Meet Frank Mestas

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Frank Mestas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Frank, so great to have you sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our readers and so let’s jump right into one of our favorite topics – empathy. We think a lack of empathy is at the heart of so many issues the world is struggling with and so our hope is to contribute to an environment that fosters the development of empathy. Along those lines, we’d love to hear your thoughts around where your empathy comes from?

Empathy, at its most basic level, is the ability to truly understand someone else’s unique perspective. It allows us to comprehend, at a deeper level, not only a person’s motivation but the underlying hopes, needs and fears that underpin their world view. For most of us, empathy comes most easily when we can readily see a part of ourselves, or our own experience, in someone else. When we see someone else going through pain or trauma that is similar to something we’ve experienced, we are automatically able to empathize with them because it’s a pain we’ve also gone through.

However, empathy and compassion tend to become more difficult when we can’t readily understand someone else; either because their experience is seemingly far different from our own or because something they’ve done has crossed a line of what we believe is acceptable. These are the types of situations where I have worked hardest to maintain my ability to empathize. Whenever I see someone do something I disagree with, I resist my initial reaction to condemn and instead try to understand them by asking myself the following questions: Why would someone do something like that? What would they have to be feeling in order to be able to do that? The obvious answer is almost always that they are filled with anger, hate or indifference. Usually, however, those emotions are just a cover for a deeper issue.

I’ve learned from my own journey, as well as that of my clients, that negative emotions like these are almost always masking some type of deep seeded fear. People who are angry, hateful or unfeeling are, deep down, usually just afraid. Antisocial and selfish behaviors are a form of self-protection. Sometimes, in a person’s life, an experience has traumatized them so much they have decided the only way to protect themselves is to hurt others before they can get hurt. Ironically the thing these people are most afraid of is admitting they are afraid. This is because fear inherently makes a person feel weak. Latching on to anger or hatred, however, gives someone who has suffered trauma a feeling of strength.

In today’s world, it seems like anger and hatred are at epidemic proportions. Much of this is because the world is quickly changing on a vast level, not only physically and culturally, but spiritually. We are going through a grand transformation the likes of which people on earth have never experienced before. Change of this magnitude can be terrifying, especially if we don’t have the tools needed to grow and change with it. This is why I believe showing compassion and empathy for those who are stuck in anger and hate is so important.

One of the basic laws of the universe, sometimes known as karma, is that you get back what you send out. A person’s reality is a mirror of what is going on inside them. Thus, someone spewing anger and hate is usually stuck in a spiraling feedback loop that takes them further and further down. Depending on a person’s willingness to examine their fears, this will happen either until they hit rock bottom and become desperate for another path or destroy themselves in one way or another. The one thing, however, that can pierce and transcend this bubble of negativity is Love. You never know how one small act of kindness will affect another person. A simple act of compassion, or showing someone that you understand their pain, could be all that is needed to snap them out of their hate spiral. It could be the spark that makes them realize there is an alternative to their self created reality. At the end of the day, we can’t actually force someone to heal. However, we can heal ourselves and in doing so, become an example and a beacon of light for others to do the same.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

My name is Frank Mestas. I’m the proprietor of MPath Energy Wellness, where I provide energy healing, reiki treatment and spiritual-based life coaching. I was born and raised in Albuquerque, NM and grew up in a working class family in what was a semi-rural, historically Hispanic area of town. Although my family was fairly comfortable for the most part, I remember distinct periods where money was tight. I attended what could be called an inner-city high school with a heavily Latino student body. Because of those circumstances some might think the odds were stacked against my success, but I never saw it that way.

From a very young age, my parents instilled in my siblings and me the value of education, as well as the belief that you can achieve anything if you set your mind to it. Because of this, I took advantage of every opportunity presented to me in school and eventually graduated as valedictorian. After high school, I pursued my Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then crossed the country for a Masters degree at Stanford. I worked in the Bay Area for a few years, commuting daily from San Francisco down to my job in Silicon Valley. However, in 2003 my then-partner and I decided we had had enough of the stress of city life. After much deliberation, we decided to move back to my home state of New Mexico where we could more easily afford to buy a home. We ended up buying a house, with land, in the same semi-rural area I grew up in. I planted a vineyard, started making wine and got a job as an engineer in order to pay for it all.

My life continued blissfully in that vein for the next fifteen years. It was in 2018, however, that the Universe decided to throw a wrench in the gears of my pleasant, but slightly boring, life and everything suddenly began to fall apart. In retrospect, I now see that all that happened was necessary for me to clear away things in my life that were holding me back. However, at the time it was a very traumatic experience. It all began fairly gradually, with a yearning to embrace and incorporate a more spiritual aspect to my life. However, this exploration soon pushed me into examining deeply held beliefs and fears from my upbringing that were no longer compatible with who I had become. Slowly, almost without realizing it, and without understanding what was happening, I began a descent into fear-based self loathing. It all culminated with a temporary psychotic break brought on by barely eating, drinking or sleeping for an entire week.

I now know that this experience was what the spiritual community calls a dark night of a soul. A dark night of the soul can best be described as a period of time where a person begins to search for a deeper meaning to their life. Eventually the person goes inward and begins to question their beliefs, their reality and even their own existence. To someone without any guidance or understanding of what is happening, it can feel like they are losing their sanity. The good thing, however, is this kind of experience is often the beginning of a spiritual awakening. For me, it spawned a search for alternative therapies to heal from the trauma I was left with. In doing so, I unexpectedly reconnected with a part of me I had suppressed for a very long time.

Growing up, I always felt a strong connection to both the natural and the spiritual worlds, likely influenced by the folk-spiritualism of my northern NM Hispano culture. In retrospect, I was always highly sensitive to the energy of my environment as well as the people around me. However, I never really understood what was happening to me or how to deal with it. As a teenager, in an attempt to better understand this part of me, I even secretly checked out some books from the library on psychic development, energy work and metaphysics. As I hinted to above, eventually, I left most of this behind when I entered the logic-based world of engineering.

As tends to happen in life, it all came full circle. The week before my breakdown, I signed up for a Reiki certification class. This one small action eventually culminated in the creation of MPath Energy Wellness. As an energy healer, life coach, certified Reiki II practitioner, medical intuitive, and empath, I’m incredibly honored to be able to share my gifts with others. My goal is to help clients connect with who they truly are and their purpose in this life by helping them remember their soul’s truth. I aim to teach others how to find balance in all aspects of life and, most importantly, how to access the divine guidance that is available to us all.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Intuition
In my field, intuition is probably the most important quality to have. I rely heavily on my intuition to guide me as I work with my clients. It can be anything from helping someone uncover their own beliefs and biases, to uncovering blockages as I work on a person’s energy field. However, I believe intuition is also one of the most important qualities for successfully navigating life in general.

Everyone already possesses a keen sense of intuition. It’s not really something that we need to develop. Unlike a skill, where you need to focus and practice in order to hone it, with intuition you really just need to get out of the way and let it come through. This is because intuition is often contradictory to what logic tells us. In modern society, we have come to depend on our logical brain as the only way to navigate the world. However, I believe the brain is actually not meant for that. The brain, apart from running the body, is simply meant as a way for your soul to experience physical reality through your five senses. As amazing as they are, the human brain and your five senses are not capable of taking in the complete totality of information needed to make the “ideal” decision at any given time. The brain cannot truly predict what’s going to happen in the next hour, much less in the next week. For this reason, when we rely solely on the brain, we often feel like we’re muddling along through life, stuck in “analysis paralysis”, often afraid of making the wrong decision. On the flip side, intuition is a direct link to the soul’s understanding.

At the most basic level, everything is energy and energy needs to flow. Unlike the brain, which makes decisions from a minuscule amount of data, your soul is connected to the flow of existence itself. This flow is the key to accessing your intuition. When your brain encounters a problem or obstacle it immediately pauses until it can gather all possible information and then calculate what to do. Intuition, on the other hand, allows you to feel the energy of the situation in totality. You instantly know how to flow with or around any problems or obstacles in the optimum way for you. If you’ve ever had a strong feeling to do something out of the ordinary, which, in retrospect, turned out to have kept you out of danger, that was your soul showing you the flow of the situation through your intuition.

Trust
Learning to trust has been one of the biggest challenges for me in this journey. I don’t, however, mean trusting others. I’m referring, instead, to trusting my intuition, the flow of the universe, my soul’s knowledge, Spirit or whatever you want to call it. In essence, it is trusting that everything is working out for my best, that I don’t have to try to control everything, that the control is built into the system and that all I have to do is let it happen. I haven’t spoken of our helpers in Spirit yet, however, their guidance has helped me find this trust. Some people refer to these helpers as guardian angels, others call them spirit guides. Many people don’t even know or believe they exist. However, whether you know they are there or not, they are always with you, subtly helping you in any way you need.

The thing about this human existence is that we choose to intentionally forget that we are powerful, eternal souls in order to pretend for a while to be limited, flesh and blood beings. The reason we do this is because it allows for immense learning and growth. From your soul’s perspective, growth comes through experience and creation, the most rewarding type being experiencing and creating connection, otherwise known as, love. However, how do you do this if, as in the spirit realm, you already inherently know you are an eternal spark of the divine; unified and connected to everything in existence? The answer is to create a reality where we forget all of that for a while just for the experience of being limited. We all know this world can be a truly horrible place. However, how amazing is it to be able to create and spread love in the midst of, and in spite of so, much negativity? Most people would agree the most rewarding experiences, the ones with the most growth and personal transformation, are usually also the most difficult. This is the exact reason why we, as souls, have chosen to be here. To truly get the most out of this life, all we need to do is trust that we are here for this reason.

Understanding this is where my spirit guides have helped me immensely. Through gentle prompting from Spirit, I have come to understand that we are never truly alone. No matter the problem, big or small, we always have all the help we need. All we have to do is ask for guidance and trust that, whatever happens, irrespective of how it appears, it is truly for our best.

Optimism
Try to find the positive in all that happens. Holding on to optimism has become more and more difficult lately, especially with all the chaos happening in the world. However, through my own experience, as well as guidance received from Spirit, I have come to realize that everything in the universe is inherently neutral. We give things meaning based on our own beliefs and definitions. As an example, if someone randomly comes up to you and calls you a “blurgwarg”, you’ll most likely just be confused, not knowing what to feel about it because you have no idea what a “blurgwarg” is. Only when you are given a definition will you be able to form a judgement on whether it is good or bad. This is the same with all things. Another example of this would be a baby. A newborn has no definitions or beliefs, so it doesn’t know what is good or bad, dangerous or safe. To a baby every single thing is completely neutral until either they can make a judgement about it through experience or someone defines it for them. The beauty and power of this idea is that we get to define our own reality by deciding for ourselves what is good and bad.

In any given situation, even when something is happening that we don’t necessarily prefer, we have the option of defining it as positive or negative. A negative choice, in this example, would be choosing to believe that the situation you are in is some type of punishment. A positive choice for the same situation, however, would be to decide that even though the path is difficult, what you are going through is making you stronger, more resilient and giving you opportunities to learn about yourself. I’ve made it a point in my life to look for the bright side in even the worst situations. I admit, however, that often it’s extremely difficult, but that hardship just means there’s more opportunity available for personal growth.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?

First, I stop, breathe and center myself. Next, I remind myself that whatever is happening isn’t being done to me, it’s being done for me. These two steps are important because they help me shift my perspective from a negative one to a positive. Once I’m centered and in a positive mindset, I can work to let go of whatever fear is causing me to need to control events and, then, allow the universe to show me how stuff needs to go. Usually, once I do this, things just start falling into place. I stop focusing on what I fear will happen in the unpredictable future and, instead, I’m able to let intuition guide me to what is needed in the current moment. In this way, whatever is most important is allowed to come to the forefront. Interestingly, in doing this, I also gain a broader perspective on the things that aren’t really important at all.

A big part of this process is to not suppress or reject my fear, but instead to look for the underlying core belief that is creating it. Our emotions can be powerful tools to help us learn more about ourselves. Negative emotions, like fear or anger, tell us we are holding on to a false belief about ourselves that is in conflict with our soul’s truth. The interesting thing is that many of the negative beliefs we hold on to aren’t even our own. They are things others have taught us. When we finally root out a core belief and determine where it comes from, it often doesn’t even make logical sense to us. We quickly realize there’s actually no reason to be afraid. It’s quite hilarious to see some of the things our subconscious holds on to because it believes it is protecting us.

The other side to this process is using positive emotions. Like the negative ones, these are also powerful tools. Positive emotions, however, like joy, excitement and pleasure, tell us we are on the right track. They are the guideposts that show us our soul’s truth. I encourage my clients to always utilize their intuition and excitement, joy, etc., in every decision they make. Choosing the option that “feels” better, that gives you even the slightest bit more excitement puts you in tune with the inherent flow and synchronicity that forms the basic structure of the universe. By following this process, I have learned that even the most overwhelming situations quickly become manageable.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mpathenergywellness.com/
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