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In many ways, the journey of healing is not so much a chapter in your story, but changing the way you write the entire book. It’s a shift in the way you move through the world, one in which you move from being disappointed that life has not met your every expectation to expanding your vision to perceive all of the magic, the wonder, the awe, the heartache, the loss, the gain, the contrast that makes us all perfectly and unpredictably human.
Life can be deeply challenging and profoundly unfair, and without the ability to move through the feelings that may accompany our experiences in real time, we often become trapped in the old stories we once wove around them.
When we are able to validate, accept and process our own human experience independent of anyone else, something magical occurs. We begin reconnecting with our true desires, heeding our subtlest instincts, and cease sabotaging our inspired thoughts and feelings. Through this, we tend to usher in a serendipitous unfolding of events. Over time, we begin to recognize that there is a common thread carrying us through each one of these experiences, which is our soul’s silent guidance: ever-present, and always leading us just beyond what we can see in real time.
Your first purpose is to heal. The sheer impact of you becoming the person you know you were meant to be will have a ripple effect on everyone and everything around you. Nothing will ever be the same. If you cannot imagine how else you might leave a legacy, help others, or do something meaningful with your life, the most important place to start is within yourself.
You will enter that emotional fire and burn off everything blocking the core of you from truly being in the world.
Note what comes effortlessly to you, within this is a key to your future. Note what is interesting to you, within this is a key to your purpose. Note what you struggle with the most, within this is a key to what you’re here to heal.
You will have to spend many nights by yourself, in candlelight, making yourself dinner, learning to love yourself, to be alone with yourself and enjoy that time. You will have to stay precisely where you are and learn to mend the wound of your unworthiness before you can be loved.
The things that are truly right for you will find you, and they will stay. They will grow you, challenge you, and change you. Most of all, they will not exist in the distance, in the future, in a potential version of reality. It is their undeniable presence that will ultimately put your heart at ease.
There are so many thousands of things you have released, and only a few that you’re still clinging to. Sometimes, letting go is an action, sometimes, it is a decision, and very often, it is a matter of distraction. We let go not when we think we are supposed to, but when our minds move onto reciting different stories, building new realities. We move on not when we have adequately picked apart the pieces of what used to be, but when we begin to think more about what we’d like to build in its place. We aren’t really letting go. We are just accepting what’s already gone.
You will have to stop thinking one person’s perspective of you is the sum of who you are.
What we envy in others is actually a cue for us to become clearer about what we want to create for ourselves. We aren’t actually trying to say they don’t deserve that, but rather, I want to feel like I deserve that, too. Jealousy reveals our own self-suppression.
“It is safe to let go of the past experiences once I’ve extracted the lesson from them.” You don’t have to keep ruminating. You don’t have to keep reviewing the details of old experiences. You don’t have to keep worrying that you’ll get caught off guard again.
The experiences we can’t release often still hold within them a lesson that has yet to be extracted. Once we’ve learned from the mistake and carry that wisdom with us each day, we are free to finally release what brought it to us. When we haven’t learned the lesson, it doesn’t feel safe to release the teacher.
If you sum someone up by their worst traits, you sum yourself up by your own. And what you will almost always come to find is that the moments at which you feel most compelled to judge and shrink other people from your life is the very moment at which you yourself feel pretty small. Instead of projecting, seek deeper wisdom. Heal your relationship with yourself, and the rest will fall into place.
Healing is the ultimate vulnerability.
You will know that it’s time to take your power back when there is no other viable choice, because in the aftermath of loss, you discovered that you unraveled your own existence so that nothing could be taken from you again. You can’t lose your power.
You need to think beyond the limits of your current perspective. You need to be daring. This isn’t just because aiming higher inevitably raises your expectations overall, but also because boldness often tells you what you’re actually capable of, though you might not yet believe it. If you’re willing to believe that something might be possible for you — it already is. The virtue of you even being willing to consider it means that it’s somewhere within your realm of possibility already. It’s just a matter of first realizing it, and then acting on it.
Likewise, discomfort is the healthy response to knowing it’s time to make a change. Discomfort is not trying to punish you, it’s trying to help you. However, most people can’t simply sit with it long enough to let it tell them what it needs to say, let alone take the next step, which is often to temporarily endure more discomfort before a solution is found. Discomfort is an experience most people are not willing to face or feel. This is why their lives stay as they are.
A life of more is not one that always expands outward, it’s very often one that opens up inward. I hope you will consider that maybe that’s possible for you. I hope you will slowly learn that you can live without a problem to solve or mountain to climb. I hope you will realize that your existence will not always be a constant well of longing,
Before you’ll know what’s right, you’ll know what’s wrong. This is the scariest part because without the answers, it seems like the questions are never-ending. It seems like you’re stuck. It seems like there’s no way out. There is, you just haven’t thought of it yet. This makes sense because you’ve also never come to terms fully with what’s really not working in your life. When you have the courage to do one, you often find the other.
You know it is only ever in solitude that we extract the most important truths about our lives. Without the expectations of others around us, we get to see who we most essentially are.
Loneliness is what happens when you convince yourself that you’re no longer worth connection. Loneliness is what happens when you misbelieve that love is something you get when you’re good enough, something you receive when you play by the specific and unrelenting rules of those you’re most invested in receiving it from. That type of connection, though? It’s not connection.
Try to find love for the moments that life has given you to be alone. Try to find love as you remember that you are already a piece of something far bigger than you, from where you came and where you will return. Try to find love in the fact that maybe you’re being given an opportunity to be introduced to yourself so that you might be able to introduce that person to someone else. And maybe that was the piece that was missing all along.
Your heart goes slowly. It does not act impulsively or irrationally or with anger. The heart shows you what is true through the feelings that do not fade. The heart shows you where you’re meant to be by where it keeps bringing you. The heart is comfortable taking leaps of faith, because it can feel what’s on the other side. The heart is used to believing before it can see. The heart is the centermost part of who you are, and the truth that lives there is the one you are meant to follow.
Until you are at home in your own heart, you will never make peace with the world. This is because you will be constantly requiring things to be different than they are, constantly needing people to fulfill your own expectations of them, constantly needing to weave around your fears and your triggers. What you have to realize instead is that home is not an idea, it’s not a place, it’s a way of being. It’s a way you show up to your life and make it your own. It’s a way you find comfort in the contours of who you are, not who you might one day become.
We are not alive to seek safe spaces within the idea of another. We are here to realize that we are the source of our own existence, of all that we create, of all that we are. We are here to bring ourselves home, and then to show others the way back to themselves.
You can live within the questions. Life doesn’t start when we’re set on the answers, it unfolds within the questions themselves. It’s not knowing where we’re going to end up, but the journey of exploration and soul-searching and deep-diving and connecting and seeking and ultimately arriving at our north. It’s not always knowing exactly what we’ll be doing in 10 years, but having the courage to pursue what feels right and comes effortlessly today. It’s not always being certain that one relationship is the end-all, be-all of your existence, but showing up to it each day in spite of the unknown.
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The truth is that big things happen in small parts. It’s not about those one-off changes, it’s about the accumulation of intentions you set day-in and day-out. You are far more defined by your daily routine than you are whether or not you moved someplace in particular or accomplished something in particular all by an equally particular point in time. The truth is that the path will lead you to where you need to be inevitably — holding your breath until you arrive only delays you getting there.
even when we gather all of those reasons we should believe in our worth, we really don’t feel it until we decide to love ourselves even if we don’t believe we’re worth it. Instead of trying to convince yourself that you’re the best person ever, try instead just caring for yourself and your surroundings unconditionally. Worth is not something we earn, but something we remember as we cultivate our own care and approval.
You are not only as worthy as you prove yourself to be. Your worth is a self-evident byproduct of the presence of your being. Maybe the point is that you stop and finally feel it.
The life you have today is a mere dream of the past. The things you do right now were once the things you only could have ever prayed to have. The people in your life are the ones you gazed out the window for years and wondered if they would ever arrive, if someone would ever show up that made you feel so deeply understood.
When we improve or elevate one part of our lives, the others that remain unhealed begin to stand out more starkly in comparison.
Periods of transition can be tough, but when you’re really ready, you’ll know how to let go with gratitude, and step in with grace. What this means is that you’ll be thankful for everything you’ve experienced, including each misstep and mistake. From each, you learned something invaluable, and for that, you won’t really regret it. Then you’ll step in with that same sense of appreciation. You’ll take the first strides into your new chapter with a feeling of ease and awe, because you know what it’s like to live out of alignment with who you are—and you’ll never forget how good it feels to
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What you build in the wake and the aftermath of loss will be so profound, so stunning, you will realize that maybe, the loss was part of the plan. Maybe it awakened a part of you that would have remained dormant had you not been pushed the way you were. If you are certain that you cannot let go of what is hurting you, then don’t. But take one step today, and then another tomorrow, to rebuild a new life for yourself. Piece by piece, day by day. Because sooner or later, you’re going to go an hour and realize you didn’t think about them, or it. Then a day, then a week…and then years and swaths of
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Detachment teaches us how to love ourselves first. It teaches us how to be resilient. It is a sign that our goal in life is no longer just to remain comfortable. It is the greatest display of self-love. Detaching from a relationship when we know it isn’t right is a sign that we no longer rely on others for our sense of stability and self, and it is often the first sign that we are more mentally strong and emotionally free than ever before.
What is it that you want to feel each day? What do you want to be most proud of by your life’s end? What work do you want to do each day? How do you want to be remembered? How do you want to impact others? How comfortably do you need to live in order to feel whole? Where do you want to spend your days? What do you want your relationships to be like? What do you want your bank account to look like? What do you want your closet to look like? What do you want your home to look like?
When something doesn’t work out the way we thought, it’s almost always because we aren’t as good at it as we thought, we don’t love it as much as we thought, it wasn’t as good for us as we thought.
When our lives improve — they improve. Good things add up, and we stabilize. The more stable we are, the less likely we are to incur a “negative” experience that’s within our control, and the more likely we are to handle one that’s out of our control.
What is no longer a part of your life is no longer a need in your life…even if you can’t quite see over the horizon yet. You are not meant for the people who leave you, you are not always at fault for the people who have left, and you are not broken for those who have faded into the distance. Embracing the ebb and flow of life, and the impermanence of it all, is the way you will learn to love people when you have them and be grateful for them when you don’t.
Eventually, you have to realize that the biggest challenge in your life was the state of your own mind. Whether or not it allowed you to enjoy what was in front of you, whether or not it joyfully prepared for the future while savoring today, or whether or not it seized you up and made you feel paralyzed in the face of the unknown.
You are not trying to get better in order to actually be better. You are trying to get better in order to prove to someone else that you’re worthy of their attention or love or time.
The next right step in your life is not always the one that scares you the most. Sometimes, it’s the one that bores you the most. Sometimes, it’s the least exciting option. Sometimes, it’s the one that you’re avoiding, resisting and running away from, because it’s the step that requires you to sit in your discomfort, metabolize your uncertainty, and do what you know you will have wished you did a few years down the line.
