Apparently, liberation runs in my family.

I didn't fully realize just how literally until I was teaching A Course in Miracles recently, and something unexpected happened.

I was talking about guilt, freedom, and our need to remember who we are when suddenly I began thinking about the women who came before me.

My mother, Milagros Pons,  played a role in the resistance against the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. She smuggled things into the country that helped those working toward its liberation.

But then there was my great-great-grandmother, Ceferina Calderon.

Now she was something.

She was a wealthy landowner, a horse-riding, gun-packing woman who used her resources to help fund the movement for Cuba's liberation.

As I began talking about these women during class, I could feel something rising inside me.

The warrior.

The part of me that has always wanted people to be free.

And suddenly I understood something about myself in an entirely new way.

The warrior didn't need to disappear.

She needed to evolve.

From Fighting for Freedom to Remembering Freedom

My ancestors fought systems they believed were oppressing people.

And throughout human history, that has sometimes been the way we have understood liberation:

Find the oppressor.

Fight the oppressor.

Defeat the oppressor.

Become free.

But A Course in Miracles invites us into a much deeper revolution.

What if the ultimate prison isn't outside us?

What if it is the identity we have accepted inside us?

The identity that says:

I am powerless.

I am not worthy.

I am not enough.

Someone else determines my value.

The world determines my safety.

Someone outside me has the power to take my peace away.

That is the prison ACIM is trying to help us escape.

And no revolution outside us can accomplish that.

Because eventually we have to discover:

The prison door opens from the inside.

The Guilt Beneath the Prison

Chapter 13 of A Course in Miracles, The Guiltless World, makes an extraordinary connection:

“If you did not feel guilty, you could not attack.”

Think about that.

Behind our condemnation...

behind our defensiveness...

behind our need to prove someone wrong...

behind our desire to punish...

there is guilt.

Not simply guilt about the things we've done in this lifetime.

ACIM points toward something much deeper: the unconscious guilt associated with our belief that we separated from God.

We believed we walked away from Love.

And somewhere within the ego's thought system is the ancient fear:

I did something terribly wrong.

From that belief comes the expectation of punishment, which the Catholic Church was happy to remind me of.

And then we project it everywhere.

Someone must be guilty.

Someone must pay.

Someone must be punished.

Someone must be the villain.

And so the revolution continues.

Victim becomes oppressor.

Oppressor becomes victim.

The pendulum swings.

Generation after generation.

Lifetime after lifetime.

Until someone decides:

There has to be another way.

The Day I Almost Blew Up My Family

Which brings me to another chapter in the Orlando Family Liberation Archives.

Apparently, before becoming an Awareness Coach, I briefly considered a career in pyrotechnics. 😂🔥

I was about seven years old, living in Puerto Rico, because the Dominican Republic was under U.S. military takeover after the assassination of the dictator. Thanks, mama! 😜

My parents had specifically told me not to play with matches.

Naturally, I found some matches.

Then I crawled underneath our house, gathered leaves and twigs, and started myself a lovely little fire.

There was only one minor problem.

My parents had large tanks used for their welding business stored nearby.

In other words...

Little Laina wasn't simply playing with matches.

Little Laina and my family were potentially preparing for liftoff.

🔥🚀😂

Thankfully, one of my sisters saw what I was doing and alerted my parents.

The fire was extinguished.

The house survived.

The Orlando lineage continued.

And I received the biggest spanking of my life.

But something else happened afterward that stayed with me.

Once I understood what I had almost done, I felt tremendous guilt.

I went to my parents and said:

I'm sorry.

Please forgive me.

I won't do it again.

And beneath that childhood experience is a beautiful spiritual metaphor.

I had been warned.

I didn't listen.

I discovered the consequences.

And eventually I was willing to admit:

Maybe Mom and Dad knew something I didn't.

What If God Isn't Punishing Us?

For much of my early life, I believed God worked like frightened human parents sometimes do.

Misbehave.

Get punished.

Disobey.

Pay the price.

Sin.

Go to hell.

But the God I have discovered through my own journey—and through A Course in Miracles—is nothing like that.

God isn't standing over humanity with a belt.

God isn't saying:

I told you so.

God isn't demanding that we suffer enough to earn our way home.

God knows something we have forgotten.

We never actually left.

We are still held within the Mind of God.

Still created as Love.

Still innocent beneath everything we imagined ourselves to be.

Our suffering isn't God's punishment for leaving.

It is what we experience while believing we are something other than what God created.

We've simply been playing with matches.

Sometimes we've built spectacular fires.

But Love has never stopped being Love.

The Butterfly Was There All Along

One of my favorite metaphors from this teaching is the caterpillar and the butterfly.

A caterpillar doesn't suddenly decide one afternoon:

You know what? I think I'll become something completely different.

The blueprint of the butterfly was already there.

The transformation reveals what was waiting within it.

I believe awakening is like that.

We don't manufacture the Christ within us.

We don't earn it.

We don't become worthy enough to receive it.

It is already there.

But the identity we constructed from fear, guilt, conditioning, victimhood, specialness, and separation has to begin dissolving.

Not because that identity is evil.

Because it is too small.

The caterpillar isn't bad.

It has simply reached the point where crawling can no longer contain what it was created to become.

Integration in Daily Life

The next time you feel irritated, defensive, judgmental, offended, or tempted to make someone else the villain, don't immediately try to become more spiritual.

Become curious.

Ask yourself:

What am I defending?

What am I afraid this means about me?

Where am I giving someone else authority over my peace?

What would change if I remembered who I am as God created me?

Then notice whether guilt lies beneath the reaction.

Perhaps you weren't as loving as you wanted to be.

Perhaps you ignored your guidance.

Perhaps you abandoned yourself to gain someone's approval.

Perhaps you made yourself small.

Perhaps you attacked someone because you were frightened.

Don't turn that recognition into another weapon against yourself.

Let the discomfort become an invitation.

You don't need punishment.

You need correction.

You don't need condemnation.

You need remembrance.

And then choose again.

Extend kindness.

Use your voice.

Set the boundary.

Apologize when appropriate.

Forgive.

Tell the truth gently.

But don't shrink.

Because liberation isn't pretending nothing happened.

Liberation is refusing to let what happened define who you are.

Lainaism

"The final revolution isn't overthrowing the oppressor. It's overthrowing the belief that you were ever powerless."

🔥🦋

Maybe the Warrior Was Never the Problem

I used to think awakening meant becoming so peaceful that the warrior in me would eventually disappear.

I'm beginning to understand her differently.

My mother carried her.

Ceferina carried her.

And I carry her.

But perhaps consciousness evolves the way that warrior expresses herself.

At one level, she picks up a weapon.

At another, she picks up a box of matches.

And eventually...

she puts them both down.

Because she discovers a power greater than fighting.

Remembering.

Remembering who she is.

Remembering who her brothers and sisters are.

Remembering that nobody needs to be destroyed for Love to prevail.

Remembering that liberation begins when we stop asking the world to tell us whether we are free.

Maybe that is how ancestral patterns are truly healed.

We don't reject the energy our ancestors carried.

We raise it into a new expression.

The warrior becomes the liberator.

And the liberator eventually discovers:

There is nobody left to fight.

Closing Transmission

Beloved,

You do not need to fight your way back to God.

You never left.

You do not need to punish yourself for the fires you started while you were dreaming.

You only need to wake up.

Let the guilt rise.

Let it be seen.

Let it show you where you forgot.

And then let Love correct what fear misunderstood.

The door has never been locked.

The butterfly has never been absent.

The Christ has never left you.

Perhaps the ancient warrior within you has fought long enough.

Let her put down her weapons.

Let her open her hands.

Let her remember.

And then...

Let her fly.

🔥🦋❤️

Turns out, the fire was never meant to be extinguished.
It just needed to remember what it came here to illuminate.

With love,