After delivering over 2,500 presentations on a broad
The external world is a reflection of the internal world. Inner states of being are the real causes of the way we experience life. To truly change our life, we need to first change within.
Having earned a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and worked in the field for a few years may have helped me to become a keen observer of the relationship between causes and effects, which sometimes lead us to misperceive effects as if they were causes. The same happens in life. We tend to believe that what is happening in our external life is what drives our psychological processes, but it is quite the other way around.
I also used to mistakenly believe that when I was not content with certain aspects of my life or with certain people around me, then I needed to change or fix them.
Now I see that in those cases what needs to be changed is my self-awareness and the way I look at those circumstances.
As I had the opportunity to travel to over 35 countries and to live in several of them, I could experience being in relationship with diverse cultures in Brazil, where I was born, and in places such as India, Nepal, Mongolia, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Myanmar, Singapore, Indonesia (Bali), and others. Genuine appreciation for such diverse expressions of the human experience led me to come to the realization of another fundamental life principle:
Oneness is the foundation of life. We have a shared identity, One Self, that expresses itself through each of us as individuations of the same impersonal consciousness.
For a visual representation of what I mean by One Self, consider the diverse forms of greens, flowers, and trees that arise as individual expressions of the plant kingdom. We know they spring from the same ground of being—the soil is their shared identity. Although individual expressions are born and die in time, the source (soil) where they spring from is atemporal. Likewise, we each represent a human expression that is born and dies in time, though the essence of who we are, our true Self, is atemporal.
It was in one of those places where I lived in Asia that life arranged to bring my life partner and I together. Budkhand (Tibetan name meaning “female deity of awakening”) or simply “Budhi”, a lotus flower from Mongolia, was one of my long-time students who later became a teacher like me. We now work together as teachers/facilitators of wisdom teachings aimed at raising humanity’s level of consciousness through the realization of our Oneness.
Most of the presentations we delivered as well as the meditation practices we guided were meant to help our students and fellow travelers on the way of awakening to realize what our true Self really is. Though many of the teachings we found along the way were dualistic in nature (light vs darkness, soul vs ego, good vs evil, spirit vs matter, etc.), the non-dualistic ideas of Vajrayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta resonated with us more than any other.
During the years I lived in India, I had the opportunity to attend hundreds of hours of teachings from the Dalai Lama. In particular, I attended an intensive 10-day-long retreat with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in which I received the Gyalwa Gyatso initiation, which was my first real experience in Oneness.
What you experience in Oneness is the union (yoga) between the personal self (the temporal part of me that includes the physical body and personality) and the atemporal Self, which is the conscious awareness we all share in Unity. In Oneness we see ourselves and life in a completely different way.
Later we found those same non-dualistic ideas from classical Asian traditions in two contemporary books written from a western perspective that helped us come into full awareness of Self and to the merging of the human and spiritual levels of experience in Oneness.
These books are A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love. They have completely quenched all thirst for knowledge. Through the profound and practical wisdom in them, we came to the end of seeking and the beginning of living as we truly are in the absence of an ego-self.
Nowadays our work as teachers/facilitators is almost completely based on the contents of those two books, along with a few others, such as Way of Mastery and Choose Only Love. In 2019 life arranged for us to meet Glenn Hovemann, founder of Take Heart Publications—a publishing company based in California that publishes A Course of Love—, and Mari Perron, author/receiver of this book. Since then we have been working for Take Heart Publications, collaborating with Glenn on extending awareness of A Course of Love into every part of the world.
With Glenn, I am a co-publisher and co-president at Take Heart Publications. I developed the website acourseoflove.org and wrote most of its contents in partnership with Glenn and Mari. I also work with Glenn to publish a monthly newsletter that is sent to over 4,400 subscribers all over the world. Glenn and I also coordinate the translations of A Course of Love from English into 11 foreign languages.
Besides being a board member of Take Heart Publications, Budhi and I are representatives of Take Heart Publications in Brazil, where we live. The online groups we facilitate in English include participants from many countries. We are also actively engaged in organizing online and in-person gatherings in Brazil, where we are part of a team of event coordinators. In 2023, we organized the second national gathering of ACOL readers in Brazil.
Another aspect of our work involves the production of video content for the official YouTube channels of A Course of Love in English and in Portuguese. I’m the producer, along with Lynn Kidd, of four interview series: Heart to Heart: How A Course of Love Changed My Life (24 episodes), Wisdom of the Heart: Topic-based Conversations with A Course of Love Readers (37 episodes), Love is the Answer: A Podcast that Explores the Power of Love in Real Life (17 episodes), and our new podcast, Love in Movement: Sharing our Unique Expressions
of Living Love in Daily Life (4 episodes).
I’m regularly invited as a speaker at online and in-person conferences in Brazil and in other countries. I like to share personal life experiences that illustrate the wisdom transmissions in A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love in daily life.