It truly is the path of the warrior to delve inside and clear out all the baggage in order to make room for more love, and in my eyes is what’s being called for on our planet at this time – people who know how to love themselves, people who are unapologetic about their self-love, people who love themselves so much that they SHINE – and literally overflow this love to everyone around them.
Be happy
Dear reader, I hereby give you my full permission to be happy! Yes, you heard me right. HAPPY! In this life of ours, it is your absolute duty to be happy, and to shine that out far and wide for as many people to feel and see as is humanly possible! I’m not kidding!
We’ve been wallowing in our ‘muck’ as a species for rather a long time now, and that time is no longer. Being miserable, like a soggy camel, does not serve anyone. Least of all you! Snap out of it! We weren’t given the gift of life to just moan about it. We were put here to enjoy! Life is a gift – remember?
Happiness lies awaiting you, right here. Happiness is available in your very attitude to life. If you want to focus on everything being shit then be my guest. If, however, you learn to change your focus to appreciating the very moment that just hit you, then… boing! Hello happiness!
Your happiness is important. Working out how to be happy and how to live a life that makes you feel happy and good is probably the best thing you could do for the planet at this time. Happiness is contagious, and the planet could use more happier humans. A LOT more.
So stop feeling guilty for being and/or wanting to be happy. We are allowed, you know? Let yourself succumb to your own happiness, embrace it. Welcome it in. Give it to yourself – guilt-free!
Happiness comes in many forms: it could be in the form of a hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day, sitting in the park listening to summer birdsong, going for a drive with your favourite album playing, seeing family or friends, a sunset walk on the beach. It can come in the form of money or it can come in the form of exchanging a smile with a stranger on the train.
One sure-fire way I always find to get happy is to laugh at myself in a mirror. Go on, give it a try! Go into the bathroom, close the door so no one can hear you, take a look in the mirror and just laugh! Observe how it feels. Pretty good, huh? To me, it’s all about attitude. Look at your attitude and how you respond to life. If your view has a negative slant on it, work on that. See if you can change to a new story!
Allow your own happiness, let yourself receive it. It’s here in this very moment, in these very words you are reading. See if you can feel it here waiting, happiness beckoning. Make friends with it and become its best new mate. You deserve it.
Be gentle
Gentleness is a sorely underrated quality in this world. The ability to be gentle with ourselves, with others and the planet is vital for a harmonious life and a healthy future Earth.
Beneath our feet lies a powerful and gentle, living, breathing being – Gaia. The Earth. Just because many of us have forgotten her existence doesn’t mean that she does not exist. She does exist; quiet in her calmness and gentle in her power.
We could do well to take a leaf out of her book and learn to become gentler with ourselves. It ties in with self-love – gentle is not weak. Gentle is loving, gentle is caring, and the planet is in crisis because male ‘leaders’, men who are afraid of being seen to be ‘weak’, have been running the show for too long. These are not men who know how to be gentle with themselves or the planet. This must change and it must change soon, or we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.
We must get in touch with our gentleness. We must change the mindset that says that gentle is ‘weak’. What absolute rubbish. Gentle is not weak. Gentle is strong. We need more gentle leaders.
And how do we do this? By healing our conditioning around what gentleness actually is. Gentleness is simply the ability to be kind to ourselves. When we are kind to ourselves we are, in turn, kind to others. When we are kind to others, others are kind back to us. It’s a positive cycle – the complete opposite of a vicious/negative cycle.
To take this a step further, when we start being kind and gentle to the Earth, the Earth also starts being kind to us. Magic little things start happening in our lives, unexpected gifts start showing up – this is the wonder of the Earth giving back to us. When we give to it, when we care for it, it shows its appreciation. It’s a magical thing, not logical, but certainly true in my experience. When I do something unconditionally loving for the Earth, it always gives back to me, often in completely unexpected ways.
An example might be: if you took the effort of clearing up some rubbish from a special place in nature, this good deed is felt by the land. I swear it. Something really nice might happen to you later that day – someone might give you a gift or do something nice for you. That is the magic of your conscious attitude towards the Earth. To take it one step further, when you start living a life that is constantly in touch and giving to the Earth, where every day is about giving and about being ‘in service’, then that’s when life really starts showing its appreciation and magic to you, and takes on a whole new level of conscious amazingness.
One excellent way of bringing some gentleness into your day would be to start it with a meditation (see page 64). This can start you off on a gentle path that really does carry on throughout your whole day. In addition, you could take a look at how it feels to live a little more gently – try cutting back on that third cup of coffee in your day and replace it with herbal tea instead. You old hippy, I hear you cry! No, seriously. Try it.
CHAPTER 2
FACE YOURSELF, KNOW YOURSELF
Travelling on our journey, we soon realize that there is dark as much as there is light in life. A spiritual life is not one that tries to make everything light all the time. No. That would be quite unrealistic. We need to know and fully accept both sides of life – light and dark – and remain balanced between the two.
To accept both the light and the dark in life, we must first accept the light and dark within ourselves. Once we accept both these aspects we find ourselves becoming more balanced and more accepting of, well, everything. We become less swayed by things. We remain neutral. In the middle. This isn’t to say you don’t have an opinion. Of course you have an opinion. You just aren’t too attached to it.
Owning the good and the bad
There is a thing that happens in our world. It’s not so nice. It’s called projection. We all have the tendency to do it. However, it would serve us better if we stopped doing it as much as we do.
Growing up, most of us have been taught that our ‘bad’ parts – our anger, sadness, frustration – aren’t welcome. And, as we grow into adults, we then ‘disown’ these parts of ourselves. But, as we grow older, because we don’t ‘own’ these parts in ourselves, we tend to project them out onto other people.
We blame, we point the finger, vigorously, until we’re blue in the face and hot and bothered, ‘You! You’re doing this! You must be bad!’ And then we start firing missiles at each other. Metaphorically – or physically!
This is ‘disowning’ our dark sides, our shadows. By externalizing and projecting these things onto other people we get to deny them in ourselves. This is BIG. It’s the reason for much of the disharmony in our world, especially at global world-stage level – we’re ALL doing it!