FROM SELF-SABOTAGE TO SELF MASTERY
MOVING FROM SELF-SABOTAGE to self-mastery sounds like an extraordinary transformation, when in reality it is the natural course of coming to understand that you were responsible for holding your life back, and so you are also capable of moving it forward.
CONTROLLING YOUR EMOTIONS VS. SUPPRESSING THEM
The Buddhists believe that controlling the mind is the path to enlightenment.20 Enlightenment, by which they mean, spontaneous and true happiness.
The idea is simple in theory and complex in practice: By both exploring our understanding of the mind and training it to behave in a certain way, we sort of purify ourselves to experience the essential nature of what we are, which is, as they believe, joy.
If you’ve ever sat in a meditation class, you’ll know that the first principle of mind control is the opposite of what you’d think: It’s about letting go.
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.
Their approach is that controlling the mind is actually a matter of surrendering to the mind, allowing it to behave as it pleases while regulating their reaction to it.
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Emotional suppression is a regulation strategy that people use when they do not have adequate coping mechanisms for their feelings.
The pattern is often this: The person denies or ignores their true reaction to a situation or experience, believes it will simply go away if they continue to disregard it, finds that their day-to-day lives are disrupted by a sense of unease, and one day, it all comes to a breaking point and they have an emotional outburst that they cannot control.
Therapy generally aims to help patients no longer suppress how they feel. Instead, they are encouraged to recognize those emotions but choose how they respond to them.
In the healing process, suppressing and controlling can seem like a fine line.
When someone cuts you off in traffic and you choose not to yell out your window, are you suppressing how you feel or controlling it? If your partner says yet another idiotic thing and you choose not to respond to it, are you suppressing how you feel or controlling it? If your coworker aggravates you consistently about a project and you choose not to say anything, are you suppressing how you feel or controlling it?
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Suppressed emotions function similarly to unconscious biases. One such type of bias is confirmation bias, wherein your brain sorts through stimuli to bring your attention to facts or experiences that support what you already believe. Though you’re not aware of the bias, it’s still affecting you.
On the other hand, controlling your emotions involves becoming more conscious of how you feel. You are aware that you are angry, sad, or aggrieved, but you are choosing what you do about it. It is not really that you are controlling your emotions, but your behavior.
When you are suppressing your emotions, you don’t know how you feel and your behavior seems out of control.
When you’re controlling your emotions, you do know how you feel, and your behavior seems within your control.
The answer is that when you’re in traffic, or in an argument, or dealing with a difficult coworker, you should be aware of how you feel but still in control of how you respond. Emotions are temporary, but behaviors are permanent. You are always responsible for how you choose to act.
We often think that the measure of physical strength is how much weight we can bear, how long we can run, or how pronounced our muscles are. In reality, physical strength is a measure of how efficiently the body runs itself, how capable it is of effectively performing day-to-day tasks and occasional challenges when they arise.
Mental health is the exact same way. It is not a measure of how happy we seem, how perfect things are, or how unconditionally “positive” we can be, but that we are able to move through day-to-day life and the occasional challenge with enough fluidity and reason that we aren’t stifled or held back by ourselves.
Amy Morin very famously disclosed some of the things that mentally strong people don’t do. Identifying their habits and behaviors is essential, but what if you just aren’t there yet? If you want to become a mentally strong person, this is where you begin.
LEARNING TO TRUST YOURSELF AGAIN
Inner peace is the state of being connected to the deep internal knowing that everything is okay and always will be. The concept of finding one’s “inner peace” has been part of spiritual and metaphysical practices for centuries and has just recently become more mainstream with the development of popular psychology.
Albert Camus once said: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
That sums up the entirety of what inner peace really is: the understanding that no matter what is happening around you, there is a place of total knowing and calmness within you. Not only are you capable of returning to that place when you need to, but it’s possible to live your entire life from there. The challenge is learning how to connect with it in the first place and rewire how you respond to your mind, which is always jumping from one worst-case scenario to the next.
You know when people reference knowing something “deep down?” They say things like: “I’m worried, but deep down, I know it’s going to be okay.” Or, “I’m angry at him, but deep down, I know he loves me.” What do you think they are referencing? Where is deep down? They’re talking about the place within them that has an infinite wisdom, a better understanding, and a more insightful perspective of what’s going on. It isn’t shaken by the stressors or fears that the mind wants to offer.
So much of the process of finding inner peace is being able to get to that “deep down” place where you know and feel that ultimately everything will be okay.
There’s another metaphor in meditation in which calmness is compared to steadying a lake or a large body of water. 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.
CREATING ALIGNED GOALS
One of the most important parts of discovering your inner peace is that you trade in your desire for “happiness.”
Unfortunately, happiness is fickle. It can lead you to being attached to certain achievements, belongings, or specific circumstances. It can lead you to become dependent on other people’s opinions or life unfolding in a particular way. 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.
This is difficult for most people, and often, people will continue to create stress, problems, and drama for themselves because their egos are still very much attached to thinking they need something external to make them feel good. This is the quintessential sign of someone who has not yet found their inner peace: They are searching, often frantically, for a sense of satisfaction, belonging, or worthiness outside of themselves.
So really, it’s not that happiness isn’t a virtuous thing to which you should aspire, or that happiness isn’t something you’re ever allowed to feel. The reality is that inner peace is the true happiness, and everything else is just a false means of trying to convince yourself that you are “okay.”
Think about it this way: What do you typically imagine will bring you happiness? Money, a relationship, a promotion? What happens when you achieve those things? Consistently, throughout all of humankind, the answer is the same: You return to your baseline. This is because this kind of happiness is not real. It is only being completely at peace with whenever you are in any given day that you will find a genuine sense of wonder, presence, and joy.
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With all this talk of how we have to “come back” to our place of inner peace, it brings up the question of why we ever got disconnected from it in the first place. This is important because understanding why we lose it is fundamental to finding it again.
When we grow up, we adapt to our environments. We adopt the beliefs and ideas of those around us. We alter our personalities so that we become safer; we believe the world can’t hurt us. When we are children, we are more vulnerable than ever, and it’s during this time that we pick up what can easily become lifelong coping mechanisms.
If we are not instructed from a young age to connect with our inner sense of peace, we will instinctively begin to trust the voice in our head. This is where we really get lost, because the thoughts that we have on any given day are largely the product of what the Buddhists would call the “monkey mind,” or as a neurologist could explain it, the process of different receptors firing off and making associations with things that may or may not have anything to do with reality.
When we begin to trust our thoughts, we let them inform our feelings. This becomes a cycle and ultimately traps most people who aren’t aware that it’s happening. They have a weird or scary thought, have a subsequent strong feeling, and the combination of the two makes the situation feel real when it’s actually a misunderstanding of your neurological process.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that our thoughts are useless. It just means that they are not always reflective of reality and should be used as more of suggestions than anything else.
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The answer is that they can; most people just aren’t instructed on how to. But beyond that, most people are actually too scared to go into their own feeling states, because their inner child is too traumatized.
Everyone has an “inner child”; it is the part of you that is most innocent and pure, and it never goes away.21 Over time, it is your responsibility for you to learn how to parent this inner child, who will honestly be the one to push you away from your inner peace. They will be the one to throw a tantrum and tell you that everything is falling apart and that you’re going to die and that you should just give up.
In the same way that you wouldn’t let a child run your waking life now, you can’t always believe what your inner child is afraid of. You can, however, learn to work with them, heal them, and make them feel safe…in the way any good parent would.
Stephen Diamond explains it like this: “To begin with, the inner child is real. Not literally. Nor physically. But figuratively, metaphorically real. It is, like complexes in general, a psychological or phenomenological reality, and an extraordinarily powerful one at that.” He argues that mental disorders and destructive behavior patterns are usually more or less related to unconscious parts of ourselves and were most often adopted in early life.
FINDING YOUR OWN PEACE
Finding inner peace isn’t always so much about just sitting in the lotus position until wisdom becomes you; it’s about making the uncomfortable decision to stay with your discomfort and to choose differently.
As Gail Brenner explains: “The inner war is perpetuated by resistance—that is, not wanting to feel the way we feel, not wanting people to do what they are doing, not wanting events to occur as they are occurring. Resistance wants to rewrite our personal histories and ensure that our plans materialize.” She argues that inner peace is the only kind that exists because nothing else is in our control.22
Another really amazing way to find your inner peace is to constantly remind yourself that your worries are a fabrication of your mind’s need to identify potential threats for survival, and true happiness is being here in the moment. If that’s hard to believe, make a list of the following:
- Everything you have intensely worried about in your life. Go back as many years as you can, and be as detailed as you can.
- Every difficult situation you swore you would never get through or never get over.
- Every time you have genuinely felt happy and at peace.
Guaranteed, your responses to the first will bring a smile to your face in that they will remind you that you have worried constantly in your life, and yet they were mostly unfounded.
Your response to the second will also be relieving, because it will show you just how much pain you thought was insurmountable in your life and how, in retrospect, you don’t really ever think about those things anymore.
Finally, your answers to the last question will remind you that your happiness has never come from things being perfect on the outside, but from you being present and open and connected to yourself and to the moment.
DETACHING FROM WORRYING
In the same way that it’s easy to become addicted to substances or behaviors that allow us to avoid the present moment, worrying is chief among the coping mechanisms people use to distract themselves from what really matters.
Over time, you convince yourself that worrying equals being safe. You think that by running worst-case scenarios through your head again and again, you will be better prepared for them. This is completely false. Not only are you draining your energy imagining situations that are very often completely manufactured, but when you are already hypersensitive to any one of these fears or ideas, you will actually create those circumstances simply out of your avoidance or over-responsiveness to them.
You have to remember that among all the things to know about the “monkey mind,” your head wants to constantly seek out situations and experiences that will affirm itself. If you believe something will be good, it will be. It might not look exactly how you imagined, but the outcome will be exactly what you expect.
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 THAT YOUR FEELINGS ARE NOT ALWAYS FACTS
The most challenging part of all of this is arriving at a place where you can discern between which feelings are instinctive and informative and which are rooted in fear and ego.
In a world that constantly tells you that your gut knows everything and that your feelings are real, and that if you reach in deep enough, you’ll uncover a well of wisdom that can guide you… it can be really easy to assume that every feeling and idea we have is not only real but is somehow forecasting what’s going to happen in the future.
Your feelings aren’t predictions. They are not fortune-telling mechanisms. They are only reflecting back to you what your current state of mind is. It’s like having a nightmare: The monsters aren’t real, but they could be metaphors for something you’re worried about in your waking life.
What holds so many people back from finding their inner peace is the fact that they can’t tell the difference between which is correct: their fear or their peaceful feeling.
Remember this: The feeling of peace is the one telling you the truth.
Your feelings aren’t here to tell you what’s going to happen. They’re only here to inform you of where you are energetically and mentally and how you should respond to what happens around you. Fear is trying to scare you into staying small and keeping safe. It is a mortal, limited thing. The feeling of peace is trying to remind you that everything will be okay because it always is…and always will be, no matter what.
BECOMING MENTALLY STRONG
No matter who you are or what your purpose is in life, mental strength is going to be a key component in ensuring that you actualize all of the potential latent within you.
Mental strength is not a fixed trait. It’s not something we inherently have or don’t. Ironically, it’s not necessarily easier to have if you aren’t faced with many challenges in life. In fact, it is often people who are in the most difficult circumstances that are forced to develop the highest degrees of mental strength.
Being mentally strong is a process, and it is a practice. This is where you can begin.
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Mentally strong people are planners.
They think ahead. They prepare. They do what’s best for the long-term outcome.
You might think that this disconnects them from the moment, but the opposite is true. Worrying disconnects you from the moment. Overthinking disconnects you from the moment. When you are consistently sidelined from your own anxiety, it’s because you don’t have a plan regarding the thing that’s making you scared.
Think about something you aren’t scared of. Do you know why you aren’t scared of it? Because you have a plan for what you’d do if it were to happen. So you’re able to let go and be present.
Whether it’s becoming financially healthy, improving your relationships, going to therapy, getting a new job, or pursuing a new career path or dream: If you don’t have a plan, you’re going to keep having a problem.
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It seems like everyone is thinking about you, judging you, evaluating you, and determining your status in life. They aren’t.
Social media has likened us all to mini-celebrities in our own circles: We become convinced that everyone around us is disproportionately concerned with the minutiae of our lives.
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.
Nobody is thinking about you in the way that you think they are thinking about you. They are mostly thinking of themselves. When you feel self- conscious for going grocery shopping in your sweatpants, please know that nobody cares and nobody is looking. When you feel anxious about your accomplishments or lack thereof, please know that for the most part, nobody cares and nobody is looking. This is true of absolutely everything in life.
Nobody is evaluating you the way you are evaluating you. They mostly take you at face value. Stop thinking that you’re the sun that everyone revolves around. This world is not all about you. Your life isn’t even all about you. The more you can put aside your spotlight complex, the more you’re going to be able to relax.
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We live in a specialized society.
People go to school; they apprentice and train to become very skilled at one task. They then market and sell this task in exchange for purchasing other people’s expertise.
You are not supposed to know everything.
You are not supposed to be a financial expert; that’s why you can hire one to do your taxes or advise your investing.
You are not supposed to be a master chef; that’s why you can buy a cookbook or ask your mother for help. You are not supposed to be a world- class trainer; that’s why you can book an appointment with one and learn. You are not supposed to understand the complexities of mental health and neuropsychology; that’s why you can visit with a psychotherapist and learn how to get better.
You are not supposed to know everything. You’re not supposed to be good at everything. This is why you have people whom you can hire or learn from. Cut yourself some slack, and focus on what you are proficient in. Outsource everything else.
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The main reason that people sustain anxiety is due to long-term thinking in either/ors, otherwise known as false dichotomies.
This is a cognitive distortion in which you eschew an entire field of possibilities in favor of one or two polarized outcomes, neither of which are
likely or reasonable.
If I lose my job, I am a failure. False.
If this relationship ends, I’ll never find love again. False.
If this scary thing happens, I won’t be able to go on. False.
Anxiety is caused by logic lapses, where there’s a breach in your reasoning skills. You jump from one event to an unlikely conclusion, and because it makes you feel something strongly, you assume it to be true. Ultimately, you start thinking in dichotomies, which are not only ineffective, but also spook you so much that you are rendered incapable of actually handling your life.
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Given that our most fundamental human fear is of the unknown, it makes sense that we go through mental gymnastics to try to predict certain outcomes in our lives.
However, psychic thinking, or the idea that your feelings are premonitions, that you can “just know” what the future will hold, or that your fate is somewhere set in stone for you, makes you mentally weak. It places you in the passenger’s seat when you need to be behind the wheel.
When you are engaging in psychic thinking, you’re extrapolating. You’re taking a single feeling or experience and making a long-term prediction about your life. It is not only false; it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Stop trying to predict what you can’t know, and start putting your energy toward building what you can. You and your life will be better for it.
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In the grand scheme of your life, the outcomes that really matter are the ones that are almost completely within your control. It’s easier and less scary to pretend as though you are simply a cog in the wheel, but you’re not.
If you actually put your energy toward learning to be productive, taking care of your health and wellness, improving your relationships and self- awareness, you’d have a radically different life experience. Every single one of those things is within your ability to change or at least influence greatly.
There are some things in life that are outside of your control. If you focus on them, you will miss something really important: the majority of your life is the direct result of your actions, behaviors, and choices.
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You are not supposed to feel happy all of the time. Trying to feel happy all of the time is not the solution; it’s the problem.
Instead of the ability to sustain positivity at all times, mental strength requires that you develop the ability to process complex emotions such as grief, rage, sadness, anxiety, or fear.
When you do not know how to allow these feelings to pass through you, how to make sense of them, learn from them, or simply just allow them, you get stuck on them. You bury them, and then everything around you becomes a trigger that threatens to unleash the floodgates.
You might think it’s about keeping a stiff upper lip, but it’s not. It’s about crying when life is sad, being angry in the face of injustice, and being determined to create a solution when a problem arises. That responsiveness, instead of reactiveness, defines mental strength.
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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.
The only time you’re going to really hold onto the past is when you haven’t fully learned from the past. When you have, you can apply those lessons to the present moment and create what you wanted to experience then.
Focusing on what happened disproportionately to what’s happening now, or what you want to happen in the future, is what keeps you completely stuck. If you feel as though you truly failed yourself in some profound way, it becomes even more crucial that you move on and create the experience you desire now.
Your life is not over. You did not fail indefinitely, but you will if you never let go and try again.
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If you feel really tangled up in your thoughts, feelings, and fears, talk to someone. Perhaps a mental-health professional or a trusted friend. If nobody is around, talk to yourself. Talk out your ideas as though you were speaking to someone else in front of you.
Sometimes, we need an objective third party to help us sort through complicated parts of life. Keeping it all buried in your head and heart often makes it worse. Letting it out into the open tends to simplify the problem, release the emotion, and help you move on.
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Growth usually isn’t a sweeping thing. It happens incrementally. It occurs in tiny bursts and small steps. This is because when we are growing, we are actually expanding and restructuring our comfort zones. We are readjusting to a new way of life, and if we shock our systems with too much change too fast, we often revert back to what we knew.
The most effective and healthy way to change your life is slowly. If you need instant gratification, make the goal the tiny step you take each day. Over time, momentum will build, and you’ll realize that you’re miles from where you started.
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Triggers are not random; they are showing you where you are either most wounded or primed for growth.
If we can see these triggers as signals that are trying to help us put our attention toward some part of our lives that needs healing, health, and progress, we can begin to see them as helpful instead of hurtful.
You cannot ignore your problems. You cannot disregard your wounds. These are issues that you will need to unpack, process, learn from, and adapt your behavior accordingly. This won’t only make you mentally stronger; it will also give you a better quality of life overall.
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The greatest gift that life will hand you is discomfort.
Discomfort is not trying to punish you! It is just trying to show you where you are capable of more, deserving of better, able to change, or meant for greater than you have right now. In almost every case, it is simply informing you that there is more out there for you, and it is pushing you to go pursue it.
Instead of trying to pacify this discomfort, mental strength requires that you listen, learn, and begin to change your course.
If you can begin to see your life as a feedback mechanism that is reflecting who you are with the ultimate goal to help you live better and more fully, all of a sudden you realize that it was never the world standing in your way, but your own mind.
HOW TO TRULY ENJOY YOUR LIFE
If you were to ask, many people would undoubtedly agree that they believe the purpose of life is to enjoy it. However, so many people struggle to be present and actually experience their lives as they are. The culprits are varied and can include everything from unrealistic expectations to trying too hard to feel good. (It is, after all, something you have to allow.)
When you’re struggling, the most insulting and difficult thing that someone can tell you is to “just relax” or “just enjoy yourself.” When you’re in survival mode, the last thing you can possibly think about is just sitting back and rolling with the punches. This is the most important part of learning how to enjoy your life again: When you’re in a place of trauma and pain, you can’t try to force yourself to be happy. First, you have to step back into neutral.
When you’re struggling and you try to make yourself feel good, you are actually intensifying the polarity of your feelings. You are shoving the “bad” feeling down in place of trying to feel something different. Ironically, many people who struggle emotionally are, at their core, people who actually just have a greater desire to enjoy life.
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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. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure.
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There’s a saying that if you’re anxious, it’s because you’re living in the future, and if you’re depressed, it’s because you’re living in the past. When you’re living in the present moment, you realize that both the past and future are just current illusions in the infinite, eternal “now” and that they are actually ways in which you can avoid being in your body.
The only place to find happiness is in the present because that’s the only place it truly exists. Trying to find happiness by focusing on what could or might happen in the future is actually a process of disassociation. Practice arriving into today by focusing on taking life one day at a time and doing the most with what you have in front of you currently.
There’s a fine balance between living for the moment and taking care of your future self.
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In his book on Hygge, the Danish art of coziness and well-being that many attribute to the nation’s staggeringly high happiness rates, Meik Wiking explains that connecting with others is not just spending time with them; it has to do with not trying to dominate, impress, or create an emotional
reaction in someone.23 You find a lot more happiness by not trying to prove yourself.
People who want and need to assert their dominance in relationships are the ones who are always in arguments over hypothetical things, creating drama at important holidays or events, or otherwise finding that the very people they are supposed to love and cherish most receive the worst of their behavior.
In order to find greater happiness, you need to see yourself as an equal to those around you. When you view yourself in a position to constantly learn from all those you know, you are no longer compensating for fearing you are “beneath” them.
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When we think of trying to “enjoy” life, it’s common for our minds to jump to trying to achieve things that are huge, overwhelming highs. We think that being happy is only what happens when we’re on vacation or just landed a huge bonus.
This, however, is actually the opposite of happiness, because it’s conditional. True happiness is embracing the little joys in life: the sunrise on a warm summer morning, your cup of coffee, or an amazing book. It is being grateful not only for when big things happen, but also for the small satisfactions that you can find every day.
Most people severely overthink happiness. They assume their lives have to be in perfect working order for them to experience real joy. This is not so. Real joy is finding happiness where you are and how you are.
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Regardless of whether or not you are introverted or extroverted, the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life experiences. Tons of research backs this up: We become most like the people we spend time with, and our happiness is directly correlated with not the quantity of
relationships we have, but the quality of each of them; being lonely is as much of a risk to your health as smoking.24
However, what most people interpret this to mean is that they should just make friends where they can find them and be close to their biological family, even if they dislike them. That’s totally missing the point. Happiness is not contingent upon you forcing relationships you don’t want to be in. It is, however, contingent upon you building and fostering relationships with people you really like and who add value to your life.
When you meet someone with whom you really have a connection, go out of your way to make sure you see that person and keep your friendship healthy.
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When you approach life as though you already know all there is to know, you are actually closing yourself off to potentially having new and better experiences. If you assume that you know what will happen when you try something new, or if you think you know what places you haven’t been to would be like…you might just want to leave some room to surprise yourself.
Think of life as something you can constantly learn from. Your pain teaches you what does not feel good and what you should not continue to do. Your joy teaches you what is in alignment. Everything can be your teacher, and the more you allow your life experiences to shift and change you, the better you (and they) will become.
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Happy people aren’t joyful all the time, and this is an important distinction to make. In fact, genuinely happy people are more at peace than they are ecstatic about everything they experience.
This is because happy people are inherently coachable and changeable. They are not stuck in their ways. They understand that life requires growth,
and when that growth stagnates, discomfort begins to arise.
The true nature of life is constant movement and constant evolution. If you do not keep up with that, life will all but force you to change as it becomes less and less comfortable to stay where you are. You cannot avoid all pain, but you can absolutely avoid a lot of suffering by staying focused on your internal growth.
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Sure, most people realize that if they work a job they dislike or stay in relationships they despise for the majority of their lives they aren’t going to feel great about it. What many don’t realize, however, is that there are far more significant things that we constantly offer our energy to that create the quality of our lives.
Those disliked jobs and stale relationships aren’t problems, they are symptoms, and at the root of all of it is where you allow your mind to run. When you give your energy to certain thoughts, they gain life. There’s a saying that the wolf that wins is the one that you feed, and when it comes to the quality of your life, you need to be extremely careful of what you allow yourself to think. It will soon become what you feel, then what you believe, and then how you behave, and sure enough, the way you live.
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Happiness is an active pursuit as much as it is a passive one. Though to feel fulfilled each day is absolutely a conscious choice (it isn’t going to happen by accident, FYI) the irony of really feeling good is that it’s not something you can force; it’s something you have to allow.
Happiness is refusing to fill your schedule to the absolute brim so you can wring the most you possibly can out of every second of your life. It is also taking time to embrace the mundanity of everyday moments. It’s sitting back and reading a book, talking over dinner with someone you love, or just enjoying the small things each day. Taking this time won’t happen on its own; you have to plan for it.
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When we were kids, all we did was imagine and play. Our lives were our canvases, and we inherently understood that we could make believe absolutely anything and spend the day living it out.
The same is true in adulthood, but over the course of a few decades, the world tends to have a way of beating the magic out of you. If you really want to enjoy life, you have to make time to do what you loved when you were young. Paint, play in the sand, play games you love, and be creative for the sake of it.
If that all sounds childish, good. It means you’re ready to reconcile with your inner child who is and always has been there all along. Enjoying life is living it out in both the simplest and most transformative ways possible. Part of that is simply letting yourself show up and be who and how you are.
BECOMING A MASTER OF YOURSELF
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.
Mastery is to realize that we are equipped with the exact traits we need to overcome the mountains before us, and in fact, doing so is the ultimate calling of our lives. We are not only capable; we are destined.
Mastery is to finally understand that the years of discomfort you endured were not some sort of purgatory you had to just get through. They were your deepest inner self informing you that you are capable of more, deserving of better, and meant to transform into the person of your dreams.
You must claim it. You must create it. Your own healing process will create an invisible ripple effect on the collective. If we want to change the world, we change ourselves. If we want to change our lives, we change ourselves. 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.
