Dare To Live

"By being yourself, you put something wonderful in the world that was not there before"

Some weeks, I'm not even messing, Instagram just speaks to me. Ugh seriously, quotes like this have been repeatedly popping up the last week and each time I see one I have a real moment of inspiration. And they just keep on coming, be yourself, celebrate your uniqueness, be unapologetically authentic - with me frantically double tapping each one.

Because I love this idea, I love the value of genuine, committed authenticity and of how much power we all have just by being who we are. But, try and write a blog post about it and my inspiration quickly turns to desperate deflation. Not because I'm not passionate about it or uninspired, but because we've all heard it before - I've definitely written it before. We've been told to be ourselves, to love ourselves, to be really real. And we've probably also argued about how difficult it is to do that and how we want to but don…

In line with today's topic, I want to keep this one simple. With such an inundation of information out there for us to feast our minds on at any given time, now and then we just need to pare it all back and get to the point.

The picture shared on our Facebook page today inspired this one. The concept of 'under thinking' is probably fairly foreign to many of us. With over-active, over-analysing, over-thinking and overly anxious minds, we're used to our thoughts exhausting instead of empowering us. So while we're fluent at second-guessing, ruminating and panicking, the language of simplicity might ironically be more tricky to translate.

The idea of under-thinking means stopping ourselves. It means honestly listening to ourselves. It means ignoring the 'what ifs', and the 'should/could've/would've's. You know all the words, questions and fears that distract us from what we really want - the ones that are experts at creating problems and making us…

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world." Buddha

Within our racing minds, we are constantly typing out the tale of our lives. With each and every thought, we re-affirm what we believe, we tell ourselves the stories of who we are and what our lives are all about. And then we can watch it all unfold right in front of our eyes.

Occasionally we can get fairly fed up with this fabrication. We realise that we don't actually want to be in this particular plot anymore. It's the bit where all we want to do is put the damn book down - it's gotten kind of challenging or boring or even that little bit too real and we don't like it. We get uncomfortable, depressed and quite simply want to escape it. 

You know the one - when we get to the chapter that narrates how much we hate our jobs, how we don't feel good enough, our dreams seem out of reach, our self esteem is on the floor, we feel like we can't keep u…

I thought I'd write a poem this time. I got really inspired recently to get back writing in this way so here it is. The idea was about feelings that we don't like, you know the ones, that rush over us and can seem to effortlessly ensnare us in a rut. I just wanted to share the line 'This too shall pass' as this is one I would've repeated to myself over and over when I was feeling down.
Even now, when I'm feeling out of sorts, I know and trust that it'll pass. Nothing lasts forever, so whatever comes up will go away pretty soon after arrival. We have to learn from these feelings and recognise that quite often, they come with a message. Once we listen, they've got plenty other places to be so we can let them go. But it's good to learn not to be afraid of these feelings, even when they're absolutely un-frtickin-bearable. They'll pass, I swear.

Awash with apathy, that familiar affliction We spin ourselves the debilitating fiction Of the fact that we…