4. Start offering what you love to do out into the world as your job.
5. Give. When you give, life gives back to you tenfold.
6. Try to face yourself and meet what is there. Give it love, give it healing, do some therapy, get the muck out.
7. Give yourself permission to take a holiday. Go and lie on a beach for a week. It is a pretty great way to get your vibes back up!
8. Start enjoying yourself! Believe it or not, we are actually allowed to be happy, we weren’t put here to be miserable.
9. Hang out with people whose company you enjoy. People who inspire you, make you laugh and raise your vibration.
10. Laugh. Remember, life is playful. It’s not supposed to be taken too seriously. We weren’t put on this Earth to mope, but to enjoy things and to laugh. So, laugh out loud, whenever something tickles you. Let yourself go a little ...
PART 3
BEING WHO WE REALLY ARE
PART THREE
BEING WHO WE REALLY ARE
‘To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you into something else is the greatest accomplishment.’
Albert Einstein
This part of the book is about finding yourself and knowing yourself, and the healing work you can do to help yourself on this journey. It’s about walking a more spiritual path. Being our true, authentic self requires us to shed excess emotional baggage, becoming lighter and less ‘cluttered’ as a result. This is all part of the path that leads to simplicity, and a happier, more peaceful life – one that can not only cope with living in in these crazy times, but which can make a positive difference to those around us and to this whole beautiful world.
CHAPTER 1
FIND YOURSELF, LOVE YOURSELF
We are living in a time where HEALING GALORE is needed. We, as a race, seem to have veered a little off track. Our society has become somewhat sick and to correct our course and help us tip things back into balance again, we need to explore healing – healing of ourselves and healing the planet.
And it has already begun. You can witness the healing starting to happen, look at what’s happening with the ‘ban the plastic’ movement. This is just the start.
The way that we do a lot of things here on Earth is about to change. And it starts with you. Not anybody else. You. The most amazing thing you can do for the planet right now is to start healing yourself. When you heal yourself, the planet heals with you. Your healing affects EVERYONE.
So, if you sometimes get wobbled out by just how much there is that needs sorting out here on planet Earth, know that actually, all you need to do, is just start with yourself. Make sorting your SELF out your priority – and then, quite literally, the world starts to change with you.
The spiritual path
Starting out on the spiritual path is no small job. But for many people the call to do this is getting louder and louder. ‘Wake up,’ it says in our ear – the whisper starting to turn into more of a roar. And it is not always an easy path. It requires something of a warrior mentality. Living consciously in a world that seems anything but can be challenging at the best of times. But this doesn’t mean we should stifle the call – quite the opposite. We must heed it. The world needs more people who are fully present and living life with eyes wide open.
The spiritual path is all about living life with your eyes fully open. It’s about living the most supercharged, awesome and amazing version of life that you can possibly imagine and not settling for the norm – a watered-down, apathetic life of living what is ‘expected’ of you. No. This is about opening up to life’s richest and most juicy offerings!
And it’s not about being ‘better’ than anyone else, or feeling superior. It’s about opening your heart, to your self. It’s about finding love for yourself first and foremost, and once you’ve found some love for yourself you can start rippling it out to those around you. This is the path of a Heart Warrior. It’s all about the ‘L-word’ – LOVE – and healing any blocks to self-love that we might have picked up along the way. And it’s about love of the planet and love of our fellow brothers and sisters around us. It’s about EVOLUTION or E-LOVE-LUTION.
Society, as it stands, is not currently designed to produce fully realized, enlightened, super-Buddhas quite yet. Although I believe change is coming, we live in a world that appears to be governed with the intention of producing sleepy rabbits – people who conform to society’s ‘norms’, question nothing and consume A LOT. People who work regular (long) hours, drive regular cars, produce children and who buy all the gadgets, thus supporting the system that, in fact, enslaves them. It is, quite frankly, a bit of a trap to say the least. And our job is to break free from it!
This requires you to be something of a rebel and to start questioning things, for your own sake and for the sake of your loved ones – as your loved ones want and deserve the best version of you. It requires you to find out who you truly are, to access your spirituality, and to become your finest self. And, by the way, this is not an escapist path of a life chanting mantras in an ashram in the undiscovered Himalayas – although you could do that if you wanted to! This is a path of action, of not settling for the norm and of thinking outside the box. And once you start on this journey, the changes you make will lead to a life of glorious fulfilment. Sound good? It is. It takes a bit of work, but, man, is it worth it!
Society might encourage us to look outside of ourselves for answers. But the wise ones know that the answers to what we are all searching for lie within – inside each and every one of us. Our enlightenment is lying dormant inside all of us, waiting to be discovered. Just remember, you don’t have to be one of those sleepy bunnies. You are powerful, beautiful, wild and untamable, and deserve a life of freedom, in tune with nature and the divine.
Love yourself
Our natural state is love. Not rush, not stress – LOVE. The problem in our society is that we’ve forgotten how to love ourselves.
We need to learn, as a race, how to keep ourselves full – overflowing, in fact – rather than permanently empty and out of gas. Our modern society can teach us some odd things. It teaches us that it is normal, even desirable, to be continuously busy, always ‘on’, always ‘connected’, always DOING something, but this can come at a big cost. If we are constantly ‘doing’, then we are basically running on adrenalin, and empty. And that’s not such a great state to be in.
The challenge of these new and rapidly changing times we live in is to stay topped up, all the time. To love ourselves enough to not go against our natural rhythms, and to stay true to ourselves: second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day (this takes practice – just so you know).
How do we start to love ourselves better, I hear you ask? Well, the best place we can start is by making friends with ourselves. And we do this by looking within and learning to love what’s inside of us – all of it! Once we can start looking at, accepting and loving our dark, hidden corners, and the places we’ve been hurt – the parts in us that we were taught weren’t ‘ok’ as children, then it starts to become easier to love ourselves. We need to explore our shadows (see page 141, Chapter 3) to help heal ourselves and then the love will begin to flow.