Saturday, May 19, 2018

Interview With Author Ivan Figueroa –Otero, M.D.




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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Brian Feinblum’s insightful views, provocative opinions, and interesting ideas expressed in this terrific blog are his alone and not that of his employer or anyone else. You can – and should -- follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels much more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2018. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s Independent.  This was named one of the best book marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. Also named by WinningWriters.com as a "best resource

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