Spirituality 103: The Forgiveness Code
Ivan Figueroa-Otero, M.D. has
practiced and studied medicine for over 40 years. He had a lengthy career as a successful
pediatric surgeon, retiring in 2009. He
then became certified in the practice of acupuncture and applies traditional
Chinese medicine techniques to treating his patients. Now, at age 73, he has released a series of
award-winning, Amazon best-sellers that explore the depths of the mind-body-
spirit connection and offers insightful advice on how we can lead fulfilling,
balanced, and productive lives. His
books are a bit of Buddhism meets Western medicine, where the healing solutions
come to us not only with pills or surgeries, but from within each of us.
1. What’s
your latest book, Spirituality 103: The Forgiveness Code, about? Spirituality
103 takes the
spiritual curriculum of the School of Life trilogy to a higher level by
unraveling the emotional maze that traps us in the self-made prisons built by
guilt. The book guides you through an imaginary battle fought in the deepest
recesses of our minds, where the enemies, which are the shadows of our
ignorance, are defeated by the guilt-busting light of forgiveness.
2. You
say the healing code for our emotional scars is forgiveness. How so? In the allegorical view of our spiritual journey as a war
scenario between wisdom (warrior of the light) and ignorance (the warrior of
the shadows), the wounds create scars left by the emotionally sharpened sabers
contaminated with the bacteria of guilt. Forgiveness is the only antibiotic
that can facilitate the healing of those imaginary wounds. Understanding that
the injuries were self-inflicted comes from the hidden wisdom stored in our
DNA, liberated by the lessons of love (medals) acquired for our bravery under
emotional bombardment.
3. Living
in Puerto Rico and seeing the devastation of the hurricane, as well as the
economic duress that existed before it, how do you find your message helps to
heal those in need? This
has been a golden opportunity to apply all the lessons of my school of life in
my own life and to see how learning from our mistakes of the past helps us to
reconstruct our lives and our country in solidarity.
4. As
a pediatric surgeon for many years you often operated under a lot of
stress. What advice do you have for
people to relax under pressure? Practice
makes perfect when you focus on your given talents. You shouldn't only do your
best, but also feel good about doing it. Feel respect and solidarity for the
life’s purpose you share with others and do the best you can without expecting
perfection in the results. Stress can be a motivating force to respect the
importance and responsibility of your role and can extend your capabilities at
doing it. Always feel connected to your common source of wisdom and think like
a musketeer, “One for all and all for one.”
5. You
were also schooled in traditional Chinese medicine and became certified in
medical acupuncture. How have you seen
healing take place by employing a mind-body-spirit connection? Modern medicine trained me to
oversee the healing process of the patient and also get most of the credit for
it. It also guided me to eradicate symptoms as rapidly as possible even if I
didn’t know the cause. The dark side of this system is that if I failed I would
also carry the burden of the result. In contrast, traditional Chinese medicine,
acupuncture and other holistic fields of medicine focus on looking for the root
cause of diseases and empowering the patient to correct the lifestyle errors
that promoted them. The healing is primordially done by the patient under
guidance by the therapist.
6. You
talk about how individuals need to undergo a self-transformation that will
guide our “magic-mirror” through our “multidimensional voyages”. Please explain. In Spirituality 103, The
Forgiveness Code, I compared our minds to a magical mirror where our universal
experience will be reflected based on the purity of our vision. We are created
from the reflection of the primordial magical mirror, which in its nature was
pure, and as such we should be able to reproduce its clarity without
distortions. During the multidimensional voyages traveled with our minds
(mirrors) the subjective traveling experiences will be distorted by the
emotional interpretations of the voyagers. These distortions are what we must
transform by remembering the original pure creative reflection of our
primordial magical mirror. “In the Magical Mirror of your mind, the clarity of
your vision (self-esteem) will depend on the purity of your vision”.
7. How
can we understand the love lessons hidden within every experience of suffering?
I am a firm
believer in the law of cause and effect, which is in accord to Newton’s third
law of physics, which says, “When one body exerts a force on a second body, the
second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in
direction on the first body”. I differ with the traditional view of the law
that maintains all effects of negative actions result in karma or punishment to
the person doing it. The main purpose of the law, which I renamed the law of love,
is to teach the individual who perpetrates the inappropriate action to learn
from the consequences of his action on others, so that he or she can rectify it
on future actions. The purpose of the law has always been a lesson of love that
creates awareness and empathy. The good or bad results of any action will
depend on the intention behind it. Intentions that consider the results of the
effects on the majority of those that share our journey are said to be
inclusive and unselfish, and those that only consider the impact on some of the
voyagers are exclusive and selfish since they please only a few of the
participants.
For more information, please consult: www.ifigueroa.allauthor.com.
Please
note: This author is a client for the public relations firm that I work for.
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