Like a Spark From Fire: Break Free from the Past, Find Your Brilliance and Become Your True Self

By Debra Berndt Maldonado and Robert Maldonado

If you are feeling stuck in life but know somehow you were meant for more, this book is an invitation for women to finally break free.

Over the course of your life, you developed an identity that helped you function and survive in the world but also covered up your true power. The flame of passion and limitless possibility of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creative Mind Media
• Release date: Feb 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985291414

Book preview

Introduction

A woman walked into a local temple and asked the Guru, Who am I? Who is my True Self? The guru explained that her individual soul is like a spark from fire. The fire is known by many names—God, the Great Intelligence, the Universe, the Self, or the Divine. If you look at sparks around the fire, the sparks appear separate and different from the fire. Though the separation causes it to have a different name and form, the spark’s substance is identical to fire.

When you look at yourself, you only see your body; your name and form that creates an illusion that you are separate and different from the Divine or God. Who are you? You are like a spark from fire. Your True Self is Divine.

When I heard this story about the Guru, this message reminded me of the term Namaste, used as a greeting. Namaste means the Divine in me recognizes the Divine in you. Let me begin by saying, Namaste. Welcome to the rediscovery of your True Self. Your Spark has always been there. Your inner Divine light has never dimmed, but your awareness of the Divine in you has been forgotten through your human experience, and you may have lost the connection to who you really are. You likely don’t see yourself as omniscient and powerful as the universe because your body feels separate; you have established an identity or personality that feels small compared to your true magnificence. You may believe you are the sum of your experiences, the number in your bank account, your debt, your credit score, your education, your career title, your awards, your association with family and friends, and your social reputation. That is not who you really are.

Early in life, you were more aware of the real you. Your light is the source of your unlimited imagination and as a child you believed in fantasies, possibilities, and magic. Over the years of life, you built up an identity that covered your true nature, which is called your ego. This identity helped you function in the world, but it also made you forget your power. It isn’t lost; your inner flame is still there as brilliant as ever and waiting for you to rediscover it again.

Everyone around you also has that same inner light, covered up by their actions, their personalities, and their human foibles. It becomes a challenge to see the light in all people, especially difficult people, people who have hurt us, and most importantly, ourselves. We focus on the exterior too much.

If you continue to live on the surface, as the world defines you, and do not discover your True Self, you will continue to feel trapped by life’s circumstances and let the world dictate your fate and your limits. Defining yourself by what others think of you leads to feelings of having little choice in your life; you settle for lesser relationships or a job that is unsatisfying, just to pay the bills, and it can even cause you to resent parents, partners, bosses, and other people in your life who have hurt you. You continue to carry stories of what happened to you and forget that you have the power to rewrite the script.

The world will ask you who you are. If you don’t know, the world will tell you.

—Carl Jung

This book challenges you to look inside to find that light that is the real you. I invite you to peel back the layers of misperception created by your ego through life experiences, and enter and explore deeper layers of yourself in your unconscious mind so that you can have a direct experience of your True Self. This is the way you can redesign the future and step into the person you were meant to become.

Like a spark from fire, you will directly experience a new part of you that is your True Personality, a part of you that is pure potential. In exploring the concepts and exercises in this book, something will awaken within you; you will become aware of the inner power that has been hiding in the shadow, and you will emerge more self-aware and empowered.

My Journey

Everything I share has been something I have experienced within myself. I was not born into an enlightened state of awareness—far from it.

My journey to understand my true nature began when a good friend gave me my first self-help book when I was twenty-five, and I was hooked. The only inner work I did, before self-help came into my life, was to pray at church for God to bring me a good man to marry. When I read my first personal growth book, You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, I learned that my thoughts create my life, and my mind was opened to a whole new world. Before that, I never thought I had any power and that God (my religious concept of Him) held all the cards. I found a new religion in personal development and self-help. I became obsessed, reading any personal development book that I could get my hands on. Each book gave me some peace of mind, some understanding, and some insights. I felt better and became more aware of my inner world, but nothing changed.

For decades, I explored everything—meditation, positive thinking, energy healing, inner child workshops, psychics, meditation, Eastern philosophy, motivation, hypnotherapy, and more. While what I was learning meant to be empowering, I got into a fixing trap. I felt left out from the normal people who I believed didn’t have any issues and didn’t have to work on themselves. There is this strange idea in society that normal human beings get to have happy lives and there is something broken or wounded in you if you aren’t living the life you want.

As I look back now, I see that not getting what I thought I wanted was the greatest gift. On some level, a wiser part of me knew that I was born for something more than just an ordinary life with regular goals. Something in me knew I was meant for more.

My search for truth led me down some strange and wonderful roads. I remember reading self-help books from my favorite authors and wondering what it would be like to be them. I aspired to become a woman with wisdom and do what they were doing—sharing their knowledge to help others. These women were inspirations to me and helped me overcome my pain in life. I wanted to do the same for others; I was fascinated by human psychology and spiritual knowledge and felt it was my purpose. One main goal, present even to this day, was to bring the best knowledge to others without making them feel broken. Through my work with my husband, we developed a system for people to discover themselves in an empowering way and make real changes in their lives as well as in the people around them.

When I was still in my early twenties, one colleague of mine told me to read a book and then put a sticky note on my desk that said, Archetypes & the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung. It took me fifteen years to pick up that book. I can still see that note very clearly in my mind as it was an important seed planted that would eventually bring me to my current path. If you aren’t familiar with Carl Jung, he was a Swiss psychologist and one of the founders of modern psychology, along with Sigmund Freud. He is known for combining spirituality and psychology for high-functioning individuals to become their True Self—a process he called individuation. Individuation is when you finally break free of past patterns, labels, and limited ideas of who you are and consciously choose your destiny as the person you were meant to become.

Individuation is when you finally break free of past patterns, labels, and limited ideas of who you are and consciously choose your destiny as the person you were meant to become.

Jung’s concepts were around me, but I never really paid too much attention to them. I knew the terms synchronicity, introvert, extrovert, collective unconscious, archetypes, and Shadow, but I always kept to the more pop-style, self-help teachings, like law of attraction and manifesting. I really did not understand that I had to personally evolve to change my life. Everything I read said if I just changed my thoughts and held the intention and removed my blocks, I would get what I desired. I was trying to change my life, but I still saw myself as a small, insignificant human within the cosmos, begging the universe to bring me prizes for good behavior or thinking the right way.

Right before I met my husband, Robert, I noticed a pattern with the men I dated and my relationship with my father. Most of my personal growth journey was focused on how he treated me. He was stoic, unemotional, and unaffectionate when I was young. I never realized my part of the pattern. In response to his behavior, I became guarded, distant, and emotionally unavailable around him and, ultimately, with every romantic partner in my early adult life. I couldn’t see it because I was always focused on men who were not available, projecting my father’s image from my mind onto them.

You know how some say your whole life flashes before your eyes when you die? That was how I felt when I noticed that pattern. I replayed all my relationships in my head, and I was able to clearly see how defenses of intimacy had created my relationship life for decades. My awakening felt like the scene in The Matrix when Neo finally sees the code. That was the first time I experienced Jung’s theories in action; I embodied this process of self-discovery as I became attuned to my own behaviors for the first time.

I finally saw that I was the cause of the emotional unavailability that my ego created out of defense and fear of rejection. Something clicked inside of me when I realized that I had the power within me, all along, to have a relationship and that I was the one who was pushing men away and holding myself back. The experience is hard to describe, but like so many of my clients and students, I got this click, as if I turned on a light inside of me that took away the darkness and confusion. This is what I call a Spark Moment. It is when your inner wisdom breaks through the clutter of the ego mind, and everything is clearer. Spark Moments are much different than insights because they are beyond thought or something that can easily be put into words. These moments are a deep knowing rather than a surface, logical that makes a lot of sense analysis. The Spark Moment shifts you to a place where you can no longer go back to your old way of understanding.

Some people think insight is a transformation, but it is not. Insights happen in your logical mind. You connect the dots, and patterns start to make sense, but nothing changes. A Spark Moment is when you feel it deep in your soul and in your heart, a powerful energy of clarity, and everything is so clear that it is hard to go back again to the old pattern. In these moments, you remember who you are and reclaim your power.

A few weeks after my Spark Moment, Robert came into my life. The key here is that finding love was wonderful but not the actual prize. The real gift I gained was direct access to my power to choose the relationship I wanted. I wasn’t a prisoner to my past experiences; I had free will. A page was turned in my relationship saga, and I had a completely new relationship with love, under my terms, not driven by the old defenses of my ego’s conditioning.

Robert studied with a Jungian analyst when he was getting his PhD and introduced me to many of Carl Jung’s concepts. I felt as if a new world was opened to me, a secret other path from the mainstream of popular self-help. Jung’s theories bridged the gap between Western psychology and Eastern spirituality and gave me a map of my journey that I could use to navigate back to find my True Self.

For years I thought I knew who I was; I felt more spiritual and had some amazing mystical experiences, but I didn’t realize how attached I was to my surface personality. I now look back at my old Self, and she feels like a stranger to me. What used to limit her doesn’t limit me anymore. What she used to think was impossible is possible for me. I want you to have this same experience. I want you to know who you are because you were meant for so much more.

Have you ever looked at someone you admire and thought you could never do what that person does? Have you fantasized about big dreams but that voice in your head said, Who do you think you are? I felt that way too. I was trying to stretch my life but felt trapped in this limited personality that was bound by the rules of my past. The part of you that doubts yourself isn’t the real you. Be open to discovering who you really are as you explore the journey of this book. You will be amazed and pleased with who you become.

I spent most of my life in the corporate world as a marketing executive, but something always called me to teach and make a difference. I am now living my dream life and sharing it with my husband, Robert. We run an international coach training company, and we train life