“[I]f you don’t prioritise your life, someone else will.” Greg McKeown says in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. “But if you are determined to prioritise your own life, you can. The power is yours. It is within you.”
In Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset, she quotes the American tennis player Billie Jean King. “It’s all about what you want to look back and say. You can look back and say, ‘I could have been …,’ polishing your unused endowments like trophies. Or you can look back and say, ‘I gave my all for the things I valued.'”
I can’t stress enough how our being alive is an absolute miracle. Having the opportunity to feel and apply ourselves to each and every experience is an absolute miracle.
Be a conduit for the flow of life to pass through you.
Get curious about whatever you’re experiencing. Learn about the environments it arises from. Learn to be aware of how to get in, and get out of it. You may find an underlying cause.
Then step back and allow however you’re feeling to just pass through. It’s all just energy. It’s all sacred.
Emotions need motion.
Things arise and things disappear, such is the nature of being alive. It may hurt now, it may not, but it won’t last forever.
Know that, deep down within, there exists a capability that nobody can take from you. Beneath all the layers we accumulate preventing us from realising our true selves, there lies a beautiful spirit; a loving silence; a shared awareness that is well and truly you.
It is by sitting with our thoughts and focusing on the breath we are tapping into a profound sense of connection not a lot of us are aware even exists. It is by sitting with thought and focusing on the breath that our awareness of the present moment isn’t limited by our thinking. It by sitting with thought and focusing on nothing but the breath, sitting with all the noise and mindless chatter that pervades our peace of mind and keeps us held under the belief that we need the constant distraction in order to survive—the layers that serve only to mask our truth—that we engage with our potential as living, breathing human beings, no better or worse than the next. We enter a great arena of possibility.
David Goggins, the author of Can’t Hurt Me, a book that I have only managed to get a few pages into due to the fact it fires me up so much, wrote the following words:
As humans, we’re reading books every day to try to figure out how to be someone else. What we don’t do is go inside, turn ourselves inside out, and read our own story. You have to look inside to find out what you really want.
Inherently, life has no meaning. The time we spend waiting for it to fall on our lap could be time spent crafting a life of one.
The work for you now is to shift your consciousness to that of self-value, self-compassion and self-love so you can be the cause of healthier encoding and better outcomes for your life. It is to begin nurturing the confidence to apply yourself with the utmost authenticity. It is to honour whatever your deepest truth is at any particular moment in time, even if that is at the expense of fitting in with everybody else.
The desire to fit in is a surefire way to limit your potential.
You are a great deal more than the small thoughts that may have been occupying your mental space, leeching your energies and preventing you from stepping into the light for as long as they have. You are fire, you are passion, you are joy. You are intelligence, you are peace, you are love. You are the energy of the universe and are so much more expansive than your ego would have you think.
The work for you now is to honour your soul and start living your life to be a representation of that. This is all we can ever hope for, and once we discover how to do it, it is all we need ever hope for.
To find the love you desire you first need to become the love you desire. We are what we give.
It is our responsibility to set ourselves up for as much joy and satisfaction as possible. The only true victories are found in the challenges we overcome with ourselves.