Accepting Yourself As You Are

Valeria Teles interviews Alberto Vezendi. The author of Awake, Arise, Or Be Forever Fallen!: Fall, Awakening, and Rise of a Young Anorexic Male.

Of Hungarian origin, author and photographer Alberto Vezendi grew up in Spain, has lived in five countries and has visited more than forty. He holds a master's degree in conference interpretation, speaks five languages, and has spent more than two decades working for international organizations as a conference interpreter. In 2018, after twenty years of being somebody else's voice, he decided to be his own and embarked on a new journey as a writer and photographer.

Alberto's work carries a message of hope for all: that a better life is possible, regardless of your situation, and that you already have everything you need to live it. It's all there in your mind.

He inspires us to be ourselves, to take control of our lives, and live a purposeful existence, instead of living at the mercy of other people's wishes.

However, none of that can ever be achieved until we learn to see our real self, and ultimately accept ourselves as we really are, and not as others expect us to be.

After twenty long years of keeping it secret, Alberto reveals his painful personal experience as a young anorexic male in the hope that this will help others avoid falling into a trap created by their own mind. He also shows us that, even in our darkest moments, there shines an inner light that can guide us to happiness.

That light within is called life, and it's the only light that can guide us to happiness. But it's a light that can only shine in the present, and Alberto challenges us to live fully that ephemeral moment we call "now" in which our entire lives takes place.

Alberto went from having a carefree joy-filled life to falling into the depths of intellectual and physical misery, where death became his only companion, and then rose from his own ashes to become a better person than he ever was before.

For twenty years, Alberto rode on a fairly tolerable rollercoaster of elation and melancholy. But one day something went wrong. He flew off his seat and began to plummet into the darkest abyss of his mind on a freefall of anorexic self-destruction. The disorder dragged him into the depths of abject misery, until he hit rock bottom. That was the turning point: he had to choose between construction and destruction, between living and dying.

Alberto chose to live.

Imminent death brought him back to life and also lifted the veil from his eyes, exposing to him his real self. He had to accept that the pathetic anorexic living corpse he saw before him was no one but himself. Not the false attractive image of himself he was imagining through the lens of more than twenty years of unremitting conditioning, combined with the much deeper distortion caused by anorexia, but his real self at last.

Accepting himself as he really is meant the beginning of a new life — the first step in the long journey to rescue the wreck that Alberto had become, rehabilitate it into a man, and rise to a new existence of conscious bliss."

There's no better time than now to break the spell that binds us to a life of zombie-like aimless roaming, like animated corpses; no better time to tear to pieces the bandage that blindfolds our eyes, preventing us from seeing the paradise we're living in; no better time to start living the life we were meant to live: a life of freedom, of bliss, of self-realization.

"The magic is in you: just open your heart and you'll see it." -Alberto writes

To learn more about Alberto Vezendi please visit his website: https://vezendi.com/

For Intro-free episodes: https://www.patreon.com/aquestforwellbeingpodcast

Podcast Page: https://fitforjoy.org/podcast

** Bio intro and outro one by Heidi Lynn Peters.