I can do whatever I want but I know that there’s only one path to seemingly illusive happiness and that is... drumroll... by being myself.
How do I know who I truly am? Let’s start with who I am not as I'm painfully realising myself. I am not the construct of my mind, the version of who I think I am. That one, the one I think I am, is just a creation of my mind through conditioning since my first day on this planet, through childhood and everything that I have experienced.
I am a product of my life experiences, I mean the I who I think I am is. And that is a very limited me. And worse, it is not actually me. And until I reconnect with my real self, it will be very difficult if not impossible, I think it’s impossible, for me to live a happy and fulfilling life. Or let me say it differently: I will never be able to live a life as great as what I could be living from that little I or self. I will stay short of my potential and things will never flow quite like they could and I want them to.
Life is meant to be effortless rather than efforted. I have been lied to all my life starting with what my parents taught me to everything I was told in school about how life works. You don’t need to work hard, rather you want to work effortlessly plugging into your genius, where, just as I am typing these lines, things flow, there is no effort required, they just flow out of me. No thinking needed.
I am just typing what flows out of me, that’s it. And after 15 mins of writing, I’m using an app that deletes everything I wrote if I stop writing, you get this piece in front of you that you can read and digest in 5 mins. Yes, I am doing some minor editing to make sure it's understandable but the content and flow are untouched. That is an example of effortlessness. It comes natural. It just flows.
Now how do I connect to my true self? By getting my mind out of the way. By stopping to think about what I am going to do and let myself be guided by my body, intuition, heart or whichever it is for you. One of my therapists challenged me to wake up in the morning with amnesia and just follow what I intuitively feel doing rather than following any routine or what my head says and thinks I should be doing.
Now that might be difficult for you to do given your life but you can sit back, close your eyes and imagine getting up tomorrow morning, having forgotten who you are, where you are and what you do. What would you do? How would that day flow? Play it out in your mind, and as much as you can in real life. Or maybe do it on the weekend, where it should be a lot easier.
Life is meant to be effortless, and then life’s magic can happen when we let ourselves be who we truly are. We are that person when we don’t go thinking our way through life but rather when we just flow through it. Yes, it is difficult at first and it's scary to do that because of what I won’t do anymore, because of what other people like a partner, girlfriend, wife, dad, etc. might think but that doesn’t matter.
I don’t have to abandon my old life all at once but to start following my bliss, play with life, explore and see what unfolds because only I know what is right for me. I am unique as we all are. My talents are unique and so is their expression. And I have them for a specific reason, to give them as a gift to the world.
The world wants to experience our talents, not our learnt knowledge of accounting or whatever. I used to be a banker and an entrepreneur and I think I can do those things well. But who I truly am is an explorer of life and I have gone deep into the recesses of my mind to understand how I am standing in my own way.
My passion has been to empower myself and others, and that’s what I am doing, by writing about it. And I have no idea where this takes me but this is who I am, this is what comes effortless to me, it’s my blueprint. While I can be many others things, we have free will in the end, what comes effortlessly to me and what I’m passionate about is what I am here for.
I believe that's true for all of us. Until I “follow” my true self, I will never find the happiness I am seeking. Why? Because I am playing someone else’s life.
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