07-15-2025, 03:24 AM
Who would you become in the absence of all your concerns?
Most people currently in this paradigm of survival are looking to experts or friends
or colleagues for solutions to problems, all of which is reinforcing the belief that somebody
has a problem.
One of the quotes I use is the only problem you have is believing that you have a problem.
Otherwise it's just circumstance.
And circumstance is just what it is.
I'm not saying it's ideal, I'm not saying it's something that you particularly want,
but it is nonetheless what it is.
The suffering is not in the circumstance itself or not in the bigger picture of life,
but rather in our response to it, our interaction with it, our perception of it.
And so that at least starts to give people the access to some freedom by realizing, oh,
wait a minute, my unrest, my dis-ease, my sense of suffering is not because of the way things
are, but rather how my brain is interpreting them as a potential threat, or as something
that I don't want.
And when we look at life through the lens of that's not the way I want it, well now you
have to be in a state of resistance.
In Hinduism or like in Vedanta, non-dualism, right?
So they say, you know, when you get a thorn in your side, you need a thorn to remove it,
but then you throw away both thorns, right?
So whatever is creating the suffering, oftentimes you need the same medium to deal with it,
but then discard both.
So yeah, the ego to me, it's a facade, it's a pretense, it's a way that we want to be
seen in the world.
And it's got its merits, right?
Like to a certain degree, we could argue that because somebody does a great job of presenting
themselves in a certain way, they may get a job, they may get a spouse or a partner,
they may attract a circumstance that they otherwise wouldn't have done.
Where it becomes slippery is, you know, the mask that we use in order to try and garner
acknowledgement, love and respect, is eventually the very barrier to getting the connection
and intimacy that we want with people.
Right?
So it's sort of comical when you really look at it, especially in relationships, right?
So we want to portray our greatest version of ourselves, this sort of our ambassador,
you know, on that first date, second, third date, we want to be the best we can be in
the way that we present, which is not wrong, it's very human.
But at some point that facade has to crumble because it's inauthentic.
And then, you know, we start to engage with somebody at a really real authentic level.
And that's when a lot of the conflict happens because it's like, well, who the hell are
you?
This isn't who I met.
Right?
So the irony for me is that the most beautiful relationships are when somebody is so comfortable
in their own skin that that is what they present is the true essence of who they are versus
the sort of fabricated airbrushed version of who I think I'm supposed to be, which now
is obviously the Norman social media platforms, right?
So it's, I get it, but it's a sad state of affairs when the world is now becoming more
focused on this airbrushed experience of ourselves.
So the means that we're using such as that, which is to create this incredible, fictitious
to a certain degree version of ourselves, the underlying intention is beautiful, right?
Because we really want to be loved and accepted.
Like one of the fundamental priorities of a human being is to feel like we belong.
And so we've realized, oh, okay, well, if I can present myself in a certain way, the
chances of me fitting into the gang called humanity is going to be enhanced.
But it's in denial of the fact that, no, my belonging is first of all inherent.
I can't not be part of the gang.
I'm a human.
I'm an aspect of life.
So now we're actually, what we're actually up against is our own perception that we don't
belong.
So it becomes a vicious cycle.
If the mechanism of me feeling inadequate, insecure, having some sense of scarcity, this
sort of this sense of I'm not enough somehow, that is the driving impetus for a behavioral
adaptation to try and present myself in a way in order to be accepted.
But I can't overcome the initial belief that I'm inadequate.
If that's the driving force, it's a true freedom, true intimacy, true connection with
people is not to be found by whether I get accepted by society, but rather to see there's
part of me that doesn't feel accepted and to embrace that.
So that is that ego that by design doesn't feel enough.
It doesn't feel loved.
It doesn't feel special or valued.
It doesn't feel powerful.
These are its inherent qualities.
Most people are being driven by that, so they develop these compensation patterns and
adaptations to feeling inadequate.
But that whole system becomes a very barrier to the thing that we're apparently looking
for, which is love and acceptance.
We're under the impression that love and acceptance we want is out there when in fact
true love and acceptance is of self, including the part of me that doesn't feel loved and
accepted.
So not only is it because of the way we're raised and we're sort of mimicking our role
models of mum and dad or who our rock hair givers are, so they're already embodied in
this world of separation and compensation patterns and trying to look good and fit in.
But I think the actual design of a human being as an individual body and mind gives rise
to the experience that I'm separate to everybody else.
I'm over here and then there's everybody else on the planet around me.
So it's so seductive that it's just the way it is, that I'm a separate entity doing
the best I can to survive on a planet where life is hard.
And then you have all of these speakers and teachers and gurus and telling you, you know,
it's up to you.
You've got to work harder.
You've got to do this.
And so all of these instructional motivational teachers are reinforcing the fact that you're
this individual and it's incumbent upon you to make your life work.
And I'm not saying that, you know, you can just sit around and do nothing and you're
going to have an extraordinary life.
But I think there's so much power to be discovered in reconciling the fact that I'm not a separate
individual.
I'm held by a much bigger force that is called life itself.
And to me, that garners this real sense of true surrender and a much greater sense of
real faith beyond religion, but faith and trust in the fact that life's got my back.
Yes, I have to be proactive in the way that I am seeking to create my life, but with an
underlying understanding that life knows what it's doing.
And I'm an aspect of that.
Like an individual wave on an ocean isn't worried about its role.
Like, oh, am I high enough or loud enough relative to the waves around me?
It's a byproduct of the whole.
And so for me, when we really start to tap into that as individuals, through the perspective
of I am an individual, but I'm held by the collective or I'm part of the whole, then
there's just such a greater sense of ease about my day as opposed to thinking it's
up to me and I've got to fight the big bad world out there.
So for me, why surrender is powerful is because the aspect of a human being that is surrendering
is the fictitious extension or the facade.
So we can't really surrender our authentic self because our authentic self is already
there.
So for me, the process of spiritual evolution that is available to us as human beings is
to chip away everything that is not us.
So to me, that is the surrender process is to reveal my authentic inherent self that is
beneath that which is inherited or conditioned by virtue of the human experience.
The things that I'm told I am or more often the things I'm told I'm not.
You're not good enough.
You're not loved.
You're not wanted.
You're a failure.
So some form of negation that then we inherit on top of what is already innate, our freedom,
our love, our sense of peace, our sense of power.
So surrender is the reconciliation, the dissolution of that perceived identity which I call the
ego.
I surrender is so powerful and allows for that true intimacy with others because in
the absence of a facade, I now get to be fully in harmony with people and life around me.
The basis of a human beings identity looking at the programs of the subconscious mind
is fundamentally there's a sense of inadequacy, insecurity, scarcity.
These are sort of default settings.
As a result, a human being kind of has no choice but at some level to be self abusive.
This is why humans struggle to take compliments.
They'll brush them aside.
They'll make a joke.
They'll deny it because it doesn't resonate with the view that they have for themselves
at the deepest level.
But that view is just a view.
It's not a truth.
And so currently human beings is sort of designed to look at themselves through this self-deprecating
perspective.
The who I am fundamentally is somehow not enough.
As a baby, you don't have that perspective.
You're just being.
You're eating, you're pooping, you're sleeping.
The fact that you might throw up on your auntie's dress, it means nothing to you that it's
a goo-ji.
You're just fully self-expressed.
And there's a beauty in understanding the freedom that that child has, that baby has.
And at some point in the evolution of a human being in the arc of their life, there's
a distinct moment where you suddenly feel for the first time that just being me is no
longer enough.
Right?
It doesn't have to be a traumatic incident.
But something was said, something was witness that made us think as a human being that now
I have to do something beyond what I was previously doing.
I have to act and behave in a way that now is new to me in order to keep getting the
love and acceptance that is a human being we crave.
And from that moment, which is usually a very young age, we start to redefine who we are
and we start to manipulate our behavior because now we have this incessant desire to be loved
and accepted because fundamentally we don't feel we are just by being who we are.
And that to me starts the journey of suffering for a human being is that my inherent self
is somehow not sufficient for me to get the experience of true love that I seek.
If, I mean, it's just, it's logical, right?
Like if as a human being, I feel at the deepest level and it might not even be a conscious
thought because this is just part of these subconscious patterns, that if I believe that
who I am is somehow not enough, right?
Fill in the blank and not young enough, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not rich enough, I'm
not strong enough, I'm not smart enough, whatever it is.
But fundamentally, the who I am is somehow not enough.
Then it is only logical that I will develop compensation patterns and I will adapt to
that belief of inadequacy in order to try and get the love and acceptance that is a human
being I crave because I want to have a sense of belonging.
So that's sort of the cascade that occurs.
But as long as we're being driven by the belief in inadequacy, then it doesn't matter
what we do because the actual seed of our behavior is itself the suffering.
So it's not about how many people can we impress or how many followers can we get or
how many people can we manipulate to like us and love us because at the end of the day,
if we're still being driven by our own belief of inadequacy, then we're still going to be
in a state of suffering and disease.
So the real game of life to me is transcending our own sense of inadequacy, which is ultimately
self-love.
It is making space for the part of us that is our humanity that is founded in this design
of not being enough.
So true love is to be sufficiently large as a human being that I can allow that part of
me.
It's not about trying to win the favor of people around me to compensate for the love
that I don't have for myself.
Once we sort of hit that transition and we start to recognize for whatever reasons that
who we are fundamentally is no longer seen as enough, just being us, then we're going
to develop all sorts of adaptations to that.
The people please are the perfectionist.
These behavioral compensations are still the means by which we are trying to garner the
love that we feel we at some point lost.
Now it's such an exhausting way to live because as I said, it's futile because the
mechanism that's driving the behavior is itself the inadequacy.
So it doesn't matter how often you get acknowledged.
It doesn't matter how many fans you have, how many followers you have.
If the underlying experience of yourself is I'm somehow not something enough, loved,
wanted, then it's never going to reconcile that.
And so what happens is people become exhausted.
They become sick.
They become resigned.
They become apathetic.
They become cynical.
And now we start to unveil the litany of other ways that people seek kind of relief.
They're not getting relief from sufficient amount of love and acceptance.
So it starts to become a little bit disheartening.
And so people will turn to substances.
It might start with alcohol.
It could then lead into pot smoking, prescribed drugs.
And now we're into this really slippery, very insidious process of the initial feeling
of inadequacy that developed behavioral patterns to compensate, which themselves are exhausting
because they're inauthentic, that then don't garner the results that we ultimately want
because vibrationally they can't.
Because if who I see myself to be is not enough, then life has to constantly match that.
And now I'm leading into this world of self-medication to try and find relief from the very mechanism
that I'm oblivious to, which is my own creation.
And that is sickness, suffering and disease, which unfortunately is the current state of
affairs.
Of course, we want to have a sense of safety or security.
That's primal.
But in this realm of belonging and whether it be romantic, professional, personal, feeling
of love and acceptance, it's so primal because I feel it speaks to the underlying sense of
unity, whether it's conscious or not that we all experience, right?
The sense of oneness or belonging, it's such a powerful experience.
And that also falls under the auspices of love.
But if I think that I'm separate from the gang, now I believe that I have to do what
I have to do in order to fit into the gang.
So now I'm collapsing the external world with my source of love and acceptance.
So now I have to be a victim of circumstance, which is an exhausting way to live.
And it's also completely unreconcilable because if my experience is I'm separate and I'm
not something, in this case, love and accepted, then I'm going to do whatever I can in order
to get that.
But all I'm doing is reinforcing the belief that I'm not that.
So the irony is a real sense of belonging can only occur when I myself have experience
belonging of myself.
So the mirror of life that occurs is the degree to which I have love and acceptance of who
I am with all of my humanity, with all of my imperfections.
That is the precursor to then experiencing that with everybody else.
The irony is I no longer need it, right?
As long as we're looking for love from other people, what we're saying is I don't have
it, which is the lie.
And now I'm caught in this pretense where I feel that I need to fabricate some sort of
facade in order to win favor.
But as I said, that is just not only futile is exhausting versus if I can find that sense
of true inner peace and acceptance of who I am because I fully accept who I am, all aspects.
And regardless of where I go, regardless of who I'm in front of, I'm no longer trying
to impress or look good or get them to like me.
And that becomes, to me, the most beautiful place for a human being to live because I'm
no longer at the effect of my surroundings.
I'm no longer a victim of other people's beliefs about me.
We can say that the antithesis to surviving is thriving.
And what does that look like?
So in survival, we are even anatomically in our physiology.
We're being driven by the sympathetic nervous system, which is based in fight or flight
or freeze.
The antithesis of that would be the parasympathetic, which is based in rest and rejuvenate and digest.
And so thriving, we could say is when our system is not looking out for perceived threat or
feeling some sense of danger.
So we could in late term say, I'm totally at peace or I'm relaxed.
So what does thriving look like?
It looks like a human being who is in harmony with the way life is versus in conflict with
the way it is.
The insidious killers to me are these words that people use every day like, I should or
shouldn't.
I have to.
I must.
I need to.
These simple terms carry so much resistance and are in constant conflict with the way things
are.
I need to say that they shouldn't have done that or I should have done something is in
denial to the fact that that's not what happened.
And so now I'm saying that reality is not the way it should be, but that is a losing
fight.
That would literally be like me walking outside, pointing up to the sky and saying the sun
should be over there.
Like the audacity of thinking that I know how things should be, no one would have that
conversation because it doesn't even make sense.
We understand that the cycle of life and certainly mother nature is so powerful that
it's beyond our individual control.
But when we look at the whole of life, that includes not just the sun and the oceans and
the winds, but it also includes human beings and the way that things are.
And so for us to be able to find the similar sense of harmony with other people and the
way that life is unfolding as we would to recognize in the journey of the sun is where
we find peace because I'm no longer saying life should be different than the way it is.
So that to me is the precursor to living a much more thriving lifestyle because I'm
no longer in this fight or flight state where I'm constantly trying to control manipulate
my environment, which is really just the byproduct of me feeling uncomfortable in my own skin
and being under the impression that my happiness is the byproduct of me finalizing the way
circumstances should be according to my ego.
And that's just an exhausting way to live life.
So the absence of that was I like to say in one of my quotes that true happiness is the
absence of the search for happiness.
That's being really happy is I'm not looking for something to make me happy anymore because
I'm happy as is.
Now that's not to say that I can't still have goals and aspirations.
To me the most powerful way to live life is the absence of the search for happiness,
meaning I'm in harmony with the way things are, while still maintaining my commitment
to creating the extraordinary life that I want for myself.
But I'm no longer in conflict with life.
I'm in harmony with it.
And sometimes things go my way and sometimes they don't.
But either way I'm a piece with that and I remain committed.
Most people currently in this paradigm of survival are looking to experts or friends
or colleagues for solutions to problems, all of which is reinforcing the belief that somebody
has a problem.
One of the quotes I use is the only problem you have is believing that you have a problem.
Otherwise it's just circumstance.
And circumstance is just what it is.
I'm not saying it's ideal, I'm not saying it's something that you particularly want,
but it is nonetheless what it is.
The suffering is not in the circumstance itself or not in the bigger picture of life,
but rather in our response to it, our interaction with it, our perception of it.
And so that at least starts to give people the access to some freedom by realizing, oh,
wait a minute, my unrest, my dis-ease, my sense of suffering is not because of the way things
are, but rather how my brain is interpreting them as a potential threat, or as something
that I don't want.
And when we look at life through the lens of that's not the way I want it, well now you
have to be in a state of resistance.
In Hinduism or like in Vedanta, non-dualism, right?
So they say, you know, when you get a thorn in your side, you need a thorn to remove it,
but then you throw away both thorns, right?
So whatever is creating the suffering, oftentimes you need the same medium to deal with it,
but then discard both.
So yeah, the ego to me, it's a facade, it's a pretense, it's a way that we want to be
seen in the world.
And it's got its merits, right?
Like to a certain degree, we could argue that because somebody does a great job of presenting
themselves in a certain way, they may get a job, they may get a spouse or a partner,
they may attract a circumstance that they otherwise wouldn't have done.
Where it becomes slippery is, you know, the mask that we use in order to try and garner
acknowledgement, love and respect, is eventually the very barrier to getting the connection
and intimacy that we want with people.
Right?
So it's sort of comical when you really look at it, especially in relationships, right?
So we want to portray our greatest version of ourselves, this sort of our ambassador,
you know, on that first date, second, third date, we want to be the best we can be in
the way that we present, which is not wrong, it's very human.
But at some point that facade has to crumble because it's inauthentic.
And then, you know, we start to engage with somebody at a really real authentic level.
And that's when a lot of the conflict happens because it's like, well, who the hell are
you?
This isn't who I met.
Right?
So the irony for me is that the most beautiful relationships are when somebody is so comfortable
in their own skin that that is what they present is the true essence of who they are versus
the sort of fabricated airbrushed version of who I think I'm supposed to be, which now
is obviously the Norman social media platforms, right?
So it's, I get it, but it's a sad state of affairs when the world is now becoming more
focused on this airbrushed experience of ourselves.
So the means that we're using such as that, which is to create this incredible, fictitious
to a certain degree version of ourselves, the underlying intention is beautiful, right?
Because we really want to be loved and accepted.
Like one of the fundamental priorities of a human being is to feel like we belong.
And so we've realized, oh, okay, well, if I can present myself in a certain way, the
chances of me fitting into the gang called humanity is going to be enhanced.
But it's in denial of the fact that, no, my belonging is first of all inherent.
I can't not be part of the gang.
I'm a human.
I'm an aspect of life.
So now we're actually, what we're actually up against is our own perception that we don't
belong.
So it becomes a vicious cycle.
If the mechanism of me feeling inadequate, insecure, having some sense of scarcity, this
sort of this sense of I'm not enough somehow, that is the driving impetus for a behavioral
adaptation to try and present myself in a way in order to be accepted.
But I can't overcome the initial belief that I'm inadequate.
If that's the driving force, it's a true freedom, true intimacy, true connection with
people is not to be found by whether I get accepted by society, but rather to see there's
part of me that doesn't feel accepted and to embrace that.
So that is that ego that by design doesn't feel enough.
It doesn't feel loved.
It doesn't feel special or valued.
It doesn't feel powerful.
These are its inherent qualities.
Most people are being driven by that, so they develop these compensation patterns and
adaptations to feeling inadequate.
But that whole system becomes a very barrier to the thing that we're apparently looking
for, which is love and acceptance.
We're under the impression that love and acceptance we want is out there when in fact
true love and acceptance is of self, including the part of me that doesn't feel loved and
accepted.
So not only is it because of the way we're raised and we're sort of mimicking our role
models of mum and dad or who our rock hair givers are, so they're already embodied in
this world of separation and compensation patterns and trying to look good and fit in.
But I think the actual design of a human being as an individual body and mind gives rise
to the experience that I'm separate to everybody else.
I'm over here and then there's everybody else on the planet around me.
So it's so seductive that it's just the way it is, that I'm a separate entity doing
the best I can to survive on a planet where life is hard.
And then you have all of these speakers and teachers and gurus and telling you, you know,
it's up to you.
You've got to work harder.
You've got to do this.
And so all of these instructional motivational teachers are reinforcing the fact that you're
this individual and it's incumbent upon you to make your life work.
And I'm not saying that, you know, you can just sit around and do nothing and you're
going to have an extraordinary life.
But I think there's so much power to be discovered in reconciling the fact that I'm not a separate
individual.
I'm held by a much bigger force that is called life itself.
And to me, that garners this real sense of true surrender and a much greater sense of
real faith beyond religion, but faith and trust in the fact that life's got my back.
Yes, I have to be proactive in the way that I am seeking to create my life, but with an
underlying understanding that life knows what it's doing.
And I'm an aspect of that.
Like an individual wave on an ocean isn't worried about its role.
Like, oh, am I high enough or loud enough relative to the waves around me?
It's a byproduct of the whole.
And so for me, when we really start to tap into that as individuals, through the perspective
of I am an individual, but I'm held by the collective or I'm part of the whole, then
there's just such a greater sense of ease about my day as opposed to thinking it's
up to me and I've got to fight the big bad world out there.
So for me, why surrender is powerful is because the aspect of a human being that is surrendering
is the fictitious extension or the facade.
So we can't really surrender our authentic self because our authentic self is already
there.
So for me, the process of spiritual evolution that is available to us as human beings is
to chip away everything that is not us.
So to me, that is the surrender process is to reveal my authentic inherent self that is
beneath that which is inherited or conditioned by virtue of the human experience.
The things that I'm told I am or more often the things I'm told I'm not.
You're not good enough.
You're not loved.
You're not wanted.
You're a failure.
So some form of negation that then we inherit on top of what is already innate, our freedom,
our love, our sense of peace, our sense of power.
So surrender is the reconciliation, the dissolution of that perceived identity which I call the
ego.
I surrender is so powerful and allows for that true intimacy with others because in
the absence of a facade, I now get to be fully in harmony with people and life around me.
The basis of a human beings identity looking at the programs of the subconscious mind
is fundamentally there's a sense of inadequacy, insecurity, scarcity.
These are sort of default settings.
As a result, a human being kind of has no choice but at some level to be self abusive.
This is why humans struggle to take compliments.
They'll brush them aside.
They'll make a joke.
They'll deny it because it doesn't resonate with the view that they have for themselves
at the deepest level.
But that view is just a view.
It's not a truth.
And so currently human beings is sort of designed to look at themselves through this self-deprecating
perspective.
The who I am fundamentally is somehow not enough.
As a baby, you don't have that perspective.
You're just being.
You're eating, you're pooping, you're sleeping.
The fact that you might throw up on your auntie's dress, it means nothing to you that it's
a goo-ji.
You're just fully self-expressed.
And there's a beauty in understanding the freedom that that child has, that baby has.
And at some point in the evolution of a human being in the arc of their life, there's
a distinct moment where you suddenly feel for the first time that just being me is no
longer enough.
Right?
It doesn't have to be a traumatic incident.
But something was said, something was witness that made us think as a human being that now
I have to do something beyond what I was previously doing.
I have to act and behave in a way that now is new to me in order to keep getting the
love and acceptance that is a human being we crave.
And from that moment, which is usually a very young age, we start to redefine who we are
and we start to manipulate our behavior because now we have this incessant desire to be loved
and accepted because fundamentally we don't feel we are just by being who we are.
And that to me starts the journey of suffering for a human being is that my inherent self
is somehow not sufficient for me to get the experience of true love that I seek.
If, I mean, it's just, it's logical, right?
Like if as a human being, I feel at the deepest level and it might not even be a conscious
thought because this is just part of these subconscious patterns, that if I believe that
who I am is somehow not enough, right?
Fill in the blank and not young enough, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not rich enough, I'm
not strong enough, I'm not smart enough, whatever it is.
But fundamentally, the who I am is somehow not enough.
Then it is only logical that I will develop compensation patterns and I will adapt to
that belief of inadequacy in order to try and get the love and acceptance that is a human
being I crave because I want to have a sense of belonging.
So that's sort of the cascade that occurs.
But as long as we're being driven by the belief in inadequacy, then it doesn't matter
what we do because the actual seed of our behavior is itself the suffering.
So it's not about how many people can we impress or how many followers can we get or
how many people can we manipulate to like us and love us because at the end of the day,
if we're still being driven by our own belief of inadequacy, then we're still going to be
in a state of suffering and disease.
So the real game of life to me is transcending our own sense of inadequacy, which is ultimately
self-love.
It is making space for the part of us that is our humanity that is founded in this design
of not being enough.
So true love is to be sufficiently large as a human being that I can allow that part of
me.
It's not about trying to win the favor of people around me to compensate for the love
that I don't have for myself.
Once we sort of hit that transition and we start to recognize for whatever reasons that
who we are fundamentally is no longer seen as enough, just being us, then we're going
to develop all sorts of adaptations to that.
The people please are the perfectionist.
These behavioral compensations are still the means by which we are trying to garner the
love that we feel we at some point lost.
Now it's such an exhausting way to live because as I said, it's futile because the
mechanism that's driving the behavior is itself the inadequacy.
So it doesn't matter how often you get acknowledged.
It doesn't matter how many fans you have, how many followers you have.
If the underlying experience of yourself is I'm somehow not something enough, loved,
wanted, then it's never going to reconcile that.
And so what happens is people become exhausted.
They become sick.
They become resigned.
They become apathetic.
They become cynical.
And now we start to unveil the litany of other ways that people seek kind of relief.
They're not getting relief from sufficient amount of love and acceptance.
So it starts to become a little bit disheartening.
And so people will turn to substances.
It might start with alcohol.
It could then lead into pot smoking, prescribed drugs.
And now we're into this really slippery, very insidious process of the initial feeling
of inadequacy that developed behavioral patterns to compensate, which themselves are exhausting
because they're inauthentic, that then don't garner the results that we ultimately want
because vibrationally they can't.
Because if who I see myself to be is not enough, then life has to constantly match that.
And now I'm leading into this world of self-medication to try and find relief from the very mechanism
that I'm oblivious to, which is my own creation.
And that is sickness, suffering and disease, which unfortunately is the current state of
affairs.
Of course, we want to have a sense of safety or security.
That's primal.
But in this realm of belonging and whether it be romantic, professional, personal, feeling
of love and acceptance, it's so primal because I feel it speaks to the underlying sense of
unity, whether it's conscious or not that we all experience, right?
The sense of oneness or belonging, it's such a powerful experience.
And that also falls under the auspices of love.
But if I think that I'm separate from the gang, now I believe that I have to do what
I have to do in order to fit into the gang.
So now I'm collapsing the external world with my source of love and acceptance.
So now I have to be a victim of circumstance, which is an exhausting way to live.
And it's also completely unreconcilable because if my experience is I'm separate and I'm
not something, in this case, love and accepted, then I'm going to do whatever I can in order
to get that.
But all I'm doing is reinforcing the belief that I'm not that.
So the irony is a real sense of belonging can only occur when I myself have experience
belonging of myself.
So the mirror of life that occurs is the degree to which I have love and acceptance of who
I am with all of my humanity, with all of my imperfections.
That is the precursor to then experiencing that with everybody else.
The irony is I no longer need it, right?
As long as we're looking for love from other people, what we're saying is I don't have
it, which is the lie.
And now I'm caught in this pretense where I feel that I need to fabricate some sort of
facade in order to win favor.
But as I said, that is just not only futile is exhausting versus if I can find that sense
of true inner peace and acceptance of who I am because I fully accept who I am, all aspects.
And regardless of where I go, regardless of who I'm in front of, I'm no longer trying
to impress or look good or get them to like me.
And that becomes, to me, the most beautiful place for a human being to live because I'm
no longer at the effect of my surroundings.
I'm no longer a victim of other people's beliefs about me.
We can say that the antithesis to surviving is thriving.
And what does that look like?
So in survival, we are even anatomically in our physiology.
We're being driven by the sympathetic nervous system, which is based in fight or flight
or freeze.
The antithesis of that would be the parasympathetic, which is based in rest and rejuvenate and digest.
And so thriving, we could say is when our system is not looking out for perceived threat or
feeling some sense of danger.
So we could in late term say, I'm totally at peace or I'm relaxed.
So what does thriving look like?
It looks like a human being who is in harmony with the way life is versus in conflict with
the way it is.
The insidious killers to me are these words that people use every day like, I should or
shouldn't.
I have to.
I must.
I need to.
These simple terms carry so much resistance and are in constant conflict with the way things
are.
I need to say that they shouldn't have done that or I should have done something is in
denial to the fact that that's not what happened.
And so now I'm saying that reality is not the way it should be, but that is a losing
fight.
That would literally be like me walking outside, pointing up to the sky and saying the sun
should be over there.
Like the audacity of thinking that I know how things should be, no one would have that
conversation because it doesn't even make sense.
We understand that the cycle of life and certainly mother nature is so powerful that
it's beyond our individual control.
But when we look at the whole of life, that includes not just the sun and the oceans and
the winds, but it also includes human beings and the way that things are.
And so for us to be able to find the similar sense of harmony with other people and the
way that life is unfolding as we would to recognize in the journey of the sun is where
we find peace because I'm no longer saying life should be different than the way it is.
So that to me is the precursor to living a much more thriving lifestyle because I'm
no longer in this fight or flight state where I'm constantly trying to control manipulate
my environment, which is really just the byproduct of me feeling uncomfortable in my own skin
and being under the impression that my happiness is the byproduct of me finalizing the way
circumstances should be according to my ego.
And that's just an exhausting way to live life.
So the absence of that was I like to say in one of my quotes that true happiness is the
absence of the search for happiness.
That's being really happy is I'm not looking for something to make me happy anymore because
I'm happy as is.
Now that's not to say that I can't still have goals and aspirations.
To me the most powerful way to live life is the absence of the search for happiness,
meaning I'm in harmony with the way things are, while still maintaining my commitment
to creating the extraordinary life that I want for myself.
But I'm no longer in conflict with life.
I'm in harmony with it.
And sometimes things go my way and sometimes they don't.
But either way I'm a piece with that and I remain committed.
