It is not that brave to say you love your body only after you’ve contorted it to precisely what you want it to look like.
It is not that brave to say you don’t care about possessions when you have access to everything in the world.
It is not that brave to say you aren’t motivated by money when you have enough of it.
It is not that brave to show up as someone other than who you really are.
When you only find happiness and peace after you’ve fixed every flaw, mastered every challenge, and are living decidedly in the “after” part of the picture of your life, you have not really resolved anything.
You have only reinforced the idea that you cannot be okay until everything is perfect.
The truth is that you do not change your life when you fix every piece and call that healing.
You change your life when you start showing up exactly as you are. You change your life when you become comfortable with being happy here, even if you want to go forward. You change your life when you can love yourself even though you don’t look exactly the way you want to. You change your life when you are principled about money and love and relationships, when you treat strangers as well as you do your CEO, when you manage $1,000 the same way you would $10,000.
You change your life when you start doing the truly scary thing, which is showing up exactly as you are.
Most of the problems that exist in our lives are distractions from the real problem, which is that we are not comfortable in the present moment, as we are, here and now.
So we must heal that first. We must address that initially. Because everything else builds from it.
We must be brave and confront that discomfort, sit with it even if it churns our stomachs and pinches our faces and makes us certain we will never find a way out. (We will.)
We must listen to what’s wrong, feel it, move through it, allow it just to be.
The truth is that this discomfort is the true problem, and we are running around trying to fix one thing after another because those are all just symptoms.
If we become okay with money, we’re onto our bodies. If we’re okay with our bodies, we’re onto our relationships. Once we master all the things we care about, we start at the beginning, we try to level up, to change, to fix, to identify a problem that is any problem but the actual problem at hand.
When you start showing up as exactly who you are, you start radically changing your life.
You start receiving authentic love. You start doing your best and most profitable and effortless work. You start laughing, you start enjoying things again. You start realizing that you just needed anything to project all this fear onto, so you chose the most vulnerable and common issues in life.
When you start showing up exactly as you are, you cut the bullshit.
You declare to the world that you will not only love yourself when it sees you as worthy.
You will not only have values when you have everything you could ever need.
You will not only be principled once you get where you want to be.
You will not only be happy once someone loves you.
When you show up as you are, you disrupt this pattern. You accept love now, abundance now, gratitude now, happiness now, everything that you really want now, now, now.
The goodness of life is no longer reserved for some version of you that you’ll probably never be.
This was always a game for you to explain to yourself why it is you didn’t feel good naturally, before you knew how to start showing up and allowing your feelings.
When you still lived in the darkness, you had to suppress that and project it onto other issues.
No longer.
You are showing up as you are today, and you are taking what’s yours. Not what belongs to some imaginary version of yourself. Not what you think the world thinks you’re worthy of. You, here, now.
That is the true healing.
