By 
Luis Rojas has spent his life on a journey through pain and success towards understanding the power of love. Now, in his new book The Answer Is Love: A Simple Conversation About Discovering Your True Self, he shares what he has learned during his more than fifty years on this planet.
Luis takes readers on a roller coaster ride of the ups and downs he has experienced, from wetting his bed as a child and enduring childhood abuse, to finding love, becoming a successful criminal attorney and prosecutor, and then losing everything and starting over. . This last experience led to a greater understanding of love and ideas that he calls “Messages from the Universe” that he shares throughout the book.
One of my favorite passages in The Answer Is Love is when Luis describes himself as a hummingbird that flies to and fro from a situation to fully understand it. In the process, he gets to the depths of a situation. This ability greatly aided him in his quest for true justice. As he once told a judge who asked why the district attorney’s office had agreed to a plea deal and a lighter sentence for a defendant: “Your Honor, justice is supposed to be fair, and sometimes Showing love and compassion during criminal proceedings is the right thing to do.” to do.”
At the heart of this book are questions about why suffering occurs and its purpose in our lives. Of course, Luis reveals that the answer to these questions is that suffering teaches us to love. For Luis, love is the most important thing on earth, and he is especially aware of what can happen when love is absent in someone’s life. He has seen love in action and can tell you that it is real and it changes lives. In fact, he calls it “the mightiest force on Earth.”
Too often we focus on everything bad in the world, but Luis knows that focus is misplaced. He states, “I watch the news about violence and hate. It makes me sad, but I can tap into love, knowing that there are millions and millions of acts of kindness around the world every day.” Luis is one of those who commits acts of kindness. These acts do not need to be grand grand gestures; they can be simple moments of pausing and reacting with kindness. A perfect example is how he experienced guilt and shame as a child because he wet the bed. They made him feel that something was wrong with him by not being able to control his bladder. As a father, one night he let his daughter sleep with him. When he wet the bed, he felt fear and shame for his possible reaction, but Luis used love to eradicate any feelings of guilt. His decision to tell her bedwetting was no big deal ended a cycle of hereditary pain in the family. Such a small act of kindness was healing for both him and his daughter.
Luis points out that when love is absent from a situation, it is often because we are busy living in the past, bringing up old hurts or grudges, or we are living in the future, focusing on our fear of what is to come. She states, “We waver so quickly from the past (what did I do that made me so late) to the future (what’s going to happen) that we never stop for a second to live in the now. Love exists in the present and opens the door for positive connections with the Universe and your fellow man.” In other words, when we pause to live in the present, we can find ways to be kind and let love in.
Another favorite passage of mine involves a young man Luis loosely released after he was caught selling drugs. Luis did not want to ruin the young man’s life, but he hoped that the young man would change his way of being. He states, “I know some might say, ‘It’s wrong that you gave him a pass,’ or ‘You should have thrown the book at him.
“The introspective question is: Which book would you have thrown at him? The Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, the Bull, the Lotus Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, or the Code of Hammurabi? those books raise the philosophical concept of destroying a young person’s future for having two pounds of marijuana in their trunk. On the contrary, these books speak deeply about the importance of respecting the dignity of life, being compassionate and ‘doing for others ‘. as you would like them to do to you.'”
I love how Luis twists the definition of “book” here to broaden our perspective on the situation and remind us that all the world’s religions preach kindness. Luis later states, “As a former prosecutor who expelled many people, I can tell you that prison is not a solution. Prison is and always will be an additional problem. Prison has only one purpose: to instill fear, guilt and shame.” in criminals and in those who are incarcerated. It makes you hate yourself, and over time, it makes you hate others. The prison usually does this by removing love from the prisoners’ lives.”
Luis is on a mission to reinvigorate us all with his message of Love and remind us to act from a place of Love. He now realizes that writing this book is his mission. He states, “All the pain from the crashes in my life made me sober up and get back to my true mission, which is to help others. At all times, I reminded myself that I was a good person who was here to help others. In the end, I thanked the Universe for my flaws, as they were what encouraged me to write this book.”
I hope you will join Luis on this mission by taking to heart the words he shares in The Answer Is Love. He has given me a profound reminder of what life is really about and he has made me stop and re-evaluate situations before reacting with fear, worry or anger. We can all pause to find love in any situation, and when we do, life can change.