The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

by Brianna Wiest

In a world of revenge bodies and comeback relationships, a world that tries to tell you that your ultimate transformation should be splayed out across your Instagram feed, we’ve lost what it really means to heal, to improve, to move on with our lives. The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely. When you want to change your life so it looks different, and only that, you are still orbiting around the opinions of people who didn’t love you and didn’t have any intention to.

This growth is for you. This change is yours. This is you vs. you, you meeting you, you seeing you for the first time. This is about you becoming who you know you can be. This is about you finally living up to your potential. But mostly, this is about you recognizing that you were not your best self before. You didn’t behave the way you wish you would have. You didn’t do what you should have. You weren’t what you hoped you’d be.

The next time you’re trying to craft a glow up story that is compelling to others, ask yourself why you are still waiting for their approval. The answer, almost always, is that you still do not have your own.

Little things, done repeatedly and over time, become the big things.

What do you value? What do you genuinely care about?

What feelings do you want to experience in your life? What makes you uneasy or gives you anxiety?

Your purpose today may have been to offer someone a smile when they were at their lowest. Your purpose this decade may be the job you’re in. When you realize that you are always impacting the world around you, you start to realize something: The most important thing you can do to live meaningfully is to work on yourself. To consciously become the happiest, kindest, and most gracious version of yourself. Knowing your purpose also doesn’t necessarily mean your life will henceforth be easy or that you’ll always know what to do. In fact, when you are genuinely on your own path, the future won’t be clear, because if it is, you’re actually following someone else’s blueprint. With all of that said, when most people wonder about their purpose, they are often referring to their life’s work and their jobs. Your career is not nothing. It is how you will spend the majority of your day, every day, for the better part of your life. That’s why figuring out how you can best serve the world through that makes the long days and difficult moments bearable.

Comfort and complacency is not an option. They realize they must become the heroes of their own lives and the creators of their own futures. At the end of your life, your purpose will be defined not by how you struggled, what circumstances you were in, or what you were supposed to do, but how you responded in the face of adversity, who you were to the people in your life, and what you did each day that slowly, in its own unique way, changed the course of humanity. 15

To truly master the mind, the Buddhists practice non-attachment, in which they sit placidly, breathe steadily, and allow thoughts to rise up, cohere, and then pass.

Albert Camus once said: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

Your thoughts and actions are like stones in the water: They create a ripple effect. The point of meditation is to make yourself quiet enough so that the water comes back to its natural stillness. You don’t have to force the water to be still. It does it on its own when you stop interrupting it. The same goes for finding inner peace. It’s not so much something you have to create as it is something you have to return to.

When your goal is happiness, you will always find just behind it a lingering sense of unhappiness—that’s how balance and duality works. Inner peace, however? That’s the state in between the scales. When it’s your goal, there’s no way to lose.

Finding your inner peace is just connecting to your deepest wisdom. It’s not something you have to create, justify, imagine, or reach for. It’s always within you, it’s always an option, and it’s constantly a choice. You just have to make it. Remembering

In a number of decades, you will be gone. Your home will be sold to a new family. Your job will be taken by someone else. Your kids will be adults. Your work will be done. This isn’t supposed to depress you; it is supposed to liberate you.

Reflect on what went wrong, learn from what went wrong, and figure out how you’re either going to make up for it or change the outcome in the future. Then let it go.

Happiness is not something you can chase. It is something you have to allow. This likely will come as a surprise to many people, as the world is so adamant about everything from positive psychology to motivational Pinterest boards. But happiness is not something you can coach yourself into. Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted.

When you get to the end of your life, you will begin to see your mountains for what they really were. Gifts. When you look back on your life, you won’t remember the hardships. You’ll see them then as pivot points, growth opportunities, the days of awakening right before everything changed. To become a master of oneself is first to take radical and complete responsibility for your life. This includes even that which is beyond your control. A true master knows that it is not what happens, but the way one responds, that determines the outcome. Not everybody gets there. Most people live barely realizing that they are creating most of the waves in their lives and that it is also their job to learn to ride them. Most people spend their days lost in a fog of their own thoughts and feelings, having little ability to sort through them.

If we want to scale the greatest mountains before us, we change how we arrive at the path. When you reach the peak of it all—whatever that may be for you—you will look back and know that every step was worth it. More than anything, you will be overwhelmingly grateful for the pain that led you to begin your journey, because really, it wasn’t trying to hurt you as much as it was trying to show you that something was wrong. That something was the risk of your potential remaining untapped, your life spent with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, and wondering why you never felt quite right. Your life is just beginning. One day, the mountain that was in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But who you become in learning to climb it? That will stay with you forever. That is the point of the mountain.