I was at a cafe with my friend yesterday and it was full of green hats, green signs, waiters in green T-shirts, little leprechaun dolls and green clover everywhere... Every year becomes more common to celebrate “Saint Patrick’s day” here in Brazil. I don't like to celebrate without knowing what I'm celebrating... so I asked Google. I discovered, reading various sources, that this Saint Patrick wrote memoirs in which he tells that he was a Christian Bishop in the 5th century who sought to bring the Christianity of the Roman Catholic Church to Ireland. In the 5th century, the Roman Empire (those guys who, together with the Jewish aristocracy of the time, condemned and executed Yeshua, aka Jesus Christ) had already dominated a large part of Europe, annihilating dissent, religious, political or of any kind. But the druids* from Ireland were missing on the list, so that Bishop Patrick went to do the job. That is, the guy's mission was to wipe off dissidents in Ireland and make everyone obedient to the Roman order, whose interest was in controlling, controlling and controlling. While the other forms of spiritual expression that they annihilated promoted the reconnection (re-ligare, root of the word religion) with the divine within each one and in the elements of nature. Have you ever thought about how to control people who know of their divine nature? There's no way, and the Romans tried, and they couldn't, so they killed and destroyed evidence.

It was like this with the disciples of Yeshua (the ones who were not co-opted by the roman system), who were persecuted until the end, it was like this with recorded knowledge (the burning of the Alexandria library and many other destructions), it was like this with so many mystic schools, the “witches”, the native peoples of ours and other countries... wherever there was a sign of real power (the one that comes from our connection with our Nature), came the steamroller of the patriarchy invested in the Roman Catholic Church and crushed.

But a steamroller gives a feeling of stability, of security... it always seems better to be on the side of who’s driving it... or at least so thought the masses, who were convinced that it was a great idea to follow the colonizers' thinking and completely forget any part of themselves that disagreed with him... and voilà the celebration of Saint Patrick's Day.

And Ireland, a people tortured by long time of war, boycott, depreciation and rejection*, decided to pump this holiday as a strategy to be seen and celebrated by the world. But underdogs don't celebrate themselves, right, Brazil? So there had to be someone of imposing respect to lead the celebration... how about the "Patron Saint" of Ireland? Whoever pays any attention to the underdog becomes its patron saint... And the people forget the real and natural riches of their culture and spirituality...

Any resemblance to Brazil is not mere coincidence. It irritates me this need to borrow everything from Europeans and Americans. It's as if we were a country that, when it grows up, wants to be like them! Turns out we were huge before their invasion! (which the history books still narrate as “discovery”!)

This is the underdog complex, so well narrated by Márcia Tiburi* and so present in our lives. And what does this have to do with your difficulty in taking control of your life? Think with me: when you arrived in this world, you were already a complete human being. You were not a project of human being. Yes, you needed support to survive, grow, discover yourself... you didn't need to be moulded into something you weren't..., but that's exactly what happened to us. There were these big people, who took over the world, who seemed to know everything, and on whom our lives depended... so, I had no choice, it was either to follow those adults or get hurt. Fortunately, adolescence comes, and with it the beautiful opportunity to see things differently, learn about other ways of being an adult, and get rid of what doesn't resonate with us. Some manage to take advantage of this little hormonal help, others remain parked in compulsive obedience. And people are so trained to obey that they automatically look for the next authority or line of thought to obey. To the point of losing track of inner guidance.

In my work as a therapist this is the biggest difficulty hidden behind all the problems that people face. This pattern of thinking that some outside authority knows more about my life than I do is epidemic! Make no mistake, there are those who think they are very free for living in rebellion against something or someone... well, if your life is organized around someone other than yourself, whether obeying or going against it, what's the difference?

It's time to expel the colonizers from within us and recover our connection with who we are, in Nature, in Essence. Within each and every one of us there are incredible keys to create a beautiful and meaningful life, not only for us, but for everything and everyone around us. The time of playing the kid’s game "the master ordered" has expired... let's find this master inside?

• Druidism was one of the Celtic polytheistic forms called pagan by the Roman Empire.
• I highly recommend Ken Loach's films about Ireland - Winds of Liberty and Secret Agenda. It portrays very well the suffering and traumatic legacy of the Irish people.
• Tiburi, Márcia, Complexo de Vira-lata, ed. Brazilian Civilization, 2021.