Someone once said, “You shall know the truth and it will piss you off.” One of the truths that most of us eventually come to the realization of is that our parents did the best they could based on their level of awareness and exposure. When most of us come to this realization and see the need for reparenting, we are busy with our own kids and being adults. We become like our parents, victims of victims perpetuating the circle of dysfunction and trauma. As American Swiss Psychoanalyst Carl Jung once observed “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it would direct your life and you would call it fate.” We live below the veil of consciousness as a result of our indoctrination, domestication, programming, and script handed to us by our caregivers, parents, and society. If you don’t reparent yourself, you will constantly blame your parents for messing you up and you might not be fully present to care for your own kids too and the circle continues perpetually.
‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.’ – James Campbell
No matter what it is you are dealing with right now, it is going to pass, and you are going to be okay. It might not feel like that now, but your potential is enough to get you through any situation or circumstance. Unlocking your potential will require stretching, embracing the discomfort and playing the long game. You can’t know your potential until you step outside your Comfort Zone. All we need to crack any situation is in us; we need to stay in the moment and dig deep to find solutions to our problems. Nothing lasts forever; everything is transient, constantly changing, and impermanent.
There is no one like you, and you are beautiful and made to deal with any situation trusted upon you. You are here to unleash your greatness, unlock your potential and become the best version of yourself. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Your greatest achievement in life is to unlock your potential and become what you are meant to be. As the saying goes, GOD’s gift to us is our potential, and what we do with that potential is our gift back to him. It is never too late to be who you might have become, you are never too young to learn, never too old to change. You are specially and uniquely made to unlock your potential by solving the puzzles of life that come in the form of trials, pain, suffering and heartbreak. Our happiness is ultimately derived from recycling our pain and suffering with purpose.
American poet Maya Angelou once remarked: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.” We all complain, and we complain more than we think. When we complain, we believe it is justified, but when others do complain, we can see it clearly, and we often tell them to stop nagging. Founder of the Complaint Free movement and the author of A Complaint Free World, Will Bowen, observed, “Complaining is like bad breath. We notice it when it comes out of someone else’s mouth, but not when it comes out of our own.” Sometimes, we complain to make sense of the situation; it can be therapeutic or cathartic. Complain if you have to, but do something about what you are complaining about. If it is something within your locus of control, do something about what you are complaining about and it is not within your locus of control, like the weather, consider it a fact of life. The Best Way to Complain is to Make Things.
“Appreciate life. Never complain. Work hard and do your best.”
Whatever will go wrong will eventually go wrong (Murphy’s Law). When things go wrong like they ultimately do, the easiest thing to do is to complain, nag and moan about the situation. Knowing the difference between a fact of life (changing seasons) and life situation is critical in navigating the roller coaster called life. No one has a problem-free life; if it is not this, then it is that. Nothing lasts forever,s and everything is in transition, the key is to understand the season of life you are in and understand the lesson every situation is trying to teach you.
This is not a drill; there are no do-overs; once it is done, it is done. Most of us sleepwalk through life; we spend our limited time engaging in things and people that are not and will not take us closer to our ultimate purpose. We spend half of our walking hours in situations we don’t necessarily like; we delay living, operating on autopilot and in a trance of low-level thinking. As Henry David Thoreau observed in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city, you go into the desperate country and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
We spend our youth pursuing wealth, and we eventually spend the wealth on our health in old age. Our slumber makes us falsely think money would solve our issues and problems. Money is like alcohol; it only brings out what is already there. Austrian neurologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl asserted:
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
Life is over so quickly. It is possible to reach the end with no regrets. It takes some bravery to live it right, to honour the life you are here to live but the choice is yours. So will be the rewards. Appreciate the time you have left by valuing all of the gifts in your life and that includes especially, your own, amazing self.
Australian palliative caregiver Bronnie Ware in her book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. 1 the 5 top Regrets of the Dying are:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. 3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. 4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
The regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common one of all. It was also the one that caused the most frustration, as the client’s realisation came too late. They say though that we do more to avoid pain than we do to gain pleasure. So it is when the pain becomes too much that we finally find the courage to make changes. Until then, the pain within me was just continuing to fester until it did reach a breaking point.
The majority of us are the same, in that we just want to be happy. And on some level, we all have hearts that suffer.
We are all fairly malleable, bendable creatures really. While we have the choice to think for ourselves and have free will to live the way our hearts guide us, our environment has a huge effect on us all, particularly until we start choosing life from a more conscious perspective.
According to Ware, the number one regret we might probably have is wishing that we lived life on our terms. We wish we had woken up earlier from our slumber, stopped living in autopilot, come out of the trance, and lived our lives based on what we really want to do here on earth. As the saying goes: “In your 20s, you cared what everyone says about you, in your 40s, you stopped caring; and in your 60s, you realized that no one was really thinking about you.” For most of us, we would come to the realization that the people we are trying to impress are really not thinking about us. When you wake up from your slumber, the cat realizes that he is a lion, the chicken realizes that he is an eagle and the human realizes that he has limitless capabilities.
Running on autopilot 2 is a function of our conditioning. Most of us are stuck in subconscious programming; in fact, some brain scans reveal that we operate only 5 percent of the day in a conscious state; the rest of the time, we are on subconscious autopilot. This means that we are making active choices during only a small sliver of our days and letting our subconscious run the show the rest of the time.
When we’re running on autopilot, a primitive, or subconscious, part of our mind drives our reactions. Astonishingly, our subconscious stores every single experience we ever have. This however isn’t just a neutral storehouse for facts and figures; it’s emotional, reactive, and irrational. Every moment of every day, this subconscious mind is shaping the way we see the world; it is the primary driver of most of our (often automatic) behaviors.
Meditations
Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – The Waiting Game.
The gift of unexpected downtime – we live in a world that makes it almost impossible to stop and catch our breath. It is vital that we discover moments of calm wherever we can find them.
Ponder your day, contemplate your life and ask yourself if you are living up to your deepest values and beliefs.
‘When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start. – Thomas L. Friedman
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Take a Break.
With our society’s focus on productivity, lots of us think that we don’t have time to spare. Studies show that short breaks are essential to our well-being; they can improve our attention and decision-making. They can also help us recover from work-related stress and burnout.
The three Ws: Walk, Water and Window to the outside.
Podcast
Jada Pinkett Smith OPENS UP On Her Marriage & Struggling With Dark Thoughts – Jay Shetty Podcast
In 2022, I joined a running club to reduce my marathon finish time. The Toronto Running Rats run every Tuesday evening in downtown Toronto, and I ran consistently with the club for the next couple of months. The running club had a diverse group with different running goals and experiences. One of the most important things the club did for me was seeing what was possible with my running; there were multiple Boston Marathon runners in the club, runners running sub-3-hour marathons and have been running for a long time. Running with the club weekly allowed me to run with people on another level, a mastermind of like minds. I used the runs to train for the six marathons I ran in 2022 and set myself up for my 2023 goal of running across the Canadian provinces.
It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission – Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper
If you want to give yourself any chance of achieving any of your wildest dreams, don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness because asking for permission is waiting to be told NO. Most of your big dreams and visions in life are going to look scary, risky, and even dangerous. Well-meaning family and friends are going to tell you the odds of achieving your goal, the impossibility of the task, why it won’t work, and if it were possible, someone else would have tried it, etc If you really want to get your dreams achieved, you need to first set out a vision, believe it can be done, relentlessly take action to achieve your dreams and keep showing up daily.
“When you take charge of your life, there is no longer need to ask permission of other people or society at large. When you ask permission you give someone veto power over your life.” – Albert F. Geoffrey
We get what we tolerate in life, as we cannot rise above what we firmly believe we deserve. Your fear of being alone has got you stuck in toxic relationships, draining situations, addicted to the familiar and enabling bad behaviour from the closest people around you. Our relationships can make or mar us; they can take you to the next level and send you to rock bottom. Your inability to set healthy boundaries, people-pleasing, and accepting everything done to you, all in the name of maintaining peace, could lead to unintended consequences. As the African proverb goes, “If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do us no harm”. When you know your worth and realize that you deserve better, you begin to set healthy boundaries and optimize for peace of mind.
You deserve better than baby-seating adults, entering co-dependent relationships and giving your power away to others. You are here on earth to create epic shit, and allowing others to drain your limited energy is not worth it in the long run. Homeostasis is our natural human self-regulating tendency to maintain stability, the status quo and optimize for survival. American businessman and author John A. Shedd once quipped, “A ship in a harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for“. Happiness in life is derived from energy management, optimizing your frequencies, wavelength, amplitude and peace. If someone or something stops serving your ultimate purpose, the ideal thing to do is to renegotiate and recalibrate the mode of engagement.
A good example is how we collectively use social media as a civilization. Social media and the internet are two of the best innovations created in the past four decades; they have enabled us to communicate seamlessly, fast-tracked globalization, and enhanced lifelong learning. But the same technologies are beginning to divide our civilization as we are less kinder and less empathetic towards one another, the depression rate is going off the roof, perfectionism and self-comparison are the order of the day. We know deep inside that these technologies are not serving our ultimate life’s purpose, but we hang on to these platforms as our source of living is tied to them. I agree with American writer and political activist Upton Sinclair, who asserted, ‘ It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’
‘ It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ – Upton Sinclair
Meditate on your engagement with the relationship or thing if it stops serving you. Your life’s essence is not to perform for other people on social media, living a role that is predicated on other people’s perceptions. You deserve better; you deserve to know your purpose here in life and find a way to be of service to the world around you. You are here for a limited amount of time; this is not a drill, and there are no do-overs or second chances. You are here to do remarkable things, and engaging with things that are not getting you closer to your core purpose in life is not a good use of your limited time here. The question you should be asking your self as regards andy relationship or associations is, “What am I becoming”?
When you find yourself in a one-way relationship, this is a direct repetition of the toxic family that raised you. Notice what is happening, keep some notes so you can be sure, and start creating distance between yourself and the person you feel may be using you. Remind yourself that you deserve better. If you are alone, change your mindset to the idea that you are not by yourself but with yourself. When you can enjoy your own companionship, you become less dependent on relationships as the only satisfying way to fill your cup.
Heal fears of being alone, which provoke you to conform and stay in unhealthy relationships.
Meditation
Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Samvega
Mindfulness practice is marred by a slow and at times, unnoticeable progress. With headway so gradual, we sometimes go through a process of frustration, low motivation and lacklustre motivation.
Samvega, the pali word, refers to the stark realization of the importance of practice since death can happen at any moment. Samvega is not meant to scare us but to wake us up to life’s preciousness so we can commit to the essential things that support us in living meaningfully. We have a tendency not to think of our impermanence, as the idea of death can be very uncomfortable, but we are here in this life for a limited time, and that can be a powerful motivator to drive our practice.
Meditation is about being present and experiencing life more fully and, therefore, is a wise pursuit when faced with the limited nature of this life. We may think that a good life means accomplishing a lot, but from a view of mindfulness, a good life is experienced fully with an open heart regardless of one’s accomplishments.
Nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift. — Steven Pinker.
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Measuring Success
We define success by status or material objects or how far off a specific ladder we’ve happened to climb. We can measure achievement any way we want; we each get to say what makes us well off, and we each get to decide what hashtag winning means.
Podcast
Manifest Your Desires: How to Align Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams – Ed Mylett Podcast
Sometimes you are up, and other times you are down; sometimes you want to be cheerful, but the only emotion you can muster is sorrow. We all experience the bittersweet experience of life: death gives way to a newborn, pain and sorrow, laughter and tears, pain and gain, struggle and ease. Life is full of trials and tribulations; it is not a matter of if the hard times will come; it is about radically accepting whatever happens and learning from the experience. Do not get too high or too low; don’t let success get to your head and don’t let failure get to your heart. As author and motivational speaker Les Brown often said “Life is a fight for territory, and once you stop fighting for what you want, what you don’t want will automatically take over.“
I have averaged two to three hours of exercise daily in the past two years. My exercise routine includes Basketball shooting, swimming, weight lifting, running, cycling, pickleball, lawn tennis, and badminton. It is one of the most consistent things I have done in the past couple of months, and I consider it very gratifying and joy-inducing. The benefits of exercising can not be over-emphasized from producing dopamine, aiding the aging process, and helping sustain a positive mood, sleep, energy and cognition. Exercise has been very therapeutic for me, and it has helped me deal with the dark days.
Life is full of twists and turns, ups and downs, bittersweet experiences and suffering. Whatever would go wrong would eventually go wrong (Murphy’s law); the key to living a meaningful life is to learn to suffer mindfully. As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” “If it’s to be, it’s up to me” means taking responsibility for your life, accepting the things you can control and living your life on your terms. If you want to get anything done in life, it is up to you to find the resources, associations, connections and beliefs to get it done. No one is coming to the rescue; you are all you need, your potential is enough, and you are worthy and capable of achieving anything you set your mind to attain.
“The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself. Quit waiting to get picked; quit waiting for someone to give you permission; quit waiting for someone to say you are officially qualified… and pick yourself” – Seth Godin
If you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree. – Jim Rohn
It is never too late to go in a new direction; you are not a tree; you are here to make epic shit. As French author and Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once quipped, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” If you don’t like your present situation, move! Change can be extremely tough, but nothing moves until you move. If you do what you have always done, you will continuously get the same result. If you want a different result in your life, you have to do something different. As Newton’s First Law of Motion states, “A body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force.”
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Do not forget who you are; most of us forget our true essence and purpose in life due to the challenges, vicissitudes, trials and tribulations that we all have to deal with as a result of being human. It all started in childhood when we were indoctrinated with self-limiting beliefs, domesticated like wild animals, and programmed with our caregivers’ and parents’ projections and fears. You were told you could not do that; money is the root of all evil; people like us cannot attain that level of success. You need to know your place in this world and take care, among other well-meaning but self-limiting beliefs.
Achieving any worthwhile dream requires setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound goals. Goals are essential, but even more important are the systems and habits that make them easier to achieve. As Greek philosopher Aristotle once quipped, “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence is then not an act but a habit.” Your system makes staying consistent and showing up daily easier. As we all know, setting New Year resolutions doesn’t usually work, as most of us don’t follow through. Discipline is staying consistent with your goals even when the motivation has waned out; it is doing things that you necessarily don’t feel like doing. By focusing on the right systems, achieving your goals would be far more manageable. The beginning of any journey is usually smooth; the middle is messy, and attaining the goal is gratifying.
Systems for achieving your goal could come in different forms, such as time scheduling, batching, habit stacking, community goal setting, and using an accountability partner, among other strategies. Here are some ways I have been using these systems to achieve some of my goals.
Our relationships determine the direction and how far we go in life. At the root of all our issues is how we manage our relationships with other humans, situations and things. We stay in toxic/abusive relationships that are not helping us fulfil our purpose because it is all we have ever known, the familiar, which is the root of family. Family should always be there for you. Right? But the reality of life is that your so-called family might switch up on you at some point. They accuse you of changing, feeling superior, and becoming condescending and arrogant. Your family is not necessarily a bloodline; it is how people treat you during the hard times that shows who your true family and friends are. As the saying goes, we know our friends during adversity, and our friends know us during prosperity.
Most of us stay in toxic relationships due to our trauma/misplaced sympathetic bond with our abusers because they are familiar, and as humans, we move towards the path of least resistance. We are scared of being alone; hence, we people-please, live our lives on autopilot, not rocking the boat. It is better to be alone and healthy than among dysfunctional, unhealthy humans abusing us emotionally, psychologically and otherwise. It is tough leaving toxic relationships as the chemical imbalance and trauma bond make us stuck with our abuser. Still, by educating yourself about these unhealthy relationship dynamics, you can free yourself from these bonds.
Life is going to happen to all of us at some point, it is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when. You are either going through a storm, coming from a storm, or heading to a storm. As British writer Vivian Greene once quipped “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to end, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” We all have a choice when these storms of life come whether to be better or stay bitter, learn the lessons or let the situation lessen us, get the message, or stay stuck in the mess. Post Traumatic Growth is the change that occurs in us after we go through these storms of life. It is the transformation that happens in us after going through a painful period.
It is the lesson and the resiliency we exhibit when the vicissitudes and challenges come visiting. We become transformed when we see every trial and tribulation in life as a learning opportunity, an opportunity for a rebirth, restart, or reinvent ourselves. It is the story that we tell ourselves when we are going through this pain that shapes the course of our lives. It is growth that comes after a painful divorce, getting laid off, having a miscarriage, losing a parent, or having a health scare. It is the growth you experience after pushing yourself to the extreme or finishing a marathon. As the saying goes “No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.” By recycling our pain, we get transformed and it is that transformation that leads us to our purpose in life.
