joaquín de david

The mind is a powerful and useful tool, but it is represented by swords in the Tarot because of its double edge. The ego, disguised as the mind, is a chatterbox, constantly seeking your attention, relying on the past and future, but never the present. And that’s the trap. Life unfolds in the present moment, and to be the protagonist, presence is necessary. If you allow your mind to absorb your attention, drifting to yesterday and tomorrow, you will miss what is happening today, which is life.

Silence allows for a more detailed observation of everything you perceive. The external circumstances, seemingly uncontrollable, come to teach you something that you should discover through the feelings they bring. What are they asking you? What are they trying to tell you? What do you respond? What lesson will you take once it has passed?

You cannot control what happens outside, but you can control what happens within. It’s not about isolating yourself from the context, it’s about recognizing your limits without losing the helm. It’s also not about trying to change the waves, but knowing how to navigate them. Meditating is observing. Observing how you speak to yourself, how you treat yourself, and how you interact with others. What you give yourself and allow yourself will be more or less the same as what you give to others and allow from them. If you mistreat yourself, you will also mistreat others and allow their mistreatment. Self-criticism and self-punishment are forms of mistreatment.

Meditation is voluntarily turning off the noise of the mind to facilitate a reunion with your soul. It’s trying to lower the volume of daily problems to reach a state of serenity, allowing you to hear the inner voice that helps you improve, see your flaws, and start living from feeling. Meditation involves observing yourself to know yourself, discovering when you act out of selfishness and when you act from what you feel. The goal is to find inner balance, calm, the kind that enables knowledge. This leads to understanding, which opens the way to acceptance, and with it, love.

Life is like the radio, transmitting on multiple frequencies. If you always tune into the same frequency, you’ll always find the same thing. If you’ve already observed the results of one frequency, the way to obtain different results is by trying a new frequency. To start quieting the mental chatter, there are a thousand ways: like a statue without moving a muscle, looking at the infinite, or walking down the street, the method doesn’t matter. As a first step, it might be easier to observe something in motion, like the sea or trees in the wind, because that way the mind has something to focus its attention on, and perhaps it will be easier to focus on not judging what you see, just observing it. There the silence will begin, and with it, serenity.