The Mountain is You

The Mountain is You is written by Brianna Wiest, and explores personal growth and inner transformation, and how our self-sabotaging mechanisms prevent us from doing so.

Self-sabotage is often the reason why we can’t seem to get where we want to be. We’re programmed for safety, to return to the familiar. This is what keeps us from going forward. What you believe about your life is what you will make of it. If you only believe what you know, this is where you’ll stay.

Exercise: Take a piece of paper and a pen, and write down everything you aren’t happy with. Write down, very specifically, every single problem you face. If you are struggling with finances, you need a very clear picture of what’s wrong. Write down every debt, every bill, every asset, and every bit of income. If you are struggling with self-image, write down exactly what you dislike about yourself. If it is anxiety, write down everything that bothers or upsets you.

The first step to getting where you want to be is to create clarity and admit exactly what is wrong. Then you have a choice: make peace with the way it is, or commit to the change and all that is requires (which might be a lot!). The lingering and indecisiveness is what is keeping you stuck.

Your new life is going to cost you your old one. The people who are meant for you are going to meet you on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort zone around the things that actually move you forward. Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of being understood, you’re going to be seen. All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are. Remaining attached to your old life is the first and final act of self-sabotage, and releasing it is what we must prepare for to truly be willing to see real change.

There is no such thing as self-sabotage

Self-sabotage is a way—often unconscious—in which we try to protect ourselves. Here is a list of self-sabotaging signs and how to address them:

1. Resistance: when we try to change ourselves for the better, we feel resistance to commitment. Embrace and explore this feeling, what could be the purpose of this resistance? In what way is our sub-conscious trying to protect us?
2. Hitting the upper limit: we are unconsciously driven to return to a known balance of happiness and unhappiness. Be conscious of that desire and build a new comfort zone around a higher happiness level.
3. Uprooting: you are constantly switching strategies without ever finishing one. Avoid an ill-defined goal and find out what you really want.
4. Perfectionism holds us back from showing up and trying. Don’t spend your time evaluating whether you did well, but weather you showed up. Keep track and focus on the process, not the result.
5. Similar to feelings of inspiration, hope and helpfulness we experience feelings of sadness, upset or enragement. Accept and learn from these feelings (see the part about emotions of this section?).
6. Life is measured in outcomes, not intent. Find ways to quantify your intent, e.g. counting each time you made a healthy decision.
7. Our environment is full of distractions, When your environment is clean and tidy and you have a system in place to keep it that way you’ll begin to realize that you also feel so much less stressed and much more in control of your life.
8. Some dreams are not (or no longer) ours: When we let go of what isn’t right for us, we create space to discover what is.
9. When we set up judgments for others, they become rules that we have to play by, too. If you learn to love others, you will learn to love yourself. Practice non-judgment through non-assumption.
10. We are making decisions based on how we imagine people view our lives. Instead of thinking that we need to prove to everyone around us how perfect and flawless we are, we can imagine ourselves as people who are simply trying our best.
11. We may feel guilty of getting enough or more than one needs and try compensate for that guilt. Instead of looking at your success as a status differentiator see it instead as a tool with which you can do important and positive things in the world and your own life.
12. The fear of failing often stops us from trying. As scary as it might be to not be great at something initially, or perhaps even experience a loss, it is even worse to fail by virtue of never trying and always playing small. Failure is inevitable, but you have to make sure it’s happening for the right reasons. When we fail out of negligence, we take a step back. When we fail because we are attempting new feats, we take one step closer to what will work.
13. We downplay our successes to avoid threatening others or avoid having ‘made it’ due to our fear of peaking. Try to be happy about your accomplishments by also appreciating other’s accomplishments elsewhere. Acknowledge that when one part of our life improves, it radiates out to everything else.
14. We maintain unhealthy habits for fear of discomfort. Don’t wait for a crisis to take action. Figure out what makes you feel best. Decide what combination of healthy eating, exercise, and sleep is right for you, and stick to it. Make it easy for yourself to succeed.
15. Being busy. When you actually are busy, your first job is to streamline and prioritise your tasks in order of importance, outsource whatever else you can, and then let go of the rest. When you make yourself busy you have to get comfortable with simplicity and routine. Start with writing down your top 5 tasks that need to be done each day, and then focus on doing those and only those.
16. The people you spend time with shape your life. Work on building a circle of people who support and inspire you, who have similar goals and enjoy spending time with you. You should leave a get-together feeling energized and inspired, not exhausted and angry. Slowly but genuinely rebuild your connections, and then foster and care for them as much as you can.
17. Irrational fears are often what we project real fears onto. Instead of wasting all your energy to control a worst-case scenario, find out what message the fear is trying to tell you.

Furthermore, some symptoms of self-sabotaging cycles:

1. You spend more of your time worrying, ruminating, and focusing on what you hope doesn’t happen than you do imagining, strategising, and planning for what you do.
2. You spend more time trying to impress the people who do not like you than you spend with people who love you for who you are.
3. You don’t know basic facts about your life, like how much debt you have or what other people in your field are being paid for similar work.
4. When you get into an argument, you run away until you forget rather than talking about what’s wrong and coming up with a solution.
5. You care more about convincing other people you are okay than actually being okay.
6. Your main priority in life is to be liked, even if that comes at the expense of being happy.
7. You are more afraid of your feelings than anything else.
8. You’re blindly chasing goals without asking yourself why you want those things.
9. You’re treating your coping mechanisms as the problem, rather than trying to ask yourself what emotional need that thing is fulfilling and finding solutions for that.
10. You value your doubt more than your potential. Negativity bias makes us believe that “bad” things are more real than good.
11. You try to care about everything. Willpower is a limited resource of which you can only spend so much. Rather than trying to become good at everything, decide what matters to you most, focus your attention to that and let everything else go.
12. You are waiting for others to open doors and hand you the life you’ve been waiting for.
13. You don’t realise how far you have come. Give credit and report on the things you’ve overcome that you thought you never would.

We are often unaware of our subconscious drivers. We can find them by tracing back our most prominent struggles and drivers, peeling back the motivations toward each. These core commitments are actually a cover-up for our core needs. If your subconscious core commitment is to be needed, your core need is to know you are wanted. If your subconscious core commitment is to be loved by others, your need is self-love.

When we move beyond awareness of our self-sabotaging behaviour toward taking action, emotions we’ve previously suppressed may surface. When such emotions arise, ask yourself:

1. Why do I feel this way?
2. What is this feeling trying to tell me about the action I am trying to take?
3. Is there something I need to learn here?
4. What do I need to do to honour my needs right now?

Then, get clear on why you want to take this action. Realising that you want to do something because you want to live a better life trumps your fear and resistance.

When with asking these questions you run into other emotions—anger, sadness or inadequacy—it is important to make space for them. Let them manifest in your body and observe them. Feel what they want you to feel. Nothing is worse than the fear of feeling an emotion. Learning these feelings can give us deeper insights about what we really need and what problems within us are still unresolved.

To fully release those feelings once you are aware of them, try writing yourself a letter. Write something to your younger self or from the perspective of your future self. Write down a mantra or a manifesto. Remind yourself that you love yourself too much to settle for less, or that it is okay to be angry in unfair or frustrating circumstances. Give yourself space to experience the depth of your emotions so that they do not control your behaviours.

In order to move forward in our lives, we need to step away from the feeling and override the hesitation we feel when something different feels uncomfortable. By using logic and vision to guide ourselves (rather than the feelings reflecting the past), we are able to identify a different and better life experience. When we imagine this, we feel peaceful and inspired. It is essential that you learn to take action before you feel like doing it. Taking action builds momentum and creates motivation.

Your triggers are the guides to your freedom

Each ‘negative’ emotion comes with a message. However, we often shut down the feeling and avoid anything that might bring it up. We think that the thing that triggers the emotion is the problem. However, the real problem is that we don’t know what to do with the feeling, how to interpret it. When we can identify why something is triggering us, we can use the experience as a catalyst for a release and positive life change. It’s not about ‘getting over’ something, it is about listening to what they are trying to tell us.

1. Anger is mischaracterised by its shadow side, aggression, which is why we try to resist it. It is healthy to be angry, and anger can also show us important aspects of who we are and what we care about. Anger shows us where our boundaries are. Anger also helps us identify what we find to be unjust. We can use anger to help us see our limits and priorities more clearly.
2. Sadness is the normal and correct response to the loss of something you love; a relationship, job, or just general idea of what you thought your life would be. We do not ever need to feel embarrassed or wrong for needing to cry, feel down, or miss what we no longer have. In fact, crying at appropriate times is one of the biggest signs of mental strength.
3. Guilt affects us more for what we didn’t do than for what we did. If we have treated others unfairly, we must be able to admit, apologize, and correct that behaviour. However, if the feeling of guilt is more generalized and not specifically relating to any one incident, we need to look closely at who or what made us always feel as though we were “wrong” or inconveniencing others.
4. Embarrassment is what we feel when we know that we did not behave in a way that we are proud of. Others can never make us feel as embarrassed as we make ourselves feel. When you are truly and completely confident that you are doing the best you can with what you have in front of you, there is no need to feel embarrassed. When we do not process the feeling of embarrassment, it tends to turn into shame.
5. Jealousy presents itself as anger or judgement, when in reality it is sadness and self-dissatisfaction. If you want to know what you truly want out of life, look at the people who you are jealous of.
6. Resentment. Instead of trying to show us what we should change, it seems to want to tell us what other people should change. When we are faced with resentment, we should reinvent our image of those around us. Instead of focusing on how they should change, we can focus instead on what we can learn.
7. Regret isn’t actually trying to just make us feel bad that we didn’t live up to our own expectations. It is trying to motivate us to live up to them going forward. Accept the regret as a feeling trying to tell you to do things differently now.
8. Chronic fear often comes back down to feeling the need to focus our energy and attention on a potential threat so we can protect ourselves from it. The very act of holding these fearful thoughts within our minds is exactly how the fear is controlling us in the first place. It is derailing our lives right now, because we are channelling our energy into something that is outside of our control, as opposed to using it for everything that is actually within our control—the habits, actions, and behaviours that would move our lives forward. The only true way to get over chronic fear is actually to get through it. Instead of trying to battle, resist, and avoid what we cannot control, we can learn to simply shrug and say, and if that happens, it happens. The second we are able to shrug, laugh, or even just throw our hands up and say, “Whatever, it will be fine,” we instantly take back all of our power. When we stop being afraid of what we cannot control and know instead that nothing can possibly ruin our lives more than we are ruining them with our negative, distracted, and irrational thinking and focus, we are completely freed.
9. Panic is the emotion you experience when you don’t know what to do with a feeling. It is what happens when you have an invasive thought.

The behaviours that you think are holding you back are really just meeting your needs. It’s not a matter of trying to push yourself beyond them; it’s a matter of seeing them for what they are and then finding better, healthier ways to fulfil them.

Examples of self-sabotaging behaviour and what it might tell us:

1. Caring too much about what other people think. Instead of wondering whether or not someone else will think you are enough, ask yourself: Is my life enough for me? How do you really feel about your life when you aren’t looking at it through the eyes of others?
2. Down-talking yourself comes from the idea that when you say it first, it hurts less when someone else does it. You’re your own bully and enemy by doing it to yourself.
3. You’re not doing the best you can because if you get rejected then, you have no more excuses. You have to create things you are proud to share to give you a natural feeling of authenticity.

The ‘gut feeling’ we all know can only respond to the now. Your gut instinct functions to make things better, whereas your imagination can often make things worse.

Feelings can be changed by our thoughts, and in that sense are not necessarily ‘real.’ You experience peace and joy in your life when you condition yourself to take repeated daily actions that facilitate clarity, calmness, healthfulness, and purposefulness.

By becoming aware of your feelings, you can trace them back to the thought process that prompted them, and from there you can decide whether or not the idea is an actual threat or concern.

Remember: Your brain was built for nature. Your body was designed to survive in the wild. You have an animalistic form trying to navigate a highly civilized, modern world. Forgive yourself for having these impulses, and at the same time, understand that your choices are ultimately yours. You can feel something and not act on it.

In the moment your first reaction is often the right one. You can use this to your advantage by staying in the moment and asking yourself what is true right here and right now. Does it differ from what you think and feel about it when you are just imagining it, making guesses about it, recalling details of it, or imagining what it will be like? Typically, those projections are fear.

These realisations help you distinguish between instinct and fear:

1. Intuitive thoughts are calm and quiet.
2. Intuitive thoughts are rational; they make a degree of sense.
3. Intuitive thoughts help you in the present. They give you information that you need to make a better-informed decision.
4. Intuitive thoughts usually come to you once, maybe twice, and they induce a feeling of understanding. Intruding thoughts tend to be persistent and induce a feeling of panic.
5. Intuitive thoughts often sound loving.
6. Intuitive thoughts usually come out of nowhere; invasive thoughts are usually triggered by external stimuli.
7. Intuitive thoughts don’t need to be grappled with—you have them and then you let them go. Invasive thoughts begin a whole spiral of ideas and fears.
8. Even when an intuitive thought doesn’t tell you something you like, it never makes you feel panicked. Even if you experience sadness or disappointment, you don’t feel overwhelmingly anxious.
9. Intuitive thoughts open your mind to other possibilities; invasive thoughts close your heart and make you feel stuck or condemned.
10. Intuitive thoughts come from the perspective of your best self; invasive thoughts come from the perspective of your most fearful, small self.
11. Intuitive thoughts solve problems; invasive thoughts create them.
12. Intuitive thoughts help you help others; invasive thoughts create a ‘me vs. them’-mentality.
13. Intuitive thoughts help you understand what you’re thinking and feeling; invasive thoughts assume what other people are thinking and feeling.
14. Intuitive thoughts come from a deeper place within you and give you a resounding feeling deep in your gut; invasive thoughts keep you stuck in your head and make you panic.

Self-care is the most fundamental aspect of meeting your own needs. Aside from your own basic security, your needs are to be nourished, to sleep well, to live in a clean environment, to dress appropriately, and to allow yourself to feel what you feel without judgment or suppression. These things are not little things; they are big things. You just can’t see it because their impact is that you do them every day.

Building emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, interpret and respond to our emotions in an enlightened and healthy way. High emotional intelligence makes you connect more easily with different kinds of people and feel more content and satisfied in everyday life.

We think that once we attain our goals we feel content and relaxed for at least some time. Neurologically though, when we get what we want, we just start to want more. This is one of the reasons why we self-sabotage; we know that once we get something we’re going to be facing an even more daunting task.

We are so deeply enmeshed in the mental state of wanting, we cannot shift to a state of having.

If you have spent all your life in doubt you are not going to know how to adapt to a life in which you are relaxed and enjoying it. You will resist or feel guilty. We are reluctant to change, no matter how positive, until it becomes the new familiar.

Your subconscious mind is the gatekeeper of your comfort zone. When we are going through a healing or changing process in our live, it will always feel uncomfortable, but we have to allow our bodies to adjust to their new sense of normalcy.

Change comes in micro-shifts, not breakthroughs

Change doesn’t happen spontaneously, but rather when ideas that were sitting in the margins of your mind finally get enough attention to dominate your thoughts; a paradigm shift. Single moments don’t cause long-lasting change, restructuring our habits does.

If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day.

If you want to spend less time on your phone, deny yourself the chance to check it one time today. If you want to eat healthier, drink half a cup of water today. If you want to sleep more, go to bed 10 minutes earlier tonight than you did last night. If you want to exercise more, do it now for just 10 minutes. If you want to read, read one page. If you want to meditate, do so for 30 seconds.

Then keep doing those things. Do them every single day. You’ll get used to not checking your phone. You’ll want more water, and you’ll drink more water. You’ll run for 10 minutes, and you won’t feel like you have to stop, so you won’t. You’ll read one page, grow interested, and read another.

Living in fear

Our minds are wired to find the most extreme threat from a situation, even though this threat is very unlikely to unfold. Our mind also creates a fixed amount of adversity; problems in our day-to-day life. When you avoid any kind of real challenge, your mind will entertain you with a similar amount of perceived challenges, only will the problems not carry much value and is there no real reward to receive.

Shielding the mind from any adversity makes us more vulnerable to anxiety, panic, and chaos. We move into the passenger seat, making life something that happens to us, an ceasing control. Adversity makes you creative and interesting. Part of the human narrative is wanting something to overcome. The trick is keeping it in balance. Choosing to exit your comfort zone and endure pain for a worthy cause.

Anything that is new will feel uncomfortable until it is also familiar. Similarly, everything that is familiar tends to make us feel good, even though the behaviours, habits, or relationships are actually toxic or destructive.

Psychic thinking

Psychic thinking is assuming you know what somebody else is thinking or what they intend to do, and is often based on what we want to believe. Psychic thinking breeds anxiety and depression. Psychic thinking is nothing more than a series of cognitive biases:

1. Confirmation: our brain draws our attention to the things that are in line with our beliefs.
2. Extrapolation: we think we are the sum of our past, and that what we are dealing with will be on our mind for the rest of our lives.
3. Spotlighting: we think the world is about us, and forget that others will think about themselves in a similar way. Can you recall the last two or three embarrassing things someone else did?

Instead of trying to predict what will happen next, our energy is better used when it’s focused on making the best of the present moment. That’s what’s really going to change the outcomes of your life.

Logical lapses to profound anxiety

Anxiety is not caused by over- but under-thinking, by jumping instantly to the worst-case scenario without considering the most likely one.

When you experience a ‘logical lapse,’ the climax of the worst-case scenario becomes the conclusion. You imagine a situation and figure that you would panic, and then because you’re scared, you never think through the rest of the scenario. You never think about how you’d get through it, what you’d do to respond, and how you’d eventually move on with your life afterwards. If you were able to do this, you wouldn’t be scared of it, because you wouldn’t think it had the power to “end” you.

This is why exposure is the most common treatment for irrational fear. Mental strength is not just hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does.

Intelligent people are struggling more, just because they are so good at piecing together unrelated stimuli and identify potential threats.

We often arrive at a wrong conclusion with truthful evidence, or think that only one of two scenarios could take place. The first step to correcting this is to become aware that you are doing it.

Worrying is a subconscious defence mechanism. But when we worry about something bad, and it doesn’t happen, our brain is tricked into thinking this is therefor an effective strategy.

You can’t simply ‘stop worrying,’ but you can try to think of the non-negative possibilities, that these situations can help you grow, and that fearful situations are a natural part of life.

Releasing the past

You can only move on if you start building something new. If you truly want to let go of a past experience, you have to allow yourself to live through it.

Close your eyes and find the feeling in your body that is uncomfortable. This is your portal to its root. Follow the feeling and ask it to show you where it started. You’ll remember a time, place, or experience. Imagine your older self telling you why this experience was absolutely necessary for becoming who you are, and who you are going to be. You can’t change the past, but you can change how you experience it, and how it shapes you, in the now.

Even though you’re different on the outside, that part of you still very much exists within. That younger self doesn’t want to be pushed away; it wants you to turn around and acknowledge it.

Letting go of unrealistic experiences

You attain peace by learning to be content with the now, not by attaining your ‘perfect life.’ You change your life when you start showing up exactly as you are.

Most of our perceived problems are distractions from the real problem, which is that we are not comfortable in the present moment.

We must be brave and confront our discomfort, sit with it, listen to what’s wrong, feel it, move through it, allow it to be.

A continuous desire to self-improvement is a sign that you’re unable to deal with the feeling of being who you are.

What leaves the path is clearing the path

There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you can pretend for a while. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion. You get stuck when you try to make something that’s wrong for you right.

Releasing emotional backlog

We are masters of avoiding our feelings. We take substances, think of the future or the past, find distractions in work or entertainment, and most commonly, we tense our bodies up so efficiently that we are rendered incapable of feeling.

When not felt, emotions become embodied, literally stuck inside. We often feel fear in our stomachs and heartache in our chests, stress and anxiety in our shoulders, and relationship problems in the neck. What we can do instead:

1. Meditate to feel: Experience all the feelings that come up. You will get comfortable with feelings coming up and passing by. You don’t have to respond to them or act upon them.
   1. Find a Quiet Space: Start by finding a quiet and comfortable space where you can sit or lie down without distractions.
   2. Relax: Begin by taking a few deep breaths to relax your body and mind. You can close your eyes if you find it helpful.
   3. Turn Inward: Shift your attention inward and start to notice how you’re feeling emotionally in the present moment. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now?” It could be happiness, sadness, anger, anxiety, calmness, or any other emotion.
   4. Observe Without Judgment: As you identify your emotions, practice observing them without judgment. This means acknowledging your emotions without labeling them as good or bad. Simply be aware of what you’re feeling.
   5. Notice Physical Sensations: Pay attention to any physical sensations associated with your emotions. Emotions often manifest in the body, so observe any tension, warmth, tightness, or other sensations you may feel.
   6. Acceptance: Embrace your emotions as they are. Allow yourself to fully experience them without trying to change or suppress them. This can be challenging, especially with difficult emotions, but it’s an essential part of emotional awareness.
   7. Breathe: Use your breath as an anchor. When you notice your mind wandering or becoming overwhelmed by emotions, gently bring your focus back to your breath. Take slow, deep breaths to calm your nervous system.
   8. Explore the Roots: If you’re comfortable, try to explore the origins of your emotions. Is there a specific thought, situation, or memory that triggered these feelings? Understanding the source of your emotions can provide insight and help you respond more skillfully.
   9. Release and Let Go: As you continue to observe your emotions and breathe, you may notice that they naturally ebb and flow. Emotions are impermanent, and by allowing them to arise and pass away without clinging to them, you can gain a sense of emotional freedom.
   10. End with Gratitude: When you’re ready to conclude your meditation, take a moment to express gratitude for the opportunity to connect with your emotions and increase your emotional awareness.
2. Do a breathing scan, feeling where your body is tense, and zooming in on that feeling; visualising what it is, where it came from and what it tries to tell you. You can use a journal to write down what you feel and see.
3. The most important thing to do is to feel your emotions. Sometimes, this means allowing yourself to feel like total shit. Sometimes, this means pushing yourself through a workout, yoga, stretching, walking, or confronting triggering thoughts and letting yourself cry out what’s bothering you.

Remember that emotional health is not the experience of being perpetually calm and happy all of the time. It is the experience of allowing a range of emotions, both good and bad, and not getting too stuck on either one. Similarly, mental health and self-mastery is the ability to see and feel and experience a thought without responding to it. The response, or lack thereof, is where we regain our power and reclaim our lives.

What is really means to heal your mind

Healing yourself is the most uncomfortable, disruptive, important thing you will ever do. You don’t return to a prior state of being; you become someone entirely new.

Healing yourself is returning to your most natural state which is hungry for personal freedom, irreverent to the opinions of others, creates without doubt, shows up without fear, and loves without stipulations, agreements or conditions. Who you truly are is the best version of yourself you might have never imagined, and the most essential version of yourself that you have always been.

Healing requires you to take an honest inventory of what you’ve been ignoring all this time. It requires you to be completely honest about how you really feel, and then it requires you to actually feel it.

Healing requires you to go through the full experience of every emotion that you cut off. When you are no longer scared to feel anything, something magical happens: You find peace.

Discomfort will always be there, so we can sit and dwell on the fabricated fears that prevent our action, or accept it as the unease that comes with pushing our boundaries and growing. Healing means stepping out of your comfort zone so you can leap toward the person you want to be

It is not what makes you more comfortable and idle. It is what conditions you to be more motivated by discomfort than you are scared of it, and inspired by your still moments more than you use them to forge the chains of worry.

Healing is simply releasing the sickness that is the limiting beliefs and fears that are holding you back from becoming the best version of yourself, the person you were meant to be.

When we hold onto fear as a sort of safety net, hoping that reminding ourselves of the terrible that could happen, it won’t surprise us when it happens. In reality, the time spent worrying is better spent preparing for what’s most likely to occur.

When you heal completely, you realise that there is nothing more important than finding joy in where you are, right here and now. Whatever obstructions are in the way fulfilling your life are the challenges you have to face.

Healing is about getting to a place where you prioritize nothing over the quality of your one, short life.

Moving forward is not about getting revenge

Healing isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely. If you want to change your life so you appear different to the world around you, you are still orbiting around the opinions of others. You have to do it for yourself, to do it for you. Healing is, for the first time, prioritizing your heart over someone else’s eyes.

Nobody is looking at you the way you think they are. Nobody is thinking about you the way you wish they would. They are looking at themselves. They are thinking about themselves. This isn’t sad; it’s freeing. You have nobody to prove wrong but yourself.

The next time you’re trying to craft a glow up story that is compelling to others, ask yourself why you are still waiting for their approval. The answer, almost always, is that you still do not have your own.

Building a new future

Connect with, and find your future self:

1. Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine you are sitting in a quiet room.
2. Imagine your future self coming to sit with you.
3. Pay attention to what your future self looks like, how they behave, and what their facial expressions communicate. Envisioning the ideal version of yourself helps you find what your life needs to grow, shift, and change.
4. Ask for guidance.
5. Imagine your future self giving you aspects of your life now.

Releasing your past into the quantum field

Trauma is the experience of disconnecting with a fundamental source of safety.

If you have some kind of lingering trauma you will feel it physically in your body. You will feel anxiety, tension, fear, terror, sadness, or guilt. It will be displaced. It will not have a clear, direct cause. You will overreact to certain things and even when a problem is solved, you will still panic.

Trauma is a legitimate, physical issue. You store those emotions, energies, and patterns at a cellular level. You can begin to use your body to help you heal:

Step 1: Identify what caused the traumatic experience

You do this by feeling into yourself and noticing where you are tight or tense. Our bodies harden to protect us. But we have to slowly soften the pieces of us that are trying to protect us so that we can regain control and move forward.

When you feel yourself overreacting, you will notice that your body is starting to tense up and create a fight-or-flight response. To heal this, you have to to take deep, soothing breaths until the part of your body that was once tense is relaxed again.

You will need to self-soothe in different ways: meditating, breathing, drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, using aromatherapy, sound therapy, or whatever else works for you. It’s vital you get your brain and body physically out of panic/survival mode.

Step 2: Reinstate a sense of safety

The psychological aspect of trauma healing is that you have to literally restore the connection that was severed in the exact same way that it was broken. We do not find the resolution in avoiding these things forever.

Step 3: Stop taking thoughts and feelings at face value

You have to stop engaging in psychic thinking, stop pretending you are able to predict what will happen, that you know other people’s intentions, or that what you feel and think is absolute truth and reality.

Almost always, the thing you are most panicked about is a thing you do not know is happening for sure. It is usually an assumption, a projection, a fear turned into a terrifying potential reality.

Becoming the most powerful version of yourself

In “inner child work,” you visualize and address your younger selves, often down to a specific age of you that was traumatized. You communicate with that inner child self, learn from them, protect them, or give them the guidance that they needed when they were young.

This practice can work the opposite way as well. You can also visualize and connect with the person you know you are meant to be.

What would the most powerful version of myself…

The first step to becoming your most powerful self is to envision that person in your current context. Ask yourself: What would that version of me do right now? What would they do with this day? How would they respond to this challenge? How would they move forward? How would they think? What would they feel?

Once you have a clearer image of what your most powerful self is like, you then need to evaluate what habits, traits, and behaviours are actively holding you back from fully embodying that person.

Be willing to be disliked

To be a truly powerful person, you must be willing to be disliked. No matter what you do, others are going to judge you. It is important that you not only become okay with being disliked, but you anticipate it and act anyway.

Act on purpose

To be a truly powerful person, you need to have complete, unwavering conviction about what you want to create. Having a clear vision of what you want to create and accomplish is essential to finding your inner power

Do your inner work

Get used to asking yourself what you could learn from any situation. Evaluate why something triggered you, why something is upsetting you, what your life is trying to show you, and the ways you could grow from these experiences.

Become comfortable with vulnerability, as it precedes almost every significant part of your life

When thinking about something, think about how your most powerful self would think about it.

Learning to validate your feelings

Validating feelings does not mean you agree with them, that they are correct, healthy or informed by logic. Validating feelings means simply to acknowledge that they are there, even if we don’t understand them. When we cannot validate our own feelings, we go on a never-ending quest to try to force others to do it for us.

Validating your feelings means giving yourself permission to feel them. But the same applies to others as well. When you start with reminding others that anyone in their situation would probably feel similar to how they do right now, we lighten their load. By doing the opposite, saying that they shouldn’t feel the way they do, you only add a layer of shame.

Allow yourself to a moment every day to just feel.

Feelings and emotions are no longer threats, but informants. They show us what we care about, what we want to savour, and what we want to protect.

Adapting your own principles

You need principles to create lasting change. If you don’t have principles, problems are only going to follow you and get bigger.

A principle is not an opinion or a belief, but a fundamental truth that you can use to build the foundation of your life. A principle is a matter of cause and effect and can be a personal guideline. Principles are not immediately gratifying and do not make us feel better right away.

When we don’t pair inspiration with the principles it takes to achieve those dreams, we become more lost and disappointed than we were before.

Finding your true purpose

When you start thinking that you don’t know what to do with your life, what you really mean is that you don’t yet know who you are.

Your purpose is, first and foremost, just to be here. The most important thing you can do to live meaningfully is to work on yourself. To consciously become the happiest, kindest, and most gracious version of yourself.

Your life purpose is the point at which your skills, interests, and the market intersect. It is the things that naturally call you, that effortlessly flow out of you, and that evoke specific emotions from you. You are here to work those out, to transform them. Your ultimate purpose is to become the ideal version of yourself. It is the place from which all else will flow.

From self-sabotage to self-mastery

When you are suppressing your emotions, you don’t know how you feel and your behaviour seems out of control. Enlightenment is creating an awareness and acceptance of your emotions, whilst controlling the actions that they appear to invoke.

Inner peace is understanding that no matter what happens around you, there is a place of total knowing and calmness within you. The challenge is learning how to reconnect with this place, and rewire how you respond to your mind, which is jumping from one worst-case scenario to the next.

An important part of getting there is trading it for your desire for happiness, which by its duality simply cannot always be there.

When we are children, we are more vulnerable than ever, and it’s during this time that we pick up the necessary defences that can become lifelong coping mechanisms, driving us from inner peace.

The inner war, as opposite to peace, is perpetuated by resistance—not wanting to feel the way we feel, not wanting people to do what they are doing, not wanting events to occur as they are occurring.

Find inner peace by reminding yourself that any worry that arises, is a fabrication of your mind’s need to identify potential threats for survival. Your mind is set to think that by running worst-case scenarios through your head again and again, you will be better prepared for them. This is completely false. Not only are you draining your energy imagining situations that are very often completely manufactured, but when you are already hypersensitive to any one of these fears or ideas, you will actually create those circumstances simply out of your avoidance or over-responsiveness to them.

The most challenging part is arriving at a place where you can discern between instinctive and informative feelings, and feelings rooted in fear and ego. Fear is trying to scare you into staying small and keeping safe.

Nobody is thinking about you in the way that you think they are thinking about you. They are mostly thinking of themselves. The more you can put aside your spotlight complex, the more you’re going to be able to relax.

We often think in false dichotomies, in which you eschew an entire field of possibilities in favour of one or two polarized outcomes, neither of which are likely or reasonable.

There are some things in life that are outside of your control. If you focus on them, you will miss that the majority of your life is the direct result of your actions, behaviours, and choices.

You are not supposed to, and cannot feel happy all of the time. Trying to feel happy all of the time is not the solution; it’s the problem. Mental strength requires that you develop the ability to process complex emotions such as grief, rage, sadness, anxiety, or fear. It’s about crying when life is sad, being angry in the face of injustice, and being determined to create a solution when a problem arises. That responsiveness, instead of reactiveness, defines mental strength.

The most effective and healthy way to change your life is slowly. If you need instant gratification, make the goal the tiny step you take each day. Over time, momentum will build, and you’ll realize that you’re miles from where you started.

Triggers

Triggers are not random; they are showing you where you are either most wounded or primed for growth.

Discomfort is trying to show you where you are capable of more, deserving of better, able to change, or meant for greater than you have right now. Instead of trying to pacify this discomfort, mental strength requires that you listen, learn, and begin to change your course.

If you’re anxious, it’s because you’re living in the future, and if you’re depressed, it’s because you’re living in the past. The only place to find peace is in the present because that’s the only place that truly exists.

In order to find peace, you need to see yourself as an equal to those around you.

Happiness lies in being grateful not only for when big things happen, but also for the small satisfactions that you can find every day.

When you meet someone with whom you really have a connection, go out of your way to make sure you see that person and keep your friendship healthy.

Every experience is one from which you can learn. Both pain and joy can help your find out who you are and what you want to be. When you approach something as if you already know how it will be, you’re denying yourself the knowledge to living a fulfilling life.

Doing nothing

Happiness is refusing to fill your schedule to the absolute brim so you can wring the most you possibly can out of every second of your life. It is also taking time to embrace the mundanity of everyday moments, sitting back and reading a book, talking over dinner with someone you love, or just enjoying the small things each day. Taking this time won’t happen on its own; you have to plan for it.