got back from the lake last night

it was a ton of fun and we spent most of it zooted out of our minds. but it also really hit me how much has changed in the last 8+ years. seeing a bunch of people that I hadnt seen since my teens or early 20s. it strangely put a lot of things into perspective for me, especially considering I feel like I lost time due to the pandemic.

all in all, a lot of relaxing and chatting and eating good food!

Thank you, darkness

We live in a world where the pursuit of happiness couldn’t be greater. Self-help books on how to be your happiest self, positive psychology classes at campuses across the world (including at Google), and an ever-increasing interest in spirituality to fill that void we feel inside (despite sometimes having everything on the outside) - all signal the desire to be happy. And that’s a good thing. Happiness is beautiful and it’s important. But, being happy all the time or only ever feeling positive emotions is not realistic (it’s actually not even good for you). Negative emotions that arise from the difficult times in life are just as important- and in some ways, even more important - as the happy emotions. If we never knew any struggle, we would lack depth, humility, character and connection to something larger than our ego-centric selves. We would be so out of touch with what really matters and have no chance at survival (emotionally) because we would never have faced any problems in our lives. Pain is necessary to being a resilient soul with substance. Without struggle, we would never grow and get the opportunity to discover ourselves. Our relationship with ourselves and with others would be incredibly superficial. This seems obvious to most people because they realize, looking back on the tough times in their lives, they came out stronger and wiser.

Pain doesn’t just make us stronger and wiser (in our human form). On a deeper level, pain has a crucial role in soul work. Pain helps us discover our truest self, by connecting us with our soul. Darkness or pain in this sense is the path to the light - the light inside you.  There’s a line in Rehras Sahib, one of Sikhism’s sacred texts, that I’ve frequently gone back to over the years because it’s so powerful and true: “Dukh daroo sukh rog bhaiyah, ja sukh taam no hoee”. It means that dukh (pain) was the necessary cause that ultimately led you to achieve an immense state of bliss (sukh), a bliss that could never have been attained through happy times alone, and thus, pain is your medicine or saviour. We don’t usually feel this way in the moment of course. But there is always a bigger role that the pain plays in our lives.  Eckhart Tolle talks about suffering as being necessary for the evolution of our consciousness.

Tolle says one should be grateful for his/her suffering because eventually suffering will wake you up. When we suffer, the ego suffers and everything it’s attached to or that defines it suffers. The false sense of self takes a beating. And through this process, we surrender (well, hopefully!) to a higher power i.e. a much higher power than the ego. Surrendering allows us to realize what the larger purpose of the pain is. Pain keeps you woke by pushing the ego out of the phantom driver seat it thought it was owning and you’re forced to ask yourself: “who’s running the show?” As we ponder that question more deeply, we are driven to connect with the boundless, infinite and omnipresent source of energy that is inside us - which is the truth of us. And once we discover that, i.e. the essence of GOD or the Universe inside us, it allows us to go beyond all suffering. You begin to realize that the ego is the source of all of your suffering. Ego in this context is much broader and deeper than just arrogance or narcissism. Ego is, as Tolle says, anything that we’re identified with - our thoughts, emotions, our possessions, our loved ones, our status, our money, our addictions - all the labels and roles we feel define our false, external self. Disidentifying with and shining a light on the ego requires us to be in a state of surrender, which is much harder to do when life is great and the ego is feeling like the King/Queen of the world. When we’re in pain, it’s easier to observe the ego and see it for what it is - aka not you. And when we do this, we end the suffering right then and there. We only know what it means to rise if we have fallen. We rise (connect with our higher power) through disidentification, observation and awareness, which are the ego’s greatest kryptonite. So, suffering allows us to become closer to who we are and it frees us from the pain and traps of the ego by strengthening our consciousness/awareness. Remember, pain is our necessary medicine or saviour.

I’m grateful for my life struggles because they have shaped me into the person that I am today and most importantly, they have given me a degree of strength and faith that I could never have otherwise acquired through pleasant, non-challenging circumstances. I have a lot of work to do in disidentifying with my false self (the one with good hair) but today I am a lot humbler, a lot more grateful and open-minded and a lot less judgmental because of the challenges I’ve experienced, at different points in my life. The darkness in my life has always brought me closer to the light - the light inside me (my soul/GOD). It brought me closer to the light because it left me with no choice but to surrender and turn inwards. No external person or occurrence could lessen the pain, no matter how hard they or I tried. It was only when I turned inward to something deeper inside myself that I found peace and repose. What resulted from turning inward was a strengthening of connection to, and faith in, that indestructible part of me. The same indestructible part that lives in all of us - our spirit/soul/true essence. It’s my foundation and I have learned now, through challenging life experiences, that while something can shake me (at the branches), it can never ever touch or harm my core (soul). And KNOWING THAT gives me a feeling of strength and assurance that I cannot describe in words. It’s like I feel deep inside that my soul is saying “I got you, like I always do” - and that is the BEST feeling in the world. It stabilizes and grounds me in a way that no external person, thing or event ever could. It makes me a more positive person and better equips me to face the inevitable challenges that life will present. The deep-rooted belief  that no matter what happens, I’m going to be okay, gives me courage to push myself to do things I find scary, and it gives me resilience and allows me to see each challenge or problem as an opportunity to learn and grow. Gratitude is a key virtue in my life and that’s only because I was able to walk through the darkness and into the light. Everything I’m grateful for stems from or ties back to the light. And I’m aware of the light because of the darkness, and that makes me truly grateful for the pain. It was a necessary catalyst (love that word!). I realize that we have to walk through the dark to come home.

Some of my closest peeps have suffered immensely through addiction (and are now reborn through recovery). They often say that while their addiction stripped literally everything from them - their loved ones, their livelihood, their homes and their respect - they are forever grateful for their addiction because without it, they would never know the incredible life they have today - a values-driven life of spirituality, self-love, community and faith in their higher power. Today, they are the best version of themselves that has existed, thus far. A version that didn’t even exist before their addiction developed and couldn’t likely have existed without the suffering of the addiction. In addition to the powerful internal growth that comes from dark times, externally, there are people we would never have met and opportunities we would never have been presented, without the pain and suffering. So, next time you see a dark cloud coming through in your life, embrace it, knowing that it’s an opportunity to bring about greater sunshine than exists today. Pain grows us into a better, humbler, happier version of ourselves and ultimately gives us a better life. Just to be clear though, and this is an important point: this revelation of being the light in the face of darkness can only come about if we choose to surrender and if we choose to rise when we have fallen. Not everyone chooses that path. This goes for addiction or any other struggle in our lives - big or small. We have to choose to turn inwards, to bloom, to do the difficult work, to pick faith over fear, to flashlight the ego and to surrender. Choose well friends.

10 ways to start loving yourself the way you deserve to be loved Part 1

What is self-love?

It means very simply taking care of your 'self'! It is taking care of yourself so that you feel balanced and fulfilled from within, without needing love from without.

Self love is something you feel. You know when you are not loving yourself, that you feel drained and tired, and out of balance. Also feelings of anger and frustration is signalling that something is out of balance. It might be that you are afraid of speaking your truth and saying how you feel, so you keep it to yourself and suppress the emotion, which will result in pressure felt from within that might try to find its outlet in other ways. So your emotions come and go unpredictably and in numerous negative ways and you might doubt your decisions and procrastinate, because of it.

There are many indicators for the need of more self loving care-taking. Because when we love ourselves we are capable of truly loving others. We have more responsibility as one person than we think.

Self Love means loving and truly honouring everything that makes us be who we are!  It is appreciating all that we have been given, our gifts, our talents, our ideas, our feelings everything that makes us uniquely us.

Loving yourself means, respecting your body! It is the most clever and loving mechanism there for you! It works in your favour! Thank it and use it wisely! Give back to it, so it can function for you at its best. What are doing to it? What are you feeding it?

How much are you listening to your body? We tend to get ignorant to the signals our body is constantly telling us. It is literally communicating with us all the time.  

How much are you taking care of your thoughts? Cause thoughts affect your emotions and if they are let loose, your emotions will let loose and do whatever they want, and usually when this happens it is not good. It can cause anxiety, anger, doubt, guilt, all kinds of negative emotions. And what do emotions do? They lead us to behave in certain ways,  'reacting' to things instead of confidently acting proactively on things with love and care and kindness.

Self Love means taking control over your self and deciding over what you put into your body physically and what you choose to see, hear and later think. Most happens subconsciously

Here are 10 ways to love yourself:

(No one else but you can love yourself like this -It has truly lasting effects)

1. Watch and Notice your Thoughts - How are you responding to your own thoughts? Are you directing them to the negative or positive side? What is the quality of them? Is your thought process generally negative? - WE CHOSE OUR THOUGHTS - Becoming aware of them will help to strengthen our ability to take control of them and steer to the positive side.

If you notice that a lot of anxiety is coming from your thoughts it probably means that they are doing their own thing. And thoughts tend to pull towards the negative if we dont watch them.

2. Learn the difference between just Thoughts and Intuition - Since a lot of uncontrolled thinking is lead to feelings of fear, which keep us from being and doing what we truly actually wanted to do, it is  important practice to strengthen the ability to differentiate between understanding a guided message to us through our Intuition, or a thought that we have filtered through our own uniquely created paradigm set up, now automatically connected to uncomfortable emotions spiralling wildly through our wildest imagination. 85% of our fears do not even come true and are simply our brain doing its very clever work  of memorising all that has once affected us. Any similarities to past events, the brain might pick up on, that have previously hurt or scared us, will automatically be registered and very quickly realised into further feelings of fear as a way of 'protecting us against further pain'.

3. Realise that pain is your friend - Like explained above, the body (the physical side of us) tries to run away from pain. However, pain is a very vital part of living and a very vital part of loving yourself. If for example we let our fears overcome us and control us, we would not face certain situations that would be important for our growth, personal growth or business growth, whichever challenge it might be. On the other side of pain or uncomfort is the reward. It is the same like going to work out in the gym or whatever sports you do, the satisfaction comes after working out hard and going against tiredness or feelings of weakness and doing it anyways. When you have an exam or when you have to perform, fear always hits just before. But how good will you feel if you didn't go on stage, didn't perform, didn't push a bit harder to see results cause of fear? Even the pain of seperation or doing the right thing, feels uncomfortable but there is this knowing it will be good for us if we go through it. Don't be scared of pain. Its inevitable, suffering is a choice.

4. Go outside your comfort zones - What is your comfort? For me clearly I can be lazy and I can procrastinate very easily. I tend to comfort eat, I used to be shy and still am sometimes. So going outside my comfort zone would mean to be more proactive at speaking with people, not fearing to contact people. Sometimes its a matter of 'speaking up'. Not giving in to comfort food too much, pushing myself to go to the gym even when Im tired,etc. We all have our comfort zones. So when it comes to self love, it is many times not only about doing what you want to do right now or what you feel most comfortable in right now, such as instant gratification comfort situations. They can be more damaging than pushing through to go against your comfort zones as it will showresults for the long run.  Ask yourself, how will this help me for the long run?

5. Reactivce vs Proactive -  When it comes to our day to day, how many times do you 'react' to situations? If it is reacting to a friend, your mum, your boss a passerby? We don't realise how much of our actions are on auopilot. Simply reacting and not slowing down to think about the repercussions this may have. Not just on the relationshipiwith them or how they might feel, but on ourselves. Every reactive behaviour gets stored and will come back to us in some form or shape.  Sometimes we benefit from simply taking our time to respond to an email that might enrage us or a telephone call that made us sad, a comment that frustrated us. If we let ourselves calm down before reacting and come from a calm place, usually that place comes from a place of love. Its always important to act from a place of love, as we never know what the other person migght be going through right now and the more proactive actions we do, the more will come back to us. Tip: Let a minimum of 3 hours pass before answering, if it is a big thing, take 3 days. Just check yourself and see if you would respond from a hurt place or from a place trying to see both parts.

These are the first 5 steps to really help you to love yourself on a lasting and profound way. The other 5 steps will come in part 2.

Loving yourself takes many shapes, whatever makes you happy is important, be playful, be creative,think outside the box. Routine can become quite stale after some time so mix it up. Go out for a walk, spend time with your furry friends, meet up with your friends, go on a trip, take a bath put some music on, take a class, whatever is your type of fun, just do it.

Have a great week!

Best wishes,

Love and Light,

Maria