Episode 8: Manifesto

I am Lydia Lazzara, and I question authority. 

Note: While I normally keep my episodes profanity-free, this episode does have three instances of mild profanity (bull**** & da*n), so use your discernment if this is appropriate if you are listening around children.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

I want to experience life at the intersection of mystical and mundane. I want to see, listen, and live from my heart, experiencing the intersection of mystical and mundane in each moment. And my podcast and the stories and discussions that come through it are simply a reflection of what I experience as I live from my heart. They are bringing the intersection of mystical and mundane to the world, to your heart, so you can also experience the expansion possible. And I am so grateful that you've joined me at the intersection of mystical and mundane. And I am Lydia Lazara, founder of Questions Authority Coaching. And I welcome you to the next episode here of At the Intersection of Mystical and Mundane. Today's going to be maybe a little bit more different. I am recording this with the direct intent of sharing vulnerably and being bold. And I'm not going to edit anything out. Normally I don't edit significantly from what I say, but I will cut out maybe extra words or long spaces. And so today what's really different is you're going to hear everything the way it was recorded. So have some patience with me. And I hope that you find value in what I share today. And I hope it leads you to the intersection of mystical and mundane, and also to question authority. Because in this episode, dare I say it, I do. I am Lydia Lazara, and this is my manifesto. I question any authority that makes someone question their worth or makes them feel unacceptable just as they are. I question any authority that says someone is only valuable or worthy if they meet some standard, metric, or educational requirement. Everyone is valuable from the moment of conception through their death. Nothing can take that value away or diminish it. Any authority that says otherwise is just trying to sell something or create a power over structure to control you. No one is better than another, nor are they less than another. Everyone is worthy of love and acceptance just as they are. Distraction is the primary tactic of social media, mainstream media, and politics. When they keep the masses distracted with stories promising disclosure or promoting stories of division, hatred, and war, they keep people under their control. They maintain control of what you feel, what patterns and habits you maintain, and they control the narrative for not just your life but the world's. So start paying attention to the man behind the curtain pulling all the levers. Better yet, start paying attention to your own body and soul so you can develop true discernment. I question any authority that uses power over others to promote themselves or their agenda. Power over is the weakest form of power, yet it's the most commonly used form of power in the world today. Truth and unconditional love have no need to exert power over you or others. They are powerful regardless of your acknowledgement of them. And those who also stand in that truth and unconditional love will never need to have power over another to know and to be in that power. I question any authority that uses shame or guilt as a tactic to maintain or gain control or power over someone. Shame and guilt are never an acceptable method of modifying behavior or exerting power. Unconditional love never needs to use shame or guilt, and neither does the truth. I question any authority that uses fear as a tactic to gain power, our attention, or to distract us from corruption. Fear is never an acceptable tool to use. It is always a sign of weakness and imbalance rather than of power and truth. Truth or God never needs to use fear to get what it wants, what it needs to maintain balance, to be powerful. I question any authority that promotes tolerance over love and the eradication of the divine masculine and feminine within both the individual and the collective. Being masculine is not toxic. Being feminine is not weak. We all have both masculine and feminine within our souls, which work to promote a balance and harmony within ourselves and the entire world. It is vital to allow and encourage those with more of the divine masculine to protect and support. And it is also vital to allow and encourage those who embody more of the divine feminine to nurture, provide emotional safety and support. And we all of us need to learn how to receive and to rest within each. We are all created by God and are part of God. No human is the enemy. Division and hatred are the enemies. And the only solution is to return to ourselves, to our souls, and to God, to remember that we are all part of a unified whole. What we do to one, we do to all. Conditional love is a distortion that we have come to believe is love when it is not. True love has no conditions, no expectations, no reasons why someone could lose love. True love does not condemn, regardless of what person's actions. Yet true unconditional love is powerful. It is boundaried, and it cannot be misused. Unconditional love is not a weakness, but a strength. I am Lydia Lazara, and I question any authority that does not stand for love, for truth, and for the entire human race. I question all authorities because those that stand in truth and unconditional love do not seek to control or exert power over anyone. They welcome being questioned, and they will still be standing in that love and truth after being thoroughly scrutinized. And I help people see and question the authorities in their lives so they can return to their own power, find their own agency, and stand in truth and unconditional love. So that is my manifesto. That is what I stand for. That is my declaration to the world. I am here, and I have been questioning authorities since I was so tiny. And yeah, I learned early on as a child that it wasn't safe to question out loud. And I, in fact, did my best through most of my teenage years all the way up into my late 30s to shut down that questioning part of me. And I was never very successful at it. What I did do was internalize the questions and keep silent about a lot of it, but it keeping silent, keeping it internalized, started to have unintended consequences, started to increase my stress levels, it started to destroy my health and even destroy relationships. And if I couldn't do that openly, then well then I wasn't being true to myself. And it took my body becoming so sick with COVID and then turning it into long COVID where my nervous system shut down for me to come back to me to find my voice again. And it's been a good four plus years now that I've really been working on finding my voice and coming back to myself, and I know that there is still more to go, more to come back to, more to bring home to myself, and to learn about myself and to experience. But this manifesto that I've just shared with you, these are my truths, these are my statements of power. Every time I question authority, whether I do it out loud or internally, now that I am aware of what I am doing, every time I question authority, I call that power back home to me. And make no mistake, most of these authorities are non-existent entities that I've placed in my mind as having power over me. Because no one ever outright told me consistently, I should say, that I shouldn't question that I had to deny my authenticity in order to fit in. No one ever told me that. These were simply messages that I picked up from the world around me, from my family, from school, from church. And I think one of the biggest things is that unconditional love versus conditional love. Let's just chat about that for a moment. Because this one really, it really goes deep for me. I could never understand being raised a Christian why we were told that God, that Jesus holds this unconditional love for us and yet would send us to hell if we didn't play by this one religion's rules. I could never understand why, if there is unconditional love, there were unforgivable sins. I could never understand why if there is this unconditional love. So consumed with judgment and shame and guilt. It didn't make sense to me. As a young child, it did not make sense to me that I could feel this weirdness, this disconnect, this hypocrisy, and I didn't have the words for it when I was young. And as I got older, I just started to shut down and shut myself out of my own body because that was the only way that I could continue to live in a world that told me God is unconditional love, and then they went and put all of these conditions on that love. The only way that I could see to move forward was to disconnect from myself. And when I disconnected from myself, I disconnected from God, I disconnected from that unconditional love, I disconnected from that truth. And that happens to just about every single one of us on this earth when we are children. At some point, that seems to be the only way to move forward for us in this world that is full of power over, of division, of conditional love, of unworthiness, and of assigning arbitrary values based on some messed up metric. And so we disconnect. Or maybe a midlife crisis or something where we have what so many of us have called a spiritual awakening where we get tired and excuse my language here, we get tired of the bullshit. We get tired of living the lie and playing by these distorted, arbitrary, judgy rules. And we start to come home to ourselves again. That's what I've been doing the last four and a half years since my spiritual awakening first started. And the more in quotation marks, awake I become, the more aware of myself I become, the more I recognize where I was denying the questioning, and where I've always held that questioning and that discontent with the way things were and are. And Toto is over there finding this little cubicle in the back with this curtain drawn over it and happens to pull it back, and there's a man behind that curtain. The wizard of Oz. Someone who is actually powerless and just understood how to manipulate, how to create illusion and fear. And so it has nothing to do with the fact that it was portrayed by a man. So it's certainly not any slight against men when I say that. That's why I'm explaining that. Because that is something else that I have long questioned. And quite honestly, I questioned it and sensed the imbalance and the offness of it without even really being aware of what it was for so long. And something that I'm really coming into now is that divine masculine and divine feminine. And recognizing that our world has tried to destroy the truth and hide the truth from us about what these two distinctive energies are that live within every single one of us, regardless of our gender or gender identity. They are not gender specific. And yet those of us who are women will oftentimes be more in our divine feminine. That's a particular strength of ours that has been shackled and chained and hidden and kicked into the dirt for centuries, if not millennia, at this point. And the divine masculine was certainly promoted more, but it became distorted and imbalanced and no longer connected to the divine. And that's been happening at least as long as we've been denying and distorting the divine feminine. And the reason that's been happening is because the men behind the curtain pulling all the levers, whatever those powers are. And I am not going to claim to know. And whatever your belief is around that, that's fine. But whatever these powers are, even if they're just systems that have been in place for so long, that we literally can't even comprehend how to break out of them anymore, even though we know that they are crumbling and that they are distorted and they've become this evil entity all on their own, even if it's just that. And it keeps us in fear, and it keeps us coming back to those powers over and over again because we have forgotten how damn powerful we are. We do not need any of them. We really don't. We need to come home to ourselves. We need to remember who we are. We are divine. We embody the divine. Something that I absolutely loved learning about as a child was when Jesus the Christ came into the temple and he got angry seeing all of these moneylenders and um predatory sellers essentially inside the temple walls, this sacred space that was meant to be a place of worship, of connection, of divinity and love and truth was being used to distort our ability to connect, to distort and create these power over structures, these feelings of scarcity and lack, of judgment, of shame, of fear, of if you can't buy this to offer to God, then you are unworthy, you are not valuable. And all of it, again, bullshit. I'm sorry for the language in this episode. I'll put a warning label on it, because I've been trying very much to be PG for all the kiddos out there that you may want to listen with. But this one, this one's this one's a little tougher for me to keep that in check. But one of the other things that Jesus did, other than turning over the money lenders' tables and throwing these people out of the sacred space, was he went inside the temple where the place where the general public was able to go. And then there was an inner temple room where only the priests were allowed, and a beautiful curtain hung separating those. And how beautiful is this! The man behind the curtain. And he tore down the curtain, showing us that there is no separation between us and God. We do not need an intermediary, we do not need someone telling us what God has to say. We do not need it. And when we rely on that, we get manipulated, we become powerless. That isn't to say that you should stop going to church or stop listening to your religious leaders or uh spiritual leaders or pastors out there, that's not to say that those are wrong, but they certainly can be. And if you don't have that personal inner temple relationship with your God, with your truth, with your unconditional love, with your soul, then how will you ever have the discernment to determine what is truth and what is lie? What is love and what is distortion when it's presented to you. You can't if you only let someone else communicate the truth to you, then you will never know the actual truth. You will never know yourself, you will never know God, you will never know your soul the way that you were meant to know, to embody, to integrate. That is why I am here. That is what I am bringing to this earth: is this questioning, and it's not a questioning with judgment, it's this questioning with open curiosity and with the intent of calling home our power to ourselves, to calling home our memories, our remembrance, because deep inside our souls we know who we are, we remember who we are, and we know that we are one with God, that God has simply in their immense divine wisdom and their own curiosity and desire to grow. Decided to create individuations of themselves. And yes, I am using they them for God because I don't have a better way to say it in the English language that can that doesn't assign a gender to God because that was something else that honestly really bugged me growing up as a child. Yet so much in the Bible, and so much that I was actually taught and told, and the use of he, his, everywhere within Christianity told me that wasn't true. It told me that I, as a woman, as a female, as someone embodying the divine feminine, that I wasn't as valuable, that I wasn't as worthy. That I wasn't as necessary, and that I wasn't a part of God. And I remember, I think it was 1999 when Dogma came out, um, a Jay in Silent Bob movie, essentially, with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as angels cast out of heaven trying to get back in. And Alanis Morissette portrayed God in that movie, and that was the first time I had experienced a portrayal of God that was something other than a man, and there was part of that experience that set me free in a way, and it sat with me, and again, it opened me up to questioning so much of what I had been taught by the man pulling all the levers behind the curtain. The people pulling all the levers behind the curtain. God is so much more than a he, him, a she, her, or even a they, them. But for me, the most honest way that I can speak about God with the language that I have currently at my disposal is to use they, them. And I'm not going to pick at someone who uses he, him, or she, her. That's that's absolutely a personal preference, and is taking me years to get to where I am at with that language. And because for so long God was a he him that still will come out quite a bit, and so that's again a little side quest here in the discussion of my manifesto and what I believe. But that all of this has played into who I am today, how I operate my business, what I bring forth into the world, and how I show up. And even just calling this my manifesto gives me a little in my gut, a little, oh, are you sure? Because there are a lot of people who turned out to do really bad things that wrote manifestos. But that's again the best word that I have with the language that we have, and just because manifestos have been used to distort and to create power over dynamics and to manipulate and control does not mean that that is what mine is or will do. Because again, I am Lydia Lazara, and I question any authority that does not stand for love, for truth, and for the entire human race. So thank you very much for joining me for this episode of At the Intersection of Mystical and Mundane. If this reached you in some way, if this plucked at a heartstring, or made you look at something differently in your own life, please be sure to like, subscribe, follow me on your preferred podcast platform, and can I ask that you share me with a friend? I also would love to invite you to connect with me on social media. You can find me at Questions Authority Coaching on Facebook and on YouTube and Instagram. My handle is at questions underscore authority. And all of those links are on my website as well, questionsauthority.com. I'd love to connect with you. Let me know what you think. Let me know what this episode made you feel, made you question. Maybe it pissed you off. Let me know that too. I'm here for all of it. Because we are all one. Just having individuated experiences, living under the illusion of separateness and loneliness. I love you all. And be sure to look for the next episode to drop on the first of the month. New episodes drop on the first and fifteenth of every month. Have a beautiful day. And I send you love, and I invite you to find the courage to start questioning the authorities in your life.