Tag: ownyourlife

  • Are you sure you’re not enough?

    Are you sure you’re not enough?

    I often see people needing to remind themselves that they’re enough.

    Some even print out posters proclaiming “I am enough” and place it on their fridge or at their workplace, or on their mirror.

    Enough for what? For whom? In what? To achieve what?

    We have to convince ourselves that we’re not good enough before anyone can make us feel that way.

    When you focus on whether you’re enough, you lose sight of the fact that you’re literally reducing the entirety of who you are to what you think is enough about you in only one domain of your life.

    That’s usually in our social spaces.

    That’s how we become defined by what we think others think of us, or what we think of ourselves through our self-criticism.

    You are enough of whatever you choose to be, but first you need to see yourself clearly.

    See yourself realistically, not through rose coloured spectacles, or affirmations of things you know is not true but want must be true.

    The problem to solve is not to be enough, it’s to understand what you’re doing that may be counter productive to who you want to be or what you want to achieve.

    Start there. Start by observing the effectiveness of your approach, your effort, your strategy, etc.

    Then do something about those parts that are not as effective as they need to be.

    Now you’re solving the right problems.

    Being enough was always just a distraction.

    Own your life.

  • A bitter end

    A bitter end

    Holding on to bitterness for a past betrayal is like drinking poison and hoping that your betrayer will die.

    Bitterness eats away at your peace while you hope that the intensity of your bitterness will somehow influence the karma of the person who treated you poorly.

    If you had that much power, you’d have been able to enforce  justice with them already.

    The longer you hold on to the bitterness, the more harm you cause for yourself more than any harm that they may have imposed on you.

    When you fixate on your reasons to feel bitter, you prevent yourself from considering whether your assumptions about their intentions or motives are true.

    You also prevent yourself from seeing the impact of your bitterness on those around you who had nothing to do with that betrayal or hurt caused by someone else.

    Sometimes people betray trust because their own fears are stronger than their convictions, and not necessarily because they deliberately wanted to use or hurt you.

    Anger in the face of betrayal, even hurt, is understandable.

    But just because it is understandable doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

    Own how you feel.

    Understand what you can do to handle such situations better in future.

    Move on.

    Life awaits.

  • Dreamer or doer?

    Dreamer or doer?

    The absence of balance is stress. Emotional duress. Lack of joy. And so much more.

    The fear of not having, not coping, not achieving, or not thriving is what drives most people to exert themselves in what they think is a good effort towards a fulfilling life.

    Unfortunately, fear never inspires sustainable outcomes.

    The craziness about fear as a motivator is that it simply pushes us to do what we we’re already capable of doing.

    Think about it.

    Fear never creates ability or competence. It only gives us reason to act on the ability and competence we already possess.

    But it’s not what you think ability and competence looks like.

    The only true ability that matters is our ability to figure things out, followed by our courage to act on what we’ve figured out.

    Fear is what gets in the way of acting on what we know or believe to be true or what is needed.

    Understand your fears and you’ll find balance.

    React to your fears and you’ll either be a dreamer or a doer, but you will struggle to find peace or harmony, or even fulfilment in anything that you achieve.


  • Home, is a feeling

    Home, is a feeling

    I was never convinced that home is a place. It’s a feeling.

    I say this because I’ve had many places to call my own, but none of them felt like home.

    I’ve had many places that felt homely, most often when visiting the homes of others, but none that felt like my home.

    Home, in my mind, became that larger than life aspirational goal that continues to fuel everything that I do.

    It’s a vision and a dream, a goal and a purpose.

    But never having truly connected with it, it is an idea, the closest to which I’ve come having been the intense belief that I was created for a place other than this.

    Thus, I adopted the pace and purpose of a traveller, never looking for roots but always feeling grounded.

    The same is true for concepts like peace and feeling safe.

    All nice ideas and beautiful imagery but lacking in substance.

    Born restless. Living restlessly. Hopefully to die peacefully.

    Fully spent. Without a single ounce of energy to spare, or regrets to lament.

    Just a peaceful conclusion to the best effort that I was capable of.

    Perhaps in that lies the promise of all three. Safe, peaceful, and homely at the moment of reaching my final destination.

    Exhale.

  • Are you owning it?

    Are you owning it?

    This is a painful truth for many.

    One of the most prominent trends in people’s lives when things go wrong, is that they surround themselves with those who make them feel better about where they’re at, rather than those who push them to step up and own their life.

    You won’t ever grow beyond your current challenges if you constantly have people telling you how brave you are for living with it.

    Cherish those who hold you to a higher standard, not those who pacify you when you’re wrong.

    Of the rarest of creation, I believe, must be the sincere advisor.

    Too many offer advice because they think it’s good advice and not because they genuinely understand or are invested in supporting or uplifting the one who is experiencing difficulties.

    Such advisors regurgitate advice that worked for them, meaning well, but not realising that they’re making it about them rather than focusing on what you’re grappling with.

    If you find a sincere and credible advisor (emphasis on credible), cherish them, because their commitment is to your upliftment, and not to their own ego.

  • The path to peace is gratitude

    The path to peace is gratitude

    The path to peace, internal peace, is to see yourself clearly through the muck and the mire of the world around you.

    Peace is found in being true to who you are in the midst of a maddening crowd.

    It’s found in knowing that we can only ever choose how we respond to life, and learn from the effectiveness of those choices each time that we are required to make them.

    Peace is found in being content with what we understand to be the reasons for our poorly informed decisions so that we can learn from it, rather than shackle ourselves to our past because of it.

    Peace is found in not creating fragments of ourselves in different carefully hidden spaces of our shame or our sadness, but seeing it as intricate parts of who we are in our entirety.

    Peace is found in resisting the labels and the judgements as defining attributes of our being, but rather using those as input into informing the paths that we choose to follow in our journey of figuring out how life works.

    Peace is found in building on what holds goodness rather than berating ourselves or others in what resulted from poorly informed decisions.

    When we live life towards honouring the life that we have rather than lamenting the life that we don’t have, we find gratitude.

    And gratitude is the antidote for every illness of the heart, and every ache of the soul.

    Gratitude and accountability are roommates, and anger is the unscrupulous landlord that evicts both.

  • Feeling triggered?

    Feeling triggered?

    ⚠️ Trigger warning ⚠️ archive post.

    Blaming chemicals for your emotional state is like blaming the overflowing rivers for the rain.

    Smile, and you generate feel good hormones even if you don’t have a good reason to smile.

    That’s science, not conjecture. If you don’t believe me, Google the science of a smile. And while you’re at it, Google neuroplasticity to see how your brain REACTS to new information and experiences, and does not create those perspectives.

    Don’t dehumanise the human experience by labelling it as an illness.

    Take back your agency by understanding why you may feel the way that you do.

    Stop judging yourself or others harshly for being human.

    I wish we’d realise that by defining the human experience as an illness, we effectively dehumanise the human experiencing it.

    Think about that the next time you convince yourself or others that their reasons for experiencing an intensity of emotions is due to chemicals and not because their life experiences and perspectives warrant such a reaction.

    It’s time to start understanding, instead of judging harshly, or abdicating responsibility for who we are.

    Every emotional experience has a legitimate basis within the context of our life.

    Whether we’re correct or incorrect about why we feel that way doesn’t change the fact that we, in our mind, have reason to feel that way.

    Understand that, connect the dots to your experiences, and suddenly an overwhelming emotion becomes a source of information to work with rather than to fear or to suppress it.

    Own your life before it owns you.



  • Stop looking in that mirror

    Stop looking in that mirror

    We rarely look in the mirror to see ourselves.

    Most often, we look to see what we think others see when they look at us.

    This focus on how we appear distracts us from who we want to be.

    Reflection on the events of our lives that have shaped our expectations and aspirations don’t happen while looking in the mirror.

    At best, the mirror offers a frame within which to judge ourselves, both kindly or harshly.

    But that we need the mirror to judge remains true.

    We change the course of life when we focus on the effectiveness and wisdom that informs our actions.

    Those are most clearly seen through our honest observation of the impact we have versus the impact we hoped to have.

    Falling short of our aspirations is a reason to recalibrate our efforts and methods, never a reason to judge ourselves into giving up.

    Look in the mirror only for as long as is needed to remember who you are.

    Any longer, and you’ll lose yourself to who you want others see when they look at you.

    Or worse, you’ll see yourself through the eyes of those who don’t understand you.

    Stop looking in that mirror and embrace your life.