Nicolás Achury is a Colombian visual artist who has lived in Florida for twelve years. A portrait photographer, director, audiovisual producer, and videographer for the Latin Music Industry, his means of expression are diverse. He currently works as a camera director for a renowned pop band's live show. He studies Advaita-Vedanta and Vedic scriptures under the guidance of his spiritual teacher and works in the Ashram gardens on his days off. He lives in St. Petersburg, FL with his wife Verónica and three spoiled dogs that set the rhythm of his days. When he's not traveling, he writes and illustrates. His first book: ‘Mumukshu: Thirst for Enlightenment’, will be released in July of this year with Editorial Planeta.

Instagram: @achury

Email: nicoachury@me.com

To Die to Heal

"When we take one step closer to God, He takes a thousand steps towards us."

Swami Premeshananda

The story I told myself about myself is as interesting as anyone's, which is to say, not much. Something, yes, but not too much. That's why it's not worth extending beyond the simple description of my melodrama: A misunderstood artist, ahead of his time, pure talent. A victim of circumstances and the envy he provokes due to his gifts and honesty. A motherless orphan searching for her everywhere. Someone special who should be at the pinnacle of money and fame, who should have access to certain things. An attractive man. An interesting guy. A cultured person. Someone mysterious to be discovered behind the silence. The smartest person in the room. Labels, neuroses, fears, and projections. Learned things, copied things, things passed down from generation to generation in a wounded family, in the midst of a wounded society. Nothing more. More interesting is the way life forced me to stop repeating that self-imposed sentence. The one of fitting myself into a mold of what should and should not be. The external form of this story of injustice and at the same time greatness that I told myself was that of a man obsessed with status and its forms, with hedonism and the constant pursuit of pleasure. Surrounded by luxury and artifice, the struggling immigrant, an unconscious social climber, was unable to see his good fortune. With his gaze fixed on what he didn't have, he missed how much he did have. Of course, his clients had yachts and beachfront mansions. Grammys, Billboards, medals, keys to cities, and Honorary Degrees. He didn't. His clients had fame, people wanted to take pictures with them. Not with him. The feeling of inferiority shrank every molecule of his being. His new, expensive clothes didn't come from a Milan runway but from a store. His new Hyundai wasn't an Alfa Romeo. His apartment wasn't a house with a dock for a boat. His music video had 500,000 views, not a hundred million. His feature in the most prestigious magazines in the world wasn't a cover story. It was just something he had been commissioned to do. Unsustainable and painful, if you ask me. Dissatisfaction was the constant feeling of my existence. Even with psychiatric accompaniment and medication, anxiety and depression deepened. Life lacked purpose, even meaning: Work to make money and gain recognition so you get more work to make more money, and so on. This same life, to show me my error, would collapse without warning in the form of a call, a couple of days before the mandatory quarantine began in Miami. My main client, who had become something like my employer because he absorbed so much of my attention, was terminating my contract. My work especially revolves around live music. The first thing that died with the quarantine. Losing the client and at the same time being unable to work on other things quickly caused the standard of living we were used to to vanish in just a few months, and with it, all certainties. We suddenly found ourselves in another scenario where our egos screamed "Scarcity!" and mental illness began to gallop in both of us until it ran wild. The crisis added to the countdown to death that my unconscious had started based on statistics: since my mother and her father had both died at 44, I too was going to die at that age in a kind of curse of the eldest siblings. A deadly cocktail that broke me. But it did so in the same way that nature breaks the wave against the rocks so that it turns back into water and only water. Everything in Creation is born and dies, even within a single life, and so the baby gives way to the child and this to the adolescent, who must die to give way to the adult and finally to the elder. The child we were died. Who I was ten years ago, died. The countdown was not entirely false; I experienced a death, but not of the physical body. I experienced the death of my beliefs and prejudices. The death of my ego. The unbearable suffering of not knowing who I was without my possessions, my job, or my renown allowed me to clearly see that these labels were just that, classifications. Mental categories that I had superimposed on a being who, paradoxically, increasingly revealed to me the peace and tranquility emanating from within him. I surrendered to daily meditation —which I had practiced inconsistently in the past, when I also took on the label of yogi— and to the study of all kinds of sacred texts. The Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, The Gospel of Ramakrishna, The Imitation of Christ, the Upanishads; my spiritual appetite became voracious. My natural curiosity, which had led me to dedicate myself for years almost exclusively to reading scientific books, turned entirely into curiosity about God. I used my isolation as a spiritual retreat and immersed myself so deeply in the subject that soon I was completely focused on it. The search for God had completely seized my attention, and I could only feel the perfection of everything, the harmony of the universe, the incomprehensible power of Oneness. I even started talking about God after years of barely allowing myself a sporadic 'The Cosmos' or 'The Universe' when referring to the all-pervading Consciousness. Studying with teachers from different traditions via Zoom, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts, I found who is now my spiritual teacher. I started traveling from Miami to St. Petersburg, where he lives. The trips became increasingly frequent, as did my desire to get involved with the Ashram under his direction. I put my professional knowledge into practice to set up a camera system and a video master to stream classes online from the temple. But by then, inside me, it was the same whether I was picking mangoes or mowing the lawn, painting the fence or talking to the airline, installing the switcher or taking photos. What I do no longer matters, the spirit in which I do it matters. The intention matters, and absolute presence matters, total surrender, nothing less than that. The spirit of dedicated and selfless work now accompanies me as a central part of my spiritual practice, and I bring it to the fairs and festivals of Latin America where people want to be happy. In the audience of the show, I see Creation and offer my best, no matter if one of the screens goes out or if a cameraman ignores my instructions. I am always present, always full of joy while working. Everything is a wonderful staging in which the Divine Mother of the Universe is all the actors, the stage, the script, the audience, and the theater, the script, and the music. Everything. Not a year passed before we were fully living in St. Pete, on the other side of the peninsula, on the Gulf of Mexico. The attraction to the ancient knowledge of Vedic religion and Advaita-Vedanta is potent. Like when you get caught in a current at sea, you have to let go and be calm. Fighting it is to die. Despite how terrifying it is for what you believe yourself to be to cease to exist, after its disappearance you are still there, your consciousness remains attentive to what is happening. You exist after your body, your name, your titles, your relationships, your labels, and your possessions. You exist beyond all definition. It's time to connect with the highest vibration emanating from within you, and in whatever way, because there is not just one path. Pain is a teacher and pain is Grace because it transforms us, purifies us, perfects us and frees us. It frees us from useless beliefs, from superstition, it frees us from fear, from narrow definitions of who we are. Pain is not wished upon anyone and yet when it comes, amidst the incomprehensible and what to our minds is absurd, it brings with it the seed of healing. Facing pain, seeing its causes, understanding that it is often the product of our mind and not something objectively real, is an opportunity. May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you have peace in your minds and blessings without pause, that is my prayer. But pain will come anyway, and everything will depend on what we do with it. We can sublimate it or we can poison ourselves. Breaking the uncomfortable boxes I had to fit my idea of myself into has relaxed me. My relationship with everything in my life flows better. With my son, my wife, my colleagues. The relationship with my past, with my body, with my present. Everything has been bathed in a vibration of gratitude that only grows stronger. Money comes and goes, renown comes and goes. Human relationships come and go, as do jobs and titles. Consciousness remains, and we can only notice it when we strip it of so much rubbish we put on it to try to identify with something. Our religion, our surname, our political party, our football team, our generation, our beliefs, ideas, even our principles can all become our downfall if we let them bury the light of true existence. Dying was beautiful because a man who was cruel to himself died, making way for a more compassionate one, more friendly to his incarnation. The manipulator died and the liar died, the distressed died and the uncomfortable died. The arrogant died, the insensitive died. The bitter died, the dissatisfied died. And all those deaths are the life of who I am today. Sometimes I'm surprised to still have the same name. I don't claim to have no ego; that death is followed by a rebirth, after all, the ego is a tool too and as such cannot disappear. After so many years of searching, now I talk to God all day. I call her Mother, The Divine Mother, but also God, Hari, Om, Ramakrishna. All names are her name and all forms her form. The Allah of some, the Jehovah of others, all are one. Sometimes I pray, sometimes I repeat the mantra given to me by my Guru. Sometimes I contemplate images and sometimes I read the lives of saints to meditate on them. I am a God-intoxicated fool, I see her in everything: in my wife, in my dogs, in my friends, and in all women. In all that is feminine - which is beyond the gender binary because it is the very energy of the universe. I see her in nature, in cities, in my emotions that erupt in the same way as volcanoes. And I try to find it even where it is difficult to imagine God: the part of the Whole that is pain, injustice, cruelty, and a series of other categories that we give to the undefinable. This helps me to accept the absurd, to love the senselessness of the Universe looking at itself through my eyes. To flow with what happens, to embrace change. To shed the old skins that cover me and that I have not yet released for fear of disappearing. The Divine Mother is Everything, and therefore I am also a part of her; I am just a form of her Consciousness. Another manifestation of her creative power, like the very flower I place at her feet in the mornings. The same goes for you. We are one human family, we are one organism, and we are also just One. May today be the day to begin exploring the capacity to live it.