after a powerful experience i sat down and wrote the following, call it a mission statement:
"who am i and what am i here to do?" are the most difficult and the most important questions in life. when i know who i am i know what i need to do. my being informs my doing. most of us spend our whole life trying to become someone. it is a painful and never-ending process that i know all too well. i have spent the last eight years looking for the answer and i am committed for the rest of my life to live it and empower those who seek it to do so as well. when i am, everything changes.
what we seek is ever present and within us. it was, is and always will be. being stuck in the mind keeps us distracted from actually feeling yet that is what we yearn for the most. many of us experience something constantly nagging in the background. our drive to achieve and to live our genius becomes the nightmare of the insatiable need to obtain approval from others, trying to become someone.
but there's nothing to achieve or to become, we already are. the moment we recognise our eternal nature, we move out of our ego and into the heart and that's when we start flowing with life experiencing the feeling of bliss, love and serenity - no matter what is happening. am i in this state continuously? absolutely not. i am very human yet i have experienced this state and i am working hard at staying in it and not to fall back into the prison of the self.
before, i used to be an investment banker and startup founder. if the above sounds spiritual to you, it is. i used to be an atheist and i have come to understand that the answers lie beyond the realm of perception of the mind. yet you don't have to believe anything, experience is the most powerful teacher, the only teacher really. and you are your own most powerful teacher. no one else except you knows what you need to do.
as a coach and founder of neoslife, i am deeply committed to live the highest expression of myself and to empower everyone around me. it is a continuous labour of love. and it is work. it is the very work we all came here to do. the moment you experience your highest state of being, you know that it is.
if the above resonates within you, i invite you to get in touch. there is no randomness in life, it is simply the mind being incapable of seeing the connection.
as steve jobs famously said: "you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.... so you have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. this approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
with love, vincent
moving from what i have done to who i am being - the above is now my linkedin page.
so what happened? thursday evening, i found myself pacing around anxiously. no need to bother you with the details, it was a combination of late nights, having taken on a lot of work, pressuring myself to create results fast, money stories and wondering when will it all finally come to fruition. in short, i was trying to become.
i felt the tension rising over the past days and that night it was overwhelming and my body was contracting. i messaged my beloved coach whether she was free to hop on a call and shortly after we were speaking.
she challenged me and i realised: i was not present. i was not in acceptance. i was fighting internally. and i was being my own enemy. i was reminded that this is called the great work for a reason.
wikipedia reads: “the great work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.”
you can call it the process of awakening, the spiritual path, the journey of “becoming”, remembering who we are. it is what we are here for. what the purpose of this whole existence called life is. it doesn’t mean we have to do the great work but if i wonder how i can stop this nagging i referred to above, this feeling of i am never quite there, this is the answer.
and it’s not a simple answer. it is a commitment to continuously work on myself, to see whatever life throws at me as an invitation to learn, to evolve and elevate my way of being rather than being in resistance and feeling like a victim. it’s the great work because it is hard and because it is never ending and yet it’s the way of fully embracing the journey of life moving from resistance to taking full responsibility for everything that i am feeling and creating in my life. it’s the path to an empowered way of being.
and today i was running up against one of my limiting beliefs: i can’t trust, no one has my back. this is not an intellectual belief, it is deeply anchored in my body. it is a product of my childhood, my ancestors, generational trauma, etc. yes, this stuff is real and it goes deep. and if i don’t face it, it drives my whole life. it is the story i am unconsciously telling myself and that story then creates my life experience.
and the only way to move beyond it is to face it. head on. to take a deep breath, sit with it and move through it. what life am i and have i been building by not trusting? many of my life experiences have reinforced that i can’t trust but if i dig deeper i can see that the underlying lack of trust created the very situations that then resulted in people in my life not being trustworthy.
that’s the crazy part. me not trusting, whether consciously or unconsciously, creates a way of being, you could even say a way of vibing that is subtly perceived by others and i thereby attract the wrong people and situations in my life. those then make me believe i can’t trust but in reality it is me that never trusted which created these very situations.
it is not that the world is untrustworthy. the world is untrustworthy because i don’t trust it. it is a confusion of cause and effect. i am the cause and the world, people and situations just mirror back to me how i perceive it. life brings me the exact situations to learn the lessons i need to move forward, to move out of my limiting beliefs. to realise the powerful creator i am, we all are.
thought and beliefs create 24/7. we are all master manifestors. if i believe the world is a dangerous, unloving, untrustworthy place then this is exactly how it looks like to me and i will attract the very circumstances that confirm that view. we can only see in others that what exists within us. everything in life acts as a mirror so i can see what i need to. i can be in resistance and denial of that or i can use it to wake up, to become an empowered creator seeing the perfection and beauty of this mirror system. my experience of life is a reflection of who i am. change your thoughts, change your life.
so what does it all mean? to me it means that i have to move through that trust issue rather than avoiding it. it will keep standing in the way until i let it go. and the only way to do that is to get uncomfortable and do the opposite: trust and take actions that reflect trust rather than trying to protect myself and hold back as a result. and that’s why it’s called the great work. because doing the opposite is hard. it is like dying.
my mind finds a million reasons why i should not do that. why it is not safe even stupid. and i know if i don’t do it i continue living life with the “handbrake put on”. that is the reason for feeling a nagging in the background, why we are never quite present, why we worry rather than living. and that’s what this feeling is there for: to show me what i need to change if i want to experience the flow and beauty of life.
life is choice. everything is a choice. and once we see it for what it is, all choices collapse and only the right path remains. it becomes a choiceless choice because all other choices keep me stuck in a limited way of being. in that moment i know who i need to be and what i need to do. and then i have to take a deep breath, collect all my forces and jump into the seemingly unknown, trusting that it all will work out.
and when i do, i experience freedom. the freedom i have been seeking all along.
what would it take for you to be truly free today?
you might also enjoy this read which highlights the struggle and power of surrendering:
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