Welcome back to another episode of the Origination Point Podcast. This week, Bill de la Cruz is joined by a new special guest. We hope you enjoy this episode and be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends.

If you have any questions or would like to get in contact with Bill de la Cruz, please email him at:
contact@delacruzsolutions.com

Follow Bill on Tik Tok for daily content!
@bill.delacruz

Follow Bill on Twitter and Instagram:
Twitter: @BilldelaC
Instagram: @BilldelaC

Visit our website to purchase Bill’s book ‘Finding the Origination Point’ and to keep up to date with new content:
www.delacruzsolutions.com

— Support this podcast:
https://anchor.fm/origination-point-podcast/support

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Origination Point Podcast

I’m excited to bring you another episode of the show that you’ve been reading that is talking about the social issues that we’re facing now, about personal growth, and how we continue on a path of peace, serenity, and growth in a time of calamity, upheaval, and a lot of confusion. I’ve used this in a combination of you reading this and interviewing some guests. We have a guest that I’ve invited that’s both been a friend and a colleague and somebody whose words you’ll find very inspiring and thought-provoking.

As usual, we’re going to have a rich conversation. We’re going to touch on some things around motivation, support, and peacefulness, how we create rituals, and then how we stay in a community that supports all of those things. Those are our ideas of what we’re going to talk about. We’ll see how deep we get into it. Without further ado, I’m going to introduce and welcome Maria. Maria, thank you for coming in and joining me. How’s your day going?

It’s amazing. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure and an honor to get to work with you in this medium. It’s exciting.

We worked together in a school district and both of us felt a little bit limited in what we were able to do. Over the years, we’ve both found some things that create a little more freedom for us. Before we jump in, I’d love for you to share with our audience a little bit about yourself. Who is Maria and what’s important to you? We’ll get into what brought us into this conversation.

Maria Darlene Irivarren is a person that’s ever-evolving and learning. Just when I think I know who I am, I realize that I have a lot to learn about myself, and being gentle and allowing myself the pleasure of playing in different arenas. Having been at Denver Public Schools and community engagement, that was an amazing time in my life. I met some of the most innovative, creative, funny, caring, and deep-thinking colleagues whom I call my friends now. I feel so honored about that.

I am in real estate, where I get to help families navigate the process of one of the largest investments they can make for themselves and generationally. It’s a game-changer. Also, something that is equivalent to what is important to one’s life, which is the enhancement of our mind and education, be it formal education or education that we create through our interests and our searches. I’m an evolving soul like everybody else and I have the pleasure of being content with that.

We’ve talked about doing this show and then we got to a point where you said you’re not quite sure what success means in all these transitions. That would be something that would be interesting to talk about. As I thought about it more and more, I realized that for the word, success, we have this assumption that it means the same thing to everybody. Yet I know that that’s not true. What does that mean for you at this point in your life? I know you’ve been through a lot of transitions. I’m curious, starting there, let’s talk a little bit about success.

It’s meant so many different things in my life. Growing up in Chicago, I was raised 1 of 5. My mom and dad were immigrants from Mexico here. When I was a kid, my level of success was understanding Americana, English, what shows people were watching, and why Guess jeans were so cool. Understand why we didn’t have enough Coca-Cola in my house. Clearly, everybody else does. Understanding to navigate what it was to be Mexican and also American at the same time was my first journey in life. That was fun. I thought that was a success, stepping away from being led and then realizing that I was a little independent salmon going upstream.

That was the first time I had the pleasure of running into the success of having a critical thinking mind and also realizing that I wanted to pave my own ways. It’s not the easiest route and not always very gracefully. However, as I’ve moved through several decades of life at this point, I feel that that set me up to be okay with being out on the fringes of achieving an education later in life and buying my first place at 23. Creating a life that was meant to be created and lived by me, not necessarily in a format that other people were laying out. As I’ve been in this industry of real estate now, I started in 1997, it’s meant many things as well.

When I was younger, I wanted money. I’m like, “Clearly, money is what’s going to make me happy and what’s going to break me out of this brownness that I am, this Mexicanness that I am, these things that I didn’t quite have yet.” I rushed towards it thinking that I would encounter the things that I always equated with money, which were travel and language, but an appreciation of the arts and music, culture, and of what it is to be a thinker. I realized quickly that those two things are not a guarantee. Money, wealth, and the piece of being a lifetime learner are two totally different pieces that can come together. However, it’s not 1 in 1 simultaneously happening at the same time.

It’s that whole idea, too, that we equate money with happiness. You talked about the internal and the external. In relation to your story, internally, for me, it was like, “What are these Levi’s jeans that everybody’s wearing and how do I get some of those?” My mom said, “You’re going to have to go get a job because those are $5 over my jeans budget for you.” I had to do that when I was like 12 or 13.

The other thing that you talked about was this whole external idea of success, which is interesting because even this idea of buying myself out of who I am if I have enough money, it’s like that American dream, which is an interesting conversation. I’m curious from that perspective because so many of us, including myself, are socialized to do this comparative analysis of success based on what we’re exposed to and socialized to. It’s so much around material things versus more spiritual things. I’m curious about your thoughts around those external versus internal, which you’ll segue us into some of the other topics I know that we want to talk about.

At a young age, I started to realize too that I was an independent soul, one that was already brought here with great ideas, thoughts, opinions, and perspectives beyond the ones that were going to be shared with me. That was a wild realization as a little person. It was probably maybe like eight years old or so when then I started to feel that way. That gave me a great deal of inner strength.

I never knew how to articulate that to anybody, so I didn’t. People always made the assumption like, “This girl’s rather confident. Why is she so confident? Why does she have such swagger? She doesn’t have this or that,” or what I would deem as something that would be considered a value, but I thought like, “I am the bomb.” At a young age, I realized there was nobody else like me on the planet. There’s nobody else like you on the planet. Nobody could take our place.

There's nobody else like you on the planet. Nobody could take your place. Share on X

That helped me make some hard decisions, challenge myself to step into uncomfortable situations, and allow myself to have great successes and have great fail ups and not dwell on those moments when things didn’t go the way that I had planned. Graduating from college at 32, some people would be like, “Sweetheart, why’d you even go?” I was like, “This is my timeline. This is my journey, this is my life, and this is what it feels. How I got here is irrelevant, but I’m here and I’m going to take every minute of it.”

I threw myself a big party. I hired a DJ, got it catered, the whole shebang. My mom and dad came in. I moved to Denver in 2002 and my dad was like, “I’m not going to go visit you until you graduate from college.” My dad has a third-grade education in Mexico. Everybody says this comment where sometimes the wisest people are the people that have the least amount of formal education. I know for a fact that that’s my dad and my mom.

There’s wisdom that comes from living off the earth. There’s wisdom that comes from where you wake up in the morning, you smell the fresh air, and you see the mountains. My dad was a sheep herder and he was taking his goats as a little boy, five years old, navigating the terrain of those rough lands of the Sierra Madre Mountains. There’s a sense of knowledge, peace, and rooting that my dad gave me that I know also equally instilled in me. Our timeline is ours to lead and to live. It’s not for others to dictate. In that moment of deciding when we want to live a certain part of our path, we have to be okay with loving and trusting ourselves deeply.

 

I didn’t graduate from college until I was 50. That was my past. I worked hard at it and it was a great accomplishment. I didn’t throw quite as big a party as you did, but I had a good time. Hearing the story that you shared, it makes me think about how for people who are “uneducated,” that’s not relevant in terms of who they are, who we are, because even that idea of uneducated is this idea that you’re book smart.

People who aren’t educated in traditional schooling have this whole other thing we call street smarts. I grew up with more street smarts where I could out-maneuver people in ways that they couldn’t get because they didn’t have that same street smarts. The appreciation of getting up, smelling the air, and appreciating breath, things like that, are such a gift to have every single day.

It goes back to we are gauging a lot of our success and importance around these external factors. I learned at a young age that, to your point, we’re all unique. When I started my own business, I would go out and bid on things and people would say, “You’re competing with this person and this person.” I said, “I have no competition because nobody does what I do in the way that I do it.”

At a later time in my life, I created that level of confidence that you talk about that you were able to tap into at a very young age. I wonder how much of that is lost nowadays with young people growing up with all these electronic devices versus exploring. Even my own kids, I would say, “Go out and play.” They’d pick up their iPad and go outside. I haven’t taught my kids how to play.

Is it the technology or is it the messages on the technology? Technology is an amazing thing. Human beings were meant to create these amazing things that have either existed or are now enhanced, or they enhance our lives. It’s once they’re utilized against us that it becomes an issue. To have sophisticated systems of filtering water, to have communication that we can utilize to bring messages across the world and oceans is like magic. That stuff is powerful.

It’s what is then used to replace the actual human interaction that becomes an issue. Technology is cool, but it is not a replacer of the beauty that is, that frequency of being in the presence of another person or that beauty that is to play ball with somebody or run down the street or fall off your bike. My best friend and I would ride our bike so fast down the street and her mom said, “Do not get on Maria’s bike.” She got on the little pegs in the back and I rode so fast.

Technology is cool, but it cannot replace the beauty of being in the presence of another person. Share on X

We freaking flew off. I split my lip all the way up and my friend when flying. Her mom was looking at us out the window. That cannot be replaced by a piece of technology. That will never be replaced. I still have my cut. I’m proud of it. I still have the scars and so does my friend. How do we get the pleasure of utilizing the beauty that is the interaction of friendship, of camaraderie, of growing, of being in playland? Playland never stops. We’re always playing. That’s the beauty of the creative soul that we are. It’s attempted to essentially be pulled out of us, but we don’t have to succumb to that.

Going back to the beauty that is undereducated per se, it’s ironic that we live in a country where we have so much access to books, learning, teachings, and things of this nature in every local school. Yet we all graduate a fraction of our students to go to university or even high school, let alone even discuss what that looks like in terms of socially and economically marginalized families or people of color and all of that on the same spectrum. At the end of the day, when you’re marginalized economically, it doesn’t have an ethnicity or a race to it. It’s the same equal playing field.

In one of the classes that you had given us around bias, I remember this young woman saying, “I was a really poor young White woman in a community and I wanted to go to college. I didn’t think I could. I did go to college.” I remember understanding it was at that moment that I realized my bias of making the assumption that somebody else had more value or they innately knew that they were going to go to university, but she didn’t. She was challenged with that.

She had to also work hard and prove her own limited beliefs wrong and that of her families that also didn’t necessarily believe that she can do it. I’m like, “This young girl had lived the exact same experience that I lived. Two totally different races equally having been impacted by finances.” With regard to finances and things of that nature, I finally feel a great deal of peace with where I’m at and where I want to spend my time and efforts, and how I want to find peace in surrendering to living.

By living, I mean like enjoying a cup of coffee, enjoying my puppy when I take them for a walk or going to visit my friends and family whenever I want. These are all things that have come to fruition for me after having forcefully strangled things from coming to fruition and then at the expense of my health, time, and relationships. Once I realized what my real trade-off was, I needed to make some significant shifts. When I did that, there was a direct impact on how I perceived myself. When we had started the conversation of success, I was quite frankly still drinking the Kool-Aid of, “These are my numbers. I sold X amount of money in business.”

I was in that deeply. I knew that it was causing me a great deal of pain. I didn’t know what it was doing. Once I stepped away and started to live, people say you make time for the things that you want in your life. Once I started to do the this and that versus this or that, I realized that I can do both. Live a successful career and live a very successful, peaceful life.

Once I started to do that and allow myself to live more of a peaceful life, I started to pull away from this successful career because it didn’t necessarily define me as much as it did previously. I realized that I still had the same level of success without the grind, without whatever number it was. It’s been very transformational. I’m in a significant phase right now of another shift in where I want to go.

What’s your motivation for all of that?

My motivation is understanding that we have the great pleasure of recreating ourselves as many times as we want. That’s not necessarily the case, ironically enough, in many parts of the world. These are the things where I am so grateful to be in this country to utilize the blessings that do exist, such as that transformation of being able to evolve and create new paths, and new careers.

I’m fascinated with natural healing, botanicals, acupuncture, and homeopathic medicine. This whole world has been calling my name. To be honest with you, it’s also been a very intimidating thing for me to step into. It’s science. It’s all the things that I always was told I wasn’t good at. I’m literally facing some little monsters right now that are telling me that I can’t, or I shouldn’t, or I won’t be this or that, but I’m willing to step into it regardless.

Those are some important points for people who are reading. The ability to be transformational, grow, shift, and morph into what you want is not limited to what you have. In fact, some people who have a whole lot are not happy because they’re not being their most authentic selves. Even those little voices of those false narratives that say, “I don’t know if I’m equipped to do this,” are things that we, as human, beings have control over. You replace a false narrative like, “I don’t know if I can do it,” with, “I can do anything I want.” It doesn’t mean it won’t be uncomfortable or challenging or push you into your panic zone. It means that you’re not letting your own self stop yourself from that growth.

It’s been an important part of my process. For the many folks that I’ve worked with over the years, that’s been a part of their willingness to stay in the game, if you will, because sometimes it’s easy to quit. It’s like, it’s too much, or it’s too overwhelming. We get into this mindset that it’d be easier to do nothing. Believe me, I tried that a few times and it wasn’t. It was a lot harder because I couldn’t stop all of the things that were going on in my head that I wanted to do.

I know that we’ve talked about and that I have these rituals that I do that help me to stay grounded. What are some of the things that are important for you? You mentioned walking your dog or being able to see your family. How conscious are you in terms of your awareness when you’re in these practices that you do to keep you grounded?

Practice makes perfect. Every day is different. I wake up sometimes and I’m like, “I don’t want to walk my puppy.” I want to stay in bed longer. I don’t necessarily want to read a book or hear positive messages right now. I deter a conversation from going negative and coming back to a more solution-based conversation. it’s a constant responsibility that I wake up with and I’m like, “I’m going to work on this.” The biggest thing is that if I don’t do it, it’s okay. I used to scold myself for not doing this long enough, consistently enough, or this enough. It’s not about that. It’s about being able to meet ourselves wherever we’re at.

If that morning we want to go on a hike, then wonderful. If we don’t, that’s okay too. As long as there’s an opportunity for me in particular to recognize that there’s a reward that happens when I can walk around the park and admire the trees. I’m in love with Linden trees right now. The sand from a Linden tree is one of my favorites. I love spring. I get to see the little buds blooming and to be in wonder about what a tree is in terms of its little flowers and then the leaves. It allows me to be in the space of creativity and magic and to be in awe of what is nature. That’s walking in the city at my park.

It’s something I do right when I get up. I put my glasses on and I’m out of here. That’s it. If I don’t do it, I’m okay with it too and then I will get them out a little bit later. Another thing that I love to do is listen to motivational speakers, whether it’s business or reading a great book. I finished, again, The Four Agreements, but this time in Audible in Spanish and that was fantastic. I listened to it with my mom and dad driving back from California. That was pretty intense. Probably a little heavy for my little parents, but they got more messages.

That is an amazing book.

It was awesome. I listened to it again in English. I read it a long time ago in English. That was wonderful. Going back to like the wonderful words of being impeccable with our words, what do we want to manifest in our lives? Sitting there and saying, “I don’t want this. I don’t want that.” The universe doesn’t know the difference between do and don’t. It hears what you’re consistently repeating over and over again. For me, it’s being cognizant of the words that I use and recognizing to focus on what I want in order to manifest that, whether it’s with my relationships with my friends, time, my family, my health, and everything.

The universe doesn't know the difference between “do” and “don't”. It hears what you're consistently repeating over and over again. Share on X

I love to listen to Marie Forleo. She’s a great online business coach. She’s hilarious. She does a lot of different great interviews with people. She is constantly reiterating the simple fact that everything is figure-outable. You might not know it, but you can figure it out. I love that because many times, I get stuck thinking, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do that.” I’m like, “Chill out. You can figure it out.” Being in the space of learning, being in the space of small moments of meditation, doing a little workout, I love that. Also, being nice to myself.

Being kind to yourself is important. I’m hearing you say, “Pick something that you love to do and do it.” My favorite agreement in The Four Agreements is always to do your best. Your best may look different depending on how you feel. Your best one day may be, “I’m going to get up and I’m going to walk my mile or 2 miles,” and the next day your best may be, “I’m going to sleep for an extra 30 or 40 minutes. Either one is fine. I’ll give you my frame around practice makes perfection. It is either this work is about practice and not perfection because I don’t know what perfect is, or progress and not perfection.

The reason why that’s been important, this idea of progress and not perfection or practice and not perfection, is it goes back to we are all socialized to think that there is something called perfect out there. I don’t know what that is or what that would look like, even if I tripped right over it. If we’re not pursuing perfection, then we’re pursuing our days and we’re looking at, “What can I do? How can I make an impact?” Some of my rituals are waking up and being thankful. Doing a workout class or a yoga class. When people ask me in the morning, they say, “How’s your day going?” I say, “It’s great. The fact that I can stand up and breathe and I’m here in front of you, that’s the start of a good day.”

I don’t know if I always thought about life in terms of being able to breathe the air and see the sunshine or the clouds as part of my ritual of having the start of a day that I’m blessed to be a part of. Those are important. What do you do when you get lost or when you stumble and think, “This is unsolvable.” Where do you find your solace or your community when that happens?

First and foremost, I freak out and just go in his tailspin for a little bit. Once I get it together and calm down, it can be a day, it can be a week, it can be a month, I can be on a search for this peace, this clarity and direction, and putting that at the forefront. Also, for me, once I realize what I’m doing, stepping away from it for a second and seeing it far away from me, instead of in me and saying, “It’s over here,” and then also deciding what it is that I want it to look like.

It’s not the mechanism. It’s the intent. Going back to words that mean, it’s not how you get there, it’s getting there. Once I realize that I want to get, or have or experience A, B, C, sometimes getting in my mechanism brain is where I get tripped up. Once I recognize that I’m being sidetracked by that, I can step away from it and focus on the intention.

When I can’t do that by myself, for whatever reason, I do look for healers and people that can realign me. It comes from reading. I read the book called The Untethered Soul. I love that message of the growth of our bodies. I’m into epigenetics, watching Joe Dispenza, understanding how our brains work, creating new neurological pathways, and understanding how trauma works. Sometimes when I get in a place where I’m going off on a tailspin, I realize that I’m not necessarily working off the wiser, more grounded, more thought-provoking person that I am at this moment. I’m also healing some old patterns by working off of old things that are in my DNA at this point.

I know that’s a little deep, but I attempt to look at it from different angles. Of course, reaching out to the beautiful people that are your community and my community. It’s reaching out to my sisters, to one of my roommates, to people that I met through different coaching and development experiences that I had with an organization called PSI Seminars. More importantly, allowing myself the grace and the pleasure to ask for help and share where I’m at that’s the scariest.

That idea of even asking is rooted in, “Am I successful if I have to ask for help?” Absolutely. The other point you made, too, is most people aren’t aware of how deeply embedded some of these things we experience as adults that have been rooted in us for years before. We’re always looking for the solution for what’s happening versus looking for the healing of something that may have happened a long time ago and it’s being triggered now, which is a whole different process. One focuses on how I get through this present day and the other one focuses on the big triggering event that has so much power over us because it’s unhealed. Even though that’s deep, that’s real in terms of the whole change process that we, as people, go through.

That community, as you and I have been talking about, is important because we can be so socialized to believe that everything is so bad right now and it can be demoralizing. We might reach out to somebody who commiserates with us and goes, “You’re absolutely right. It is horrible,” versus somebody that can give us some hope, insight, or premise that says, “Have you thought about it this way?” There are so many ways. In the podcast that you talked about, everything is solvable if we step away and think about it.

Going back to the conversation around technology, be on the search. Do some consuming of cool materials and things. I love interior design. I love creating things or finding things online that I could restore for spaces that I’m creating. The pure pleasure of having time to play in those spaces was fun or to watch somebody’s process for interior design.

Whenever I have a housing problem, I’m like, “What does it mean? How does it work?” My HVAC, my furnace went out, and I’m like, “What is it?” I went online and did some research. Even those little moments of using this technology that we have as a tool that can serve a purpose are such awesome things. It could also be something that we lend our time to and we can get sucked into it, or we can come back and be like, ‘I gained this and this from YouTube University.”

I’ve done a lot of repairs in my house and my car after watching the YouTube video.

I love listening to different podcasts and taking in what it is that’s magic, like music. I love high-frequency binaural beats where you can listen to music that’s different frequencies that can change your space.

The last thing I want to ask you is what are some action steps that you think people who are reading can take to find that sense of peacefulness and community that we’ve been talking about?

First and foremost, take a moment, step inward, say thank you to your body, to your mind, to your soul, and to your perfection as a unique specimen of a human, and revel in that. Be in a place of, “There’s nobody like me out there.” Step into maybe something tangible like writing down 1 or 2 things that you’d like to see come to fruition. Not the things that we don’t want, because we all have a list written down memorized of what we don’t want, but the list of what we do want is always shorter, ironically enough.

 

Taking a break to hear those moments, hear ourselves deeply think, be okay with it, and allow ourselves the pleasure of dreaming, it’s a magical thing. We’re not in school anymore. My mom used to get my report cards and they’d always say, “Maria’s a daydreamer. She’s always looking at the window daydreaming.” I’m like, “I was.” I was daydreaming as a little girl all the time about the woman that I wanted to become the experiences that I wanted to live, of all the things that I wanted to have. I had such freedom to be in that space. I encourage people to allow themselves to dream and dream big.

Those are such powerful things. You can’t ever let anyone take away your dreams because your dreams can be your reality depending on what you put into your brain. Great session. I want to thank you again for being a part of this episode. It’s been wonderful hearing you. I hope, for those of you who are reading, that you’ve been inspired and are thinking about how you create these spaces for yourselves.

How do you reach out and ask for help and do all of it outside of judging, blaming, or shaming? As human beings, there’s so much more that connects us than divides us. If we can continue to look at those connections, we can grow this more humane world and this community that everybody is striving to reach out to right now. Any last pearls of wisdom you want to share before I close this out?

You hit the nail on the head. Every step we take towards creating a reality that is more loving and in line with an acceptance and an appreciation of all is a movement towards a great change. In this show, it’s in self-love and the moments when we go from living in our subconscious mind to our conscious mind. Switching it at that moment when we see a moment of something negative and replacing it with something positive. It’s in those many little moments that great change can happen.

Every step we take towards creating a reality that is more loving and more in line with an acceptance and an appreciation of all is a movement towards a great change. Share on X

Once again, thank you. My guest, Maria Irivarren, has shared her wisdom and thoughts about being more connected and grounded. As usual, if this content resonates with you, please share it. Please subscribe and get this out to the world because there’s so much more that connects us than divides us. Most importantly, keep growing.

 

Important Links

• Maria Darlene Irivarren
• The Four Agreements – Amazon
• The Untethered Soul
• Contact@DelaCruzSolutions.com
• @Bill.delaCruz – TikTok
• @BilldelaC – Twitter
• @BilldelaC – Instagram
• https://Anchor.fm/origination-point-podcast/support