FIRST MONTH OF THE BLOG AND WEBSITE
A short and funny story of how, where, when and with whom were born this blog and website
In early 2013 I lived in Madrid and used to work in the restaurant Yatiri in Tirso de Molina. I suddenly had a generalized physical blockage that almost completely stopped me, I could not get down the stairs, and could not cross the street between my house and the restaurant; I was totally blocked from pain, I had contractures as if I had been running for days, pain as if I had been beaten. Then I called a holistic masseur called Hugo Oklander, I remembered him because a few days before he called me telling that he had come to Madrid after an international journey in search for enlightenment, and that he had not succeeded and thus was looking for a job in Madrid. I had known him for 10 years. I offered him to become my personal masseur to heal my physical blockages. He implemented such a deep treatment that not only my pain left, but I could also understand the origins of these physical problems. “I was not doing what I was supposed to”
Days later, after going through my psycho-emotional process, I took ayahuasca in my house with my partner Paula and our little daughter Amelys who accompanied us with the cat. That night I received an order from above, I do not know if it was my higher self, my higher consciousness or ayahauasca’s, I do not care where it came from, as I heard very clearly the order and authority, it said: “DO NOTHING. LET THINGS GO. FLOW WITH LIFE. EVERYTHING COMES”.
But, a few days earlier, I realized I had to do what was I was postponing. I thus decided to unite both messages: the one from below (my body) and the one from above (my consciousness). I said, “I know what I have to do, but I won’t do anything. I trust that it will happen.”
A few days later, I was offered the opportunity to go to Ibiza for a season to accompany my daughter Ailén who needed help for a business. At that time, I did not know it would have anything to do with my situation, but I agreed to go; my daughter did rent a flat with sea view towards the sunrise, and I offered my masseur, Hugo, to accompany me there; he accepted almost immediately. When we arrived in Ibiza, I was just starting to take care of the Facebook page AYAHUASCA and I had to write in order to publish on that social network. Hugo implemented a marketing plan to get clients to massage on the island. There we were, each of us in his own activity.
In just a few weeks, I managed write a lot about ayahuasca and my experience of many years with psychotherapeutic work and shamanic medicine; Hugo could get enough customers to buy a car. Both lived in the same apartment. Sometimes Paula and Amelys came to visit and sometimes I went to Madrid to visit them; but I was entirely focused on doing what I felt at that moment: WRITING AND PUBLISHING.
The result of these three months in Ibiza, where I could see the inspiring sunrise every morning, enabled me to write and publish more than 100 texts that enabled the page to position itself as the most visited by people related to ayahuasca. I began to receive hundreds of emails from all over the world thankful about the texts and asking questions; inviting me to organize encounters with ayahuasca.
Hugo was watching from the outside everything that was happening with ayahuasca within a social network, he had already taken ayahuasca and knew it, but one night he asked me to give it to him only; he took a little and had the closest experience to enlightenment he ever had. He had given up the search for enlightenment but it suddenly came to him, more real than anything he had experienced in his search that lasted decades.
This and other situations led Hugo to ask me one day: could I do what you do on Facebook in English instead of Spanish? And I said yes, you can get started right now. Let me create the Ayahuasca English page, I set you as an editor and you can begin to translate and publish the posts I already did in Spanish. (Hugo speaks several languages because he needed to travel the world for his search for enlightenment). And so he got started. A few days later he found there was an actual interest generated by everything published on that page and he got more and more involved in this task until the day he told me: “We have to bring people to Ibiza so they experience ayahuasca”; and so we did, the first one who came was from Manchester, called John, (now he is one of our collaborators). As he told us, in just three days he had more therapeutic and spiritual experiences than in his whole life, and he is a great seeker of more than 60 years. That experience encouraged Hugo to squeeze the throttle. At this point, he had almost stopped giving massages, not even to me, in order to commit to the English Ayahuasca page.
Other people, Dejan and Maraan, an Italian couple we already knew, came to the apartment; we were again able to witness the miracle that ayahuasca can generate. We filmed everything with Hugo because it seemed incredible to see that other people can reach such high spiritual states that quickly. Although I’ve been watching these phenomena with ayahuasca for more than 10 years, they never cease to amaze me.
A few months later, before the end of 2012, we were already giving lectures and organizing retreats with ayahuasca in Manchester and London-UK, in Cuneo-ITALY and Switzerland. Dejan and Mara decided to run the Italian Ayahuasca International page. With these three pages in Spanish, English and Italian, our international community got started; it was nothing more than a virtual meeting, involving sometimes a few people taking ayahusaca for personal use. Until a weekend when more than 30 people came to Ibiza and we had to rent two more flats to accommodate those who came to experience Ayahuasca and psychotherapy.
At that point, we decided to leave Spain and begin an international tour that we thought would take 2 or 3 months but it’s been going on until today. For 2 and a half years we’ve been traveling more than 10 countries and thousands of cities and towns in Europe and America. In the coming 6 months we have nearly all of our weekends busy with this activity in many countries of America, Europe and Asia.
From being a masseur and an enlightenment seeker, Hugo, became the director of Inner Mastery International’s international expansion, a company that I created with Paula to legally expand the inner evolution work with or without the use of ayahuasca. We are currently constituted as a company in Germany and Italy, and soon in Mexico, Argentina and the United Kingdom. Hugo’s task has been central in the company’s growth; he had the most perfect combination of tremendous potential and whimsical limitations in the same physical space. (But I will discuss it in an exclusive post about Hugo Oklander and other characters who accompanied me in this project-adventure)
Given the fact that we have over 40 websites and social networks pages, and that more than 40 people are working within the organization, the Community Manager, Alvaro Arias, suggested I set up a super blog and website with all the content I had been publishing in these two years and a half, so that the texts are all centralized and can be translated into 10 languages and published on every page of Ayahuasca International. And so I decided; I met with my partner Paula and our daughter Amelys on the 08/31/15 and I told them: do you think it is a good idea to create a blog with my full name to publish all the texts I’ve been writing on my life? Paula replied what stops you? And Amelys said, “How nice, I’ll have a famous father”
On the day 1/9 I made up my mind, and in just 11 days it became a reality thanks to the technicians managed by Alvaro in his company. Today, it’s been a month since the international launch of albertojosevarela.com and more than 20,000 people already visited it. Almost 1,000 people per day.
My only regret is that I lost the best masseur I’ve ever met in my life.
Thank you Hugo Oklander
Now, looking back, I understand this order of doing nothing that everything would happen at the right moment, even difficulties, and especially all those who came to me to commit to the project, to support and accompany me in this beautiful craziness of being truly ourselves, to heal and share with others. This is a brief summary of how the community-organizations Ayahuasca International and Inner Mastery were born and I will go on publishing one post every month as I went through experiences that seem incredible or taken from a fiction film.
You can share this link with all the people you want, to collaborate in spreading a simple message that helps a lot and costs nothing: “IF WE UNITE THE AVAILABILITY OF WORKING HARD, OFFERING OURSELVES FROM THE HEART, WITH SOMETHING WE ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT, WITH THE CONFIDENCE THAT EVERYTHING COMES WITHOUT PUSH OR CONTROL, THEN THE MIRACLE HAPPENS. WHAT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE, BECOMES REALITY”.
Alberto José Varela
