Sonya posted a new blog Our Heart... on A Girl Like Me’s “Voices from our Allies” page:
Do we truly understand the power of learning to listen with our hearts? Well recently the community has been opening up to me pertaining to HIV/AIDS Awareness, and it’s truly amazing! I have been learning to live each moment in love, because life is not promised to us, it is a gift. We are to savor every moment with those we love, care for, and with our community. Everything around us is always speaking to us…The question is, are we willing to listen, learn and grow from everyone and everything around us?
If we are teachable in this life, living in existence with people who are infected or affected with HIV/AIDS will suck up all the fear around us and we will have an amazingly meaningful stigma free life. We don’t need to wait for things to happen, but we make things happen, bringing HIV/AIDS Awareness, high price medications, and unfair discrimination to the forefront so that we can bring love into every aspect of our lives. Besides, the stigma sucks up too much of our time, energy, and resources and it robs us of truly loving and being humane.
When we listen with our heart, we not only hear the words that someone is saying to us, but we try to understand the reasons that they are saying what they are saying. HIV is a Pandemic, and we can all become involved with erasing the stigma “one voice at a time” if we are not afraid to speak out, reach out, and help out. Think about it for a moment….could we be the ones to help during this emotional crisis? Or are we worsening the crisis by our unintentional negative reactions? We must think of how our words and actions will win in this fight against stigma.
There is not much we can truly change in this life except ourselves. Our happiness is not dependent on how others view us or how others act, but on how we view the world and if we are internally fulfilled. It is what we choose to do with the information of HIV/AIDS Awareness, and the choices we make pertaining to our lives. Then and only then can we squeeze the juice out of every moment of our own lives understanding it all begins within our HEART!
About Sonya: Mrs. Sonya Mallard, better known as “Ms Sonya Live”, possesses a desire to push one into their Destiny, and has an unabashed preference for the controversial. Ms. Sonya skillfully combines talk, news worthy events, interviews and motivation for people without missing a beat. The weekly show, Ms. Sonya Live is on 94.7 FM every Friday @5pm for two hours filled with Real Talk, Real Issues, with a Dose of Reality from the heart. It features audience interaction and interviews with experts in the HIV field. She is on a mission as a HIV Activist for the past 20 years and presently an HIV Educator/Tester with Project Response in Melbourne, Florida. She has been Affected and not Infected with HIV, losing her best friend, Lynette Hart, to the disease. Her greatest fulfillment comes when her students, clients, and audience members take action and make meaningful changes that transform their health, relationships, work, and spiritual lives. She is known for giving out condoms FREE and stationing condom bowls throughout drug infested neighborhoods, beauty stores, and night clubs to help decrease the disease.
Read more of Sonya’s blogs on “Voices From our Allies“.