Me

without a doubt a dream—but along the way I had forgotten to be myself.
    I learned that for me to be the master of my own life, I need to treat it with respect and responsibility. I need to be the one to decide what’s best for me; I need to look for what I need when I need it, and not let anyone else dictate what I should or should not do. My life is mine and I control it. To this day, this is an intention I hold on to tightly, because if I don’t look after my temple, or prevent others from invading it, then who will?

FIVE
    THE SOUND OF SILENCE
    LIFE’S MOST VALUABLE LESSONS ARE LEARNED IN ABSOLUTE silence. It is when we are deep in that silence that we have the ability to think about and connect with our most intimate nature, our spiritual being. We all go through life—some in more of a rush than others—searching for happiness. It seems so simple, right? But we soon realize that before we find happiness, even before we begin to look for it, we need to understand what we are made of. We must connect with the little boy or girl we each have inside to discover our deepest dreams and the means to make them happen.
    I have had the good fortune of having a great life. Extraordinary. But just as there are moments when I have felt I was at my peak, there have been others when I felt I had sunk to my lowest, and when the craziness of “Livin’ La Vida Loca” came to an end, I was going through one of those moments. I was very tired and very sad. I was in the mood for nothing, and even though to the outside world it seemed I had everything, nothing material seemed to make a difference to me. The only thing I wanted was to stay home and do nothing. I had reached the upper echelons of the music industry—something for which I had worked tirelessly— but now I was fed up and had no interest in using that power. The truth is I was simply exhausted, worn-out, and I didn’t want to do a thing. So I isolated myself as much as I could.
    What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was really on the brink of so many extraordinary things that were about to come my way. Even though I felt I had lost hope, everything in my life was aligning to bring me to this exact point of desperation in order to incite me to ask questions and find answers I would have never imagined. The thing I realized later is that I spent way too much time looking outward, as opposed to inward. I made decisions either purely based on what my mind told me—mechanically—or purely based on what I felt with my heart—passionately. Individually, both ways of handling life are incorrect, and what I needed was to find the balance between the two. I needed to find my center. I needed to go deep down to find those forgotten emotions, covered and sabotaged by the adrenaline and the euphoria I had lived through over the last few years.
    After going through so much and having so much, what I wanted now was the polar opposite: I wanted to find absolute simplicity. As always, life sent me exactly what I needed when I needed it the most.

THE LITTLE YOGI
    AT THE END of 1998, when I was in the middle of all the chaos of “La Copa de la Vida” and the preparation for my first English album, I gave a concert in Bangkok. We went from one place to another with very little extra time, which was our usual pace. At one point, after giving a press conference, I went through the kitchen of a hotel to get back up to my room unnoticed, and suddenly, in the midst of all the chaos in the kitchen, I saw a man who had a very special aura. He looked like a small Gandhi. Normally, I would have walked right by him, but there was something about him that grabbed my attention.
    “Hello,” I said in English.
    And he replied in Spanish: “Hola!”
    “Hola?” I said. “You speak Spanish?”
    “Of course,” he said. “I’m Puerto Rican, too.”
    “Are you here on vacation?” I asked him, surprised.
    Around us, chefs and plates came and went along with large dishes piled high with food. The security guards were waiting for me at the elevator bank so I could quickly return to my room to eat and rest a bit before the show. But at that particular moment I felt that time was frozen. The man emanated such a high level of peace and serenity that it was as if nothing else existed around us.
    “No, no,” he responded, “I am Puerto Rican but I have lived in Bangkok for the past eighteen years.”
    He told me that he used to be a Buddhist monk and that he had lived in