What I have learned about how to live a joyful, connected, fufilling life.
How you feel is paramount.
Making the choices that lead you to feel happy, connected and fulfilled is absolutely critical.
Everything that you want in life flows from there. Here’s why:
You are not crazy, broken or wrong.
You are simply human.
You are not hard wired to suffer.
You simply carry two competing impulses that, unmanaged, can create great suffering.
On a survival level, you resist change and have an urge to protect.
On an evolutionary level, you yearn for expansion with an urge to connect.
We all do. We yearn for connection and we protect ourselves from the pain it might bring.
Until you understand this, your entire being pushes you to maintain control. What you are controlling is how much pain you let yourself feel. As Brene Brown points out, you can’t selectively numb. When you avoid feeling the pain and you also lose the joy.
There's a deep, collective yearning to get more real.
Doing that means unwinding these old patterns and allowing ourselves to take more emotional risks. Taking the risk to open up and get real leads to the true freedom of feeling everything deeply, including feeling joyful.
True freedom is being willing to feel it all. To be fully alive, to take chances, to connect, to laugh and to love.
The thing is, the protection is happening at an unconscious level where you can’t just consciously decide to change, and have that happen. Your built-in resistance to taking those risks is a primal part of your being and the closer you get to challenging those primal patterns, the stronger that resistance will be.
This does not mean that you have to remain hostage to your protective urges. You can soften and release that resistance.
I have learned how to consciously soothe my inherent urge to protect, and support my desire to be real, live fully and connect authentically.
You can too.
This is our place of true power, deepest joy, greatest fulfillment AND delightful effectiveness.
It turned out that what I had lost, in my trip through my own depression, was myself and the things I most loved. My decision to follow what felt good and deeply mattered to me, regardless of how that “looked,” was what brought me back to myself. What it took to let go of “how it looked” (i.e. what other people thought and my negative thoughts about myself) and how I did that is the subject of my work in the world.
I’d love to share what I've learned about what it takes to let go of “how it looks” (i.e. judgment, self and otherwise). It’s an ongoing process and how I have done that, and continue to do that myself is the subject of my e-book, Just Who Is In Charge Here, Anyway? It’s free, and will come right to your inbox when you register to download it (above, right).