Often times we have been doing better than we think on our own personal path of life and get confused as to whether or not we’re making the right decisions. We can cascade down a negative path of doubt, self-criticism and disillusionment. We have never been wrong about who we are, we just don’t always have the best tools or environment for transformation.

The achilles heel of the Light Warrior is Impostor Syndrome. The idea that we are frauds, that we can’t manifest our dreams or that our failures have the final say about what we can or cannot achieve.

This course is for you if

• You are aware that you have a great mission or purpose to fulfill but, you are unsure of where to start

• You have ground breaking insights and intelligence, that is usually disregarded by the crowd or significant people in your life

• You are tired of assimilating and conforming to the dominant paradigms of society.

• You are driven by myth, wisdoms and are attracted to consciousness raising media

• You have felt forced to conform, to outdated paradigms of what it means to be a man in modern society.

Confusion and pain traded heartbeats in my body after receiving the text “Your grandmother passed away” while I was in the airport. My heart, refused to push down anymore emotions and I cracked, silently crying alone and far away from my family.

A way to describe my 2014 was shattered. At the beginning of the year, I was hired at a new school that I was desperate to work at. Working in my neighborhood, with students from similar background as me, was something that I had always dreamed off. I wanted to make a difference and show kids that it was totally possible to be themselves.

About a year earlier, I started meditating to change myself and release the emotional trauma and racial suffering that I had experienced in my life. Reading so many articles about the benefits of meditation, I wondered if it would work for me? Up to that point, I felt like I was drowning in negative emotions daily. Sometimes it was  a day of anger. Others it was a day of depression. I knew I didn’t want to keep living that life way and also I knew if I couldn’t figure out a way to “look the part” I would never get the opportunities that I desired.

I began buying book after book to fix “what was wrong with me” in a reaction to the environment I was working in and the space I was sharing. Although, I couldn’t change the racism that existed, I learned that I could process and release it and not get caught in the heat of my emotions. I had a tendency toward destruction, saying and doing things that ended up hurting everyone in my environment, most of all me.  The holding of grudges and the clutching of my emotional pain, made me sicker and sicker. I had entered my dark night of the soul.

After practicing meditation for about a year, I really started to notice the changes in my overall attitude and demeanor. My approach toward life became refreshed and I decided that I would get back to what I love most,  teaching and community activism. I had done all of this work to respond to life “outside of myself”.

I thought that I had finally had things well under control, to be able to make the change I wanted to see in my community. I applied at a school in my neighborhood, determined to work with students to shift their schooling experience. I had this great wish for myself when I was young and I was determined to carry out that work with the next generation. Although I would often find myself exhausted, emotionally drained and unfulfilled, like a mantra I repeated it will pay off.

This school which thought they were “saving” kids in poverty, was really a low grade prison. Bars were outside all of the windows.The kids, like myself had been promised if they could just change and overcome who they were as a person, they would be promised a great future.  The penalty, for not compiling was public embarrassment and shaming. Despite, this realization, I strove harder against the injustices, I experienced and the gut-wrenching anxiety of working in an environment that was so contrary to my true self.

I had one to one’s to reach out who really felt change was possible outside of this limiting colonizing structure. Former close friends, remained silent in the face of the numerous micro-aggressions that I experienced. My performance was consistently questioned, because I refused to conform to their standards fully. Despite my resistance, eventually my I lost the power of my voice and began drowning in both my experience and heavy emotions.

I reached a breaking point. Working in a racist, demeaning environment, where staff and students thought that verbally abusing and controlling others was the right way to succeed. In the midst of fighting this struggle.  A student called me a “Nigger” for the first time in my teaching career. I had protested and suffered in silence the entire year, but this was my breaking point. The next day flooded with anger from the previous day, I was in a traumatic car accident right in front of the school. Kids flooded out of the building and a fellow teacher pulled me from the wreckage. Humiliated, after I was examined by medical professionals, I walked home. In tears and in a daze, sitting in my room, I vowed to myself to never give up my spirituality again and never let myself be a victim of that level of abuse again.

Things slowly began to change, as I made my spiritual practices the center of my life. I left this school at the end of the year and used the funds I had saved to begin rebuilding myself spiritually. Though I felt very foggy and wounded, I began healing my trauma step by step. Eventually I was ready to tackle the challenge of teaching at a new school, this time determined that I would not let this setback be a defining moment in my life. 

| | |

I learned after years of ups and downs that my it would be my spirituality and not my mentality that was going to govern and change the rest of my life. I began searching through books and trying out different forms of spirituality and was introduced to Buddhism. I immediately began to employ the wisdom that I extracted out of Buddhist teachings and other philosophies and slowly began to watch my life transform and my vibration change. I however, still remained unsatisfied with how unfulfilling my life was.

In addition, I spent a majority of my time, researching the culture of my ancestors, a culture that had been robbed away from them, in the course of enslavement. I realized then, that if they could press forward so could I.  I developed a pride in myself that had been missing, and I determined to use that resolve to keep struggling.

I decided to return to teaching and prove that I could be myself, fight for my environment and teach students and colleagues how to do the same. I knew this time around, I wasn’t going to just stick to the script.  

Immediately the same sorts of problems surfaced that I was experiencing previously. I was publicly humiliated often for standing up for my truth and speaking up for what I felt was right. These insults and constant criticism definitely got to me, but every night and day I refused to abandoned my spiritual practices. I leaned on them and my closest friends as I met my trials and tribulations.

Once I learned that I was the one with my environment, I began soul-searching, meditating and contemplating on the changes I want to make. I stopped looking for everything outside of me to be perfect and began to channel the inner power that I had in me all along. 

I amassed more wisdom and began to work at my job tirelessly, dealing with micro-aggressions and slights from others who either refused to believe me or disregarded who I was as a person.  It was after a major setback and wanting to quit that I realize who the Way was. Me.

The moment of truth was at the New School I was teaching at, when a student called me a “Nigger” again. Instead of reacting, the insult was destroyed by the Force Field of my practices. I was totally astounded. While the pain from those words hurt, I was able to respond and not react to the situation.

From there I made a conscious decision, to not cave in to pressure to and go to work the next day but instead practice self-care and my traditions. My heart broke open when it was revealed to me that the same students and staff that I had challenges with, protested on my behalf and the school administration began active work to change the policies in place, that ignored destructive behavior in favor of results. I achieved a crucial change in my life, that manifested in a manner I couldn’t dream of.