Live Your Truth

by Kamal Ravikant

I walk around, a man in this society, big strong adult mask on. Seeming to have it all together. Sometimes true. Sometimes far from it. There are times that even my best isn’t enough. I will stumble, I will fall. And those times, the best thing I can do is reach out to someone who truly loves me, ask them for help, to hold out their hand.

only way to evolve is to open ourselves fully. Be raw, honest. Vulnerable.

That’s another thing I’ve learned. There is strength in this vulnerability, in tearing down the walls. People sense it in you. The world is hungry for it. And the greatest healing — for you, for those around you — it comes from opening. Opening yourself wide. To your humanness, to your feelings. And ultimately, to yourself.

four buckets to fill: mental, spiritual, physical, emotional.

we don’t stumble accidentally into an amazing life. It takes decision, a commitment to consistently work on ourselves.

over time, the days blend into a life that amazes the world.

“There is a rhythm to everything,” Musashi wrote. “To music, battle, even mounting a horse. You cannot ignore it. Rhythm to being in harmony with others, and a rhythm to not being in harmony with them.”

a rhythm to being in harmony with oneself.

Love, pain, fears, hopes, dreams, desires. All arise from the mind. We’re stuck in our heads, walking around, reliving old stories and patterns and beliefs.

regardless of the situation or whatever the external experience is, I choose who to be in this moment.

When your sense of self and happiness comes from within and isn’t a roller

coaster ride dependent on others or circumstances, you approach life differently. You make better choices. You draw to you the people and situations that matter. The others, they fall away.

There was a patience, a knowing that the exact number didn’t matter. What mattered was that I saw the stars, one by one, as I lay on my back and explored the sky.

there’s a definition of freedom, I think it’s this: living life on your terms.

The truth: I live my days as if I will live forever. Putting off so much, expecting there to be more time, another chance. If I accepted my mortality to my core, never knowing when the chain snaps, then how would I live?

Truth doesn’t change. It is the real you, regardless of your life story. Truth is what heals you, what saves you. Truth makes you rise to new heights, no matter where you are.

The magic is that as we live our truth, life does seem to calm down, as if that’s all it needed from us anyway. To be our real selves.

Ask yourself: what is it, that if I believed it down to my core, would change everything? Make the fears irrelevant? Make the person I’d become so unbelievably amazing that I’d blow my own socks off?

The only rule is that truth must empower you, make you better in every way possible. That’s it.

valid. It is your life, your experience. Your truth must feel right for you.

Set the ego aside. Reach out, share your truth, tell someone, “This is who I am. This is what I stand for. Hold me to it.” Be accountable. Often, we’ll do far more for another than we will do for ourselves. Use that to your advantage.

Now I know what success is: living your truth, sharing it.

Resist nothing. Like the Tibetan monk who once told me that he found peace by saying yes to all that happened. I met him again years later and reminded him of what he’d said. He laughed.

If you think about it, how much time do we spend in our heads wishing things were another way, beating ourselves up, beating others up, crafting a different past, wishing for a different future? All of that is resistance. All of that is pain.

Peace is letting it be. Letting life flow, letting emotions flow through you. If you don’t fight them, they pass through quickly and you feel better.

Peace is saying to yourself, “it’s ok.” Peace is knowing that the maze the mind plays in is not the truth. Peace is knowing that life is. Just is. How we choose to react to it determines our reality.

“What’s the point,” I say. “Of everything. What’s the point?” He smiles. Neutrinos pop around us, fizzle. “You are,” he says finally. “You are the point.”

fulfillment. A deeper state, one that comes from within, from being your best self. From living life the way you really wish to live it.

“Life is emotion,” he said, “life is feeling. If you’re not feeling,

you’re dead.” He paused. “Suffering is in the resistance. When we resist the moment.” Suffering is when we resist the moment.

All suffering is when we say “no,” when we say, “I want it another way,” when there is no surrender to the present.

“Freedom,” he said, leaning back and widening his chest on purpose, “is when we fully open ourselves. To the moment. Experience the moment and let it pass.”

There is no should. There only is. And when you accept that, letting the emotion rise, the feeling crest and crash, say to it, “it’s ok. I accept you.” Even say to it, “I love you.” There is power there. There is freedom.

The best people, they’re afraid, they question themselves. Many, if you corner them, will admit that they wonder if they’re good enough. But what separates them from the rest is that they jump off the cliff anyway. Sprout wings on the way down.

do: I am not the outcome. No one is. I am my effort, what I put on the table. That’s it.

Outcomes are dependent on forces far outside our control. Market dynamics, the price

This idea that you throw everything away and start again.”

Life is entropy. A beautiful chaos. But with rhythm, underpinnings of clockwork. Almost as if designed to push you to the next

stage of your growth.

The greatest achievement of humanity is the human spirit. The ability to rise beyond our circumstances, to find hope in the midst of suffering, to love so deeply that it transforms entire societies.

This, I know to be true: the effects our lives have, they are far greater and deeper than we can imagine. We matter, our lives matter. When we live our best selves, we are better for it, the world

better for it. It is that simple.

when we are better, those around us are better. Ripple effects, far greater than

Cross what I call the threshold.

Once you cross the threshold, you will never be the same. That is a fact.

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins.

I think the greatest moments in our lives, the defining ones, they are when we cross this threshold. Take that risk, make that commitment, fling open the door.

crossing thresholds, those are the crucial plot turns in the movie of our

I once heard that we all want good judgment, and good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad judgment.

Creating something of value, expressing yourself to the world — it is risk. Love is risk. And like love, it is often foolish. Madness even. And like love, it creates some of the most meaningful and fulfilled moments of our lives.