is change. That means movement is the only expectation you can have. You alone control the direction of movement from Fear to Love or vice versa, rate of speed of your movement, and the velocity of your understanding. That means, "How you interpret the current situation you are in defines the experience you will have and continue to have."

This is velocity, expansive movement in an undulating wave motion. How do you track your movement? Through memory. This becomes the understanding on which you base your next movement on, and it forms the basis of the instructions you provide to your cells on what to create next into form. You are a system of systems, and as each system interacts with the other, experience happens, and memories are how you keep track of these experiences.