My Biggest Challenge In This Lifetime Has Been To Accept Myself

Gema Ramirez

My biggest challenge in this lifetime has been to accept myself

Gema Ramirez is the owner and founder of Sweet Blue, where she offers her coaching and mentoring services and programmes. She is the Director of Alient Coaching UK, bringing to the UK market the ´Coaching and Conscious & Emotional Intelligent Leadership Programme´ that has been changing lives in Spain. Gema is also the chairwoman of Shambala Trust, an educational Trust based in Glastonbury UK, dedicated to inspiring people to raise their consciousness. She has 20 years of working experience in the corporate world, having collaborated with some of the largest IT multinationals like IBM, HP and Cisco Systems. Her first book, ´Love Unboxed´, is an international best-seller. As you will discover, Gema had bigger dreams than the norms for a young girl during the 70s in Spain

Can you tell us about your childhood and where you grew up?

I was born in Madrid, Spain, where my parents had emigrated to. When I was three years old they returned to Cádizs where I grew up, a small, beautiful port city in the South of Spain. My childhood was sweet. My most beloved memories are those of my time spent with my father, he was a wonderful man, gentle and caring and he adored me. I was born when my parents didn´t think they would have any more children. My only sister is twenty years older than me and between my birth and her birth our mother had three miscarriages, so I was totally unexpected and received as a gift from Heaven.

My dad would spend hours reading me stories, he taught me to read and sums before I went to school and I remember being bored the first year at pre-school because I knew it all. He would ask me questions and inspire me to tell him stories that he would record on his tape recorder. I was very chatty when I was little and had hundreds of films in Super 8, way before video, of me growing up. This was quite rare back then. He bought me my first bike and my first car. As he didn´t have any boys, he passed on his love for cars onto me. He also showed me how to love books and reading.

I remember being bored the first year at pre-school because I knew it all.

And I remember dearly all my animals. My duck ´Negrito´, my dog ´Tony´ who I adored, he wasn´t actually mine, he belonged to a neighbour of my parents country home, where we used to spend our weekends. Tony used to wait for me on his driveway on Fridays, when he knew we would be arriving. As soon as he saw my dad´s car, he would start following us and he would not leave my side until Sunday when we would leave to go back home.

I used to dream of Great Britain from an early age. I would play and speak to my parents in an imagined language that I pretended was English. Other girls would do sports or flamenco dancing after school… I went to my extra curriculum English classes. They made me so happy. It´s the only thing I remember of going to school. I kept dreaming of coming to England and speaking English fluently. Dreams do come true when you dream them with your heart.

The greatest memory about my childhood is the feeling of wanting to be different. As a child growing up the in the 1970s in Spain, I could only foresee three choices for me:

1. To get married and have a family: this is what was expected of most girls… I didn´t fancy the idea of getting married… never did.
2. Get a job and have a career and stay single: somehow I didn´t have the consciousness of putting 1 and 2 together. Needless to say that no woman in my family was married and having children and none was having a degree or getting a career.
3. As I was going to a Catholic school, option 3 was to become a nun! And to be honest, that was the most appealing at the time. We were shown films and pictures at school of nuns going to Africa and America helping starving children and educating them. I thought that was far more exciting than the other two options.

Yet the truth is that I wanted to do something different to any of those options. I wanted to have a different life to what I was seeing around me. I wanted to have an extraordinary life. I wanted to travel the world and do things differently to most people. I didn´t want to choose among options 1, 2 or 3… I didn´t want to choose and wanted to live my life differently! I have had a very different lifestyle and have experienced extraordinary things. And I feel I am only just starting…

What does it mean to work consciously, for you?

Human evolution is a constant. We are always evolving and changing. Most people think that evolution means better technology, more cures for illnesses, progress as we gain more material means… I believe that this is not evolution. The true evolution for me is the revolution of consciousness. Human beings are evolving towards higher levels of consciousness, where their minds and hearts are opening up to: Unconditional love; Compassion; Trust; Unity; Oneness; Diversity; Collaboration; Empathy. These values are being adopted by many and as we adopt them, the people around us, by symbiosis will adopt them too. Consciousness is what we are, our ‘essence’. This essence is the God/Goddess energy that we are. We are Gods/Goddesses experiencing life through our bodies in human form (we are not a body with a Spirit – surprise! We are consciousness living temporarily in a body). So for me working consciously is working from the perspective of that ‘essence’. When we realise we are consciousness. When we realise we are Gods/Goddesses. When we realise we are the truth we have been looking for outside of ourselves, then we can tap into that God/Goddess consciousness that we are and behave like this on our daily tasks. When we live life as the Gods/Goddesses that we are, we cannot be other than LOVE and emanate that love to everything and everyone we encounter, starting with loving ourselves.

And when we see ourselves as that, as pure consciousness, as Gods/Goddesses, we see that everyone else is a God/Goddess. Then we treat them as such. This is where we are going. This is the evolution of consciousness I was talking about before. This is, to me, working consciously, working with conscious awareness of who are, beyond all the physical, mental and emotional stuff that we are surrounded by. Recognising the divinity within us, we are the Universe and we are in it. And everything in the Universe comes from the same source of consciousness that we do, therefore we are all equal, we are all connected, we are all ‘One’. When we all start leading our lives this way, the conscious way, when business becomes conscious and aware of the wellbeing of others and the planet, respecting all living beings and living from ‘Oneness’, we will have evolved to a level that all the misery that we put ourselves through will have disappeared. This is our destiny and we are leading ourselves irremediably there. The future is bright.

What has been the biggest challenge you have ever had to face in life and how did you get through it?

My biggest challenge in this lifetime has been to accept myself. I was a very introverted and shy child and adolescent. I was scared of speaking, of asking for things, I was in so much pain that I wanted to die and I think I was immersed in sadness and depression until my mid-twenties. I didn´t like myself, more than that, I disliked myself so much that all that I had were negative thoughts about myself, about my body, my personality, my face, my capabilities, my intellect… everything was under constant criticism. That made of me a very unhappy teenager who even contemplated suicide. It has been a lifetime of constant work into self-development in order to become who I am today.

It has been a lifetime of constant work into self-development in order to become who I am today.

I learnt to transform my thoughts into positivity, manage my emotions, release stored emotions, let go of attachments and expectations. I learned to attract abundance, to express gratitude, to forgive, myself and others, to love unconditionally, to accept others for who they are and to see in everyone the magnificent beings that they are, their potential, to see with the eyes of compassion. I learnt about inclusion, diversity, collaboration, about the importance of interacting with like-minded people and building communities, about self sufficiency, self empowerment, self actualisation. I learnt to take responsibility of my own life and my happiness, to leave behind the archetypes of the victim, the complainer, the drama queen and decided to become goddess-like. Ultimately, I learned to BE in the world seeing from the higher perspective, from the perspective of God, I asked myself, “If I was a God/Goddess, how would I behave? What would Love do in this or that situation?”. When you look with the eyes of a God/Goddess, all that you see is Love and admiration for all Life, all that you see are Gods and Goddesses walking on Earth, even if they don´t know who they are. That’s what I am here to do now, like many others, to assist humanity in the massive awakening that is happening at this time.

Tell me more about what it means to be a Conscious Leader?

A Conscious Leader is self-actualised and know that they have this big responsible to BE love, kindness and compassion with their example. Going first, leading the way towards a more sustainable way of living, promoting peace and unity, putting people´s wellbeing first, and taking into consideration our effect on others and the planet with every decision.Conscious leaders are creating conscious families, conscious businesses and conscious communities all around the world. This is my vision, this is where I see the world going towards. We are going to develop, all of us, into conscious leaders in all aspects of our lives, starting with ourselves first, then with others, the planet and beyond…

Why is self-love important, and what does it mean in your life?

My biggest challenge was to learn to love myself. Self love is the basis for healing, for transforming into the person we want to be, it is the basis for happiness as we forgive ourselves, we stop the negative voices in our heads and lead the way to a fulfilled life. I love helping people to get there so that they can also experience happiness and a purpose driven life.