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Life’s an Ocean, Learn to Surf It!
Submitted by: Ricardo E.
New Haven, CTMy name is Ricardo, I was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. I'm currently 19 years old, going to school confident that all my dreams will come true because every day the puzzle is putting itself in place...
My name is Ricardo and I was born in Ecuador. I am one of five brothers. I lived in Ecuador the first ten years of my life until my family and I moved to United States for medical purposes. My twelve year old brother had been diagnosed with leukemia.
Our life changed completely, we went through an economic crisis, lack of jobs, stress, bullying in school, fatal car accidents, depression, the leukemia, and to make it worse, after six years of living in the USA, they denied our medical parole and in six months we had to leave our new life and return to our country.
We went through all those tests with a strong faith in our religion, but it all changed when we stopped asking for things we didn’t want, and we focused on the things we wanted.
Personally I’ve always been a kid that likes to dream, I also like drawing and when I was bored I used to draw a big mansion with huge rooms, elevators, huge garage filled with many very expensive cars, a beautiful pool that runs along the backyard and goes into a cave and turns into a jacuzzi, etc. I used to show my mom and say,”Look! This is my house!” I remember she used to just smile and pretend she was paying attention and not thinking about the many problems we had.
My dad had been struggling through a problem of depression, due to many years of working about twenty hours a day and barely sleeping three hours a night. Imagine taking care of a family of five boys. The depression caused my parents to have a lot of problems in their marriage; my father’s disease caused him to lose his job, which resulted in us not being able to pay for rent for a few months. I think in that time, we all hated being home, there was an aroma of stress and problems that did not permit our house to feel like home. But that wasn’t it, we knew in six months we had to leave and go back to a country that promised nothing. We had left everything behind six years ago and had no house, no car, no job, and my brother was still in a process of remission; if the leukemia came back, we had little hope of a cure in our country.
Our sky cleared up when my mother discovered a secret. She read about The Secret online and saw a couple of videos and was very interested in this topic. I remember the long hours of her trying to explain it to me even though she still didn’t quite understand it herself. The little she knew filled her with hope that we had a chance to change our life. One day I decided to go into a Barnes and Noble, which is very rare considering I hate reading, and happened to see the book that my mom was talking about so much, The Secret. They had a Spanish version which made me happy and motivated me to buy it for my mom.
The change in my mother’s life was noticeable. She lived The Secret; it was all she talked about. She started writing out a plan for her life, and giving thanks for all her good fortune as if they had already come true! She decided it was time for us to move to a better house and a better community. She described what her new house looked like, white with a nice green front yard, enough space in the back, and a big palm tree in the front. We talked about it more and more, and when I would show her the new designs for my future house, she would smile and give me new ideas for my backyard. We had moments where the illusion that was our problems, seemed to influence our moods; but for those moments my mom got new books that talked about control of emotions, and the law of attraction, etc.
After analyzing our life we realized that we had applied The Secret many times before. She remembered the many hours of self control therapy she used to do with my brother when he had leukemia. She would make him lay down, relax, and command his cells to fight and get rid of his cancerous cells (a therapy she once read when he was first diagnosed). The “riso-terapia” or laugh-therapy, had been something we continuously practiced in our house. We learned that “faith” works the same way when attracting things into our life. God doesn’t want us to ask for things, he wants us to have faith that all the things we need and want will come true. Faith meant to believe it. And for the first time in our lives, we started to pray correctly.
We “believed” that the things we wanted would come true. My mother spread this understanding with my family. Sometimes my dad and my brothers were a little skeptical, but it didn’t stop my mom. Through all this illumination, a new tragedy appeared.
My oldest brother was involved in a car accident with a friend. His friend was driving on the highway when for no apparent reason the car went off the road, through a fence, hitting a tree and causing it to flip over and into a canal. My brother was under water for an estimated fifteen minutes. The car accident occurred at 4pm, we weren’t informed until midnight. A state patrol showed up on our door and told us that my brother’s friend had passed away, my brother was in a critical condition and we needed to go immediately. I remember the twenty minute journey to the hospital, which felt like twenty hours, we were all praying to God, begging him not to take my brother from us. We got to the hospital and just like described by the state patrol officer, my brother was barely alive. A machine controlling almost every organ in his body, a tube coming out of his mouth extracting the liquid in his system and into cup that must have had about two liters of water already; water so dirty, it looked like a Coca-Cola bottle. They made us go to the waiting room where we all sat and cried about what had happened to him.
I’ll never forget the words that my brother said. He cleared his tears looked at us in a confused or disappointed manner and said, “Why do you cry for him? He’s not dead, he’s alive and I know it, we all know it. Stop crying as if he’s dead!” Those words impacted me, immediately I remembered The Secret. I apologized to God and the Universe for having doubts. My brother survived that night, contradicting all that the doctors expected. They had explained to us, that there was huge chance he wouldn’t even make it through the night. If he did, there was a huge chance he would stay in a coma for a minimum of forty eight hours. If he did wake up, they would have to see how far his brain was affected by the lack of oxygen during the accident. If he did survive, there was a huge chance he would never be the same, that he would be a vegetable, and have to learn how to do a lot of basic things all over again.
Exactly twenty four hours after the accident, my brother was conscious again. The doctors rushed in his room to verify the movement of his hands and head were actually conscious and not just involuntary muscle movements due to the medication he was receiving. He was alive and conscious. In less than a week, he was able to go back home with no brain damage whatsoever, not even a scar. The doctors were not able to scientifically explain how my brother made it through, but he did.
That same week, we were contacted by a law firm in Miami, who had been in contact with the foundation that was helping with my brother’s treatment, they told us they were willing to donate their time to help us get some type of parole to permit us to stay in the US. We were given time, six more months until we learned what the law firm and the immigration department had come up with regarding our stay in the country.
In those six months we moved to a new house. It was white, with a beautiful green front yard, a lot of space in the back, and a huge full grown palm tree in the front. My father had decided to get rid of his depression himself. He fought himself and changed into a new man, even better than the one he was before. During these six months, my father got in contact with an old friend that he had known since they were children. They had worked together growing up as leaders of the boyscout movement in our country. His friend had recently been elected president of our country. He asked my dad, “Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you! I want you working with me, I need people like you!” After that six month period we received a letter from the immigration department saying we had to leave the country and gave us a deadline of about a week from that time. At the same time my mom received a call from the presidency of Ecuador saying my father had been given a diplomatic mission in the United States.
Our tragedies and test in life made our blessings seem more miraculous. The president of Ecuador wanted an immigrant working for the people, someone who really understood them; he also wanted an honest and hardworking person and had no doubt that my father fit perfectly with those characteristics.
I remember listening to celebrities and famous people talk about how you can be anything you set your mind to, or any dream can come true. I used to ask myself, “Why would they say ‘set your mind’? Why would they refer to our goals as ‘dreams’?” Now I know they understood The Secret. What seemed like silly advice from someone who had been more fortunate than I had, now seemed to make so much sense to me. The Secret works even if you believe it or not. We now understand The Secret, the most incredible things can happen only if we decide it.
I’m currently 19 years old, going to school confident that all my dreams will come true because every day the puzzle is putting itself in place. There’s many more anecdotes I have in my life which I hope to one day share in a book of my own that could maybe help change someone’s life, the same way The Secret helped change ours. The older I get, the more I learn, the more I believe how real The Secret is. If you are going through problems, believe, pray, have faith, whatever makes you more comfortable, because the law of attraction will make all your wishes, blessings, miracles, life tests, etc, come to you.
Believe.