Every piece of you that hurts is a part of you that wants to be loved but does not know how to ask for it, or how to receive it, or how to allow it to seep into the openings where the losses and the lessons left caverns the size of your hope, your wide-eye awe, your child self, your true self; and in their place left hardness, and avoidance, and cynicism, and fear.
When we don’t know how to say that there’s a part of us that wants to be seen, we often find an unconscious way to require that it is noticed.
But if we began to recognize the most unseemly parts of ourselves not as the pieces that need to be amended or corrected or rejected — rather, the ones that most need to be nurtured and nourished and loved — we would transform.
It would all transform.
Every piece of you that hurts is a part of you that is asking you to pay attention to it. By bearing witness, by being present, by spending time. We think that loving something means to be unconditionally permissive when it is often in fact just the willingness to pay attention to the pieces that nobody else notices. To give the light of our awareness in the most tiny, ordinary ways.
Everything heals and grows when it is loved well because everything reveals its true and whole nature to us when we care enough about it to see the perfection within it. Things tend to meet us at the level of our expectation of them. When we decide to look at the ugliest parts of ourselves as the ones most deserving of love, they become the avenues to the deepest and fullest experience of being loved.
We come to find that the purpose was never to reach a completed state and then allow the floodgates to open; rather, to open the floodgates and let them fill us up from the inside out. To show us that cheap love walks beside us at our easiest, but deep love finds us at our lowest, and brings us back out into the light.
When we find it too difficult to arrive fully into the present moment, it is almost always because the quiet is telling us something we are not yet ready to hear. The longer we avoid looking honestly at ourselves, the louder our inner worlds will become. When we find the courage to look long enough into the eyes of our demons, they dissolve into crying children just asking us to set them free.
We don’t need a lot to be happy, but we do need things that are real. We do need things that grip our hearts and enliven us and make us feel like we are here for a reason, here to experience something that could only be touched by a human body, understood by a human mind, loved by a human heart. When we deny ourselves the authentic experience of being alive, we reach for more when what we really want is not to stretch wider, but to go deeper.
You don’t have to run forever. The answers you’re looking for have probably been with you all along. The journey has not been about finding that truth, but strengthening your inner resolve to choose what you have always known is right, even if the world would not understand, even if you might disappoint some people, even if it might scare you or challenge you or make you feel vulnerable in a way you never have before.
I hope you will discover that making it is not always about where you end up, but how you take each step. When you change your relationship with today, you change your relationship with tomorrow.
These words are from my book of daily meditations, The Pivot Year, which will be out next spring. You can pre-order your copy through the link in my bio. I’m sending you all love, and I hope you have a great day.
I hope you allow your life to be more than you ever thought it could be. I hope you press back on the limiting thoughts that have made you cling so tightly to the worlds you’ve already outgrown. I hope you will listen to the little calling in your heart that knows what’s really true, even if your mind doesn’t yet understand how it might be possible. I hope you will consider that maybe there’s more available to you than you even know to ask for. I hope you will let yourself be expanded, to see that there are others just like you taking big leaps in the directions you always hoped to go, but have just been waiting on the courage.
I hope you will take nothing for granted — no lesson, no person, no place. I hope you will see that everything was a teacher, even the most unlikely of experiences was in some way there to guide to your path. I hope you will have faith in the fact that everything that’s meant for you will find you, remain with you, or return to you, it is only a matter of when. I hope you will realize that when you ask for a bigger experience, you’ll first be handed the lessons that will grow you into the type of person who would have that life you want. I hope you’ll begin to see the purpose in what’s seemed meaningless, I hope you’ll never lose faith that your happy ending is still there, still waiting.
I hope you will remember that is no desire that can be within us without an equal amount of potential to make it reality. I hope you will let yourself dream. I hope you will let yourself consider more than you assumed you’d be able to have, not always in scale, but in depth and beauty and truth. I hope you will know that no experience will be wasted. I hope you know it will all eventually add up. Most of all, I hope you will realize that the journey was the becoming, not the arriving. I hope you’ll give yourself the chance to enjoy the journey while you’re still on it.
Growth is what happens when the selves we once were reach a threshold where they can no longer carry us forward, and in their place, new and truer selves must emerge, and form. When we effortlessly adapt, the process feels easy. When the old parts of ourselves that were constructed in response to fear and trauma resist their own alchemy, what rises within us is this sense of panic and disarray, and if we are not careful, it is the very moment where we are most at risk of adopting the most limiting beliefs of all: that what is most familiar to us is most correct for us; that who we have been is who we will always be.
It is less important to ask “Who am I?” than it is to ask: “Who would I like to be?”
Who you think you are is very often just who you’ve had to be. In some ways, that’s the truth of all of us — a patchwork of everyone and everything we’ve known, and loved, seen, and done. But we are also amendable, and as much as the outside world has nurtured our sense of truth, so can our internal ones. We are, in larger ways than not, of our own making.
That is the most empowering notion, and also, the most terrifying. There is no more defaulting in this acceptance. There is no more looking around and blaming, or holding on. There is only the choice of whether we will hurt to stay as we’ve been, or hurt to become who we might be. There is no workaround for discomfort, the shadows are rendered by the light. What we get to decide is what we’re going to endure for. What our greater intention will be. What we are going to let ourselves get used to. What we are going to reorient our comfort zones around so often and so honestly that in time, we become known to the world as we only ever once imagined ourselves to be.
Growth is when we let go of the known parts of ourselves — the accepted, the understood, the comfortable parts — in favor of building new ones. Parts that give us the inner sense of openness to love where we were once closed, respond where we once only reacted, choose where we once felt it was chosen for us, and become a kind of person that only once seemed viable in our wildest dreams.
Real change is something that happens on the fringe of your life.
It’s the tiny glimmers that peer through and reach you, unexpectedly. The small moments where you think of just one more thing you could try. Fate is often stumbled upon. The pieces pull together in ways that are often so quiet, so unassuming, in the heat of your fear, you can look right past them. You may know at the deepest level that you are meant for something more, or different, and yet don’t recognize that the journey of a hundred miles is composed of steps — small steps that are insignificant until they are taken consistently.
These little things grow to become something bigger than the sum of their parts. Within your process, you rediscover your confidence, your motivation. The bigger picture begins to cohere itself, and once again, you have something to believe in, to fight for, to hold onto. You realize, slowly but surely, that the fork in the road was a matter of you not knowing how to engage with the life you have found yourself in, and learning to do so is the character development required to be able to immerse yourself in it completely.
If you attempt to seek the greater purpose or impetus that this unlikely moment may be acting as, you will always find it. And you will find it not because it is always easily or inevitably there, but because that is what the human spirit does — it finds, it makes. And while your dead-end might seem like a road in which you were unceremoniously left at the end of, it’s more the result of a world that slowly taught you to deny the wiring in your brain that seeks to form connection, that recognizes opportunity, and acts. You have only ever been asked to do what you can with what you have, and what you have is exactly what you need, even in the lack, even in the blank spaces.
What is not there, or has not been; what has left or has not seemingly come as easily as you imagined it would, is also offering a sort of framing, a contrast, a necessity.
The most unlikely moments often contain within them a piece of yourself you have spent a lifetime looking for. Find it. Carry it with you toward your next horizon.
Though we may turn our roads to walk most closely with those who are tied deeply to our hearts, though we may intersect and collide and learn from others over the years, and though we may only ever know a few instances of complete, physical aloneness in our lifetimes, the truth is that our inner worlds are a place where there is only a voice of one. It is that voice narrating everything, and the essence of that narration dictates our experience. The level of its awareness determines not what we see, but how we see it. When we take time to adjust the way we perceive from that level, we actually change the moment we meet. We adjust what options we see, what we can create, what we are able to do.
The idea that you might take your quiet hours to work on that self is not a throwaway option or a consolation prize for not being able to participate in external love the way you might want. It’s a lesson on ground zero of what it is to be human. You will wake up with yourself every day, and put yourself to sleep every night. You will be left with yourself when everyone around you goes to work and to school and grows up and moves on and once again, it is you and you. You will guide yourself through every heartache, every loss. You will also get to cherish every victory, every success, every resounding win. You are the undercurrent of your entire life experience, the most common denominator.
The arena in which you have full and total control is that of yourself. You cannot control every passing thought or feeling that arises or experience that happens around you or to you, but you decide what you do, regardless of how you feel, or have been made to feel. And so that place becomes the most critical, the most potentially world-altering. It’s the only thing you can actually, fully assert your will upon and over, and so it is funny to consider that it’s the very same place that most people avoid. We spend eternity gazing outward and identifying all that’s wrong, but nothing too much changes, because there is little relief in realizing — perhaps my purpose is something far more difficult.
Perhaps my offering must begin with me.
The hard truth is that we are often softened, and deepened, by the moments life doesn’t turn out the way we anticipated, the way we hoped, the way we planned. The truth is that we learn more from what we do not receive than what we do. The truth is that the contrasts make us more whole than we were before. The heaviness sensitizes us in such a way that we come to comprehend the light.
The valleys in our lives can either be a waiting room, a suffering, or a preparation period. We get to choose what we do with defeat. We get to decide whether or not what hurts will simply burden and then jade us, or if it will catalyze us — if we will alchemize a sometimes brutal reality into an appreciation of our temporary, stinging, gorgeous, fleeting, surreal, confusing, perfect, chaotic, ecstatic time alive.
What ails us gives us a chance to better understand, and empathize, with what it really means to be human. And though none of us will ever meet a day in which the pain is dissolved forever, we can arrive at one where the ease arises more often. Where we channel what hurts into what heals. Where we become more of who we intend to be, and not less. Where we are not dissuaded by what has not gone our way, but inspired by the spirit inside us still fighting, still nudging, still pushing us to realize — there is so much more than this. There is so much more to see. 🤍
It is the willingness to see loving yourself not as a matter of infatuation, but as caretaking, that will change your life. Seeing self-love not as eros, but something deeper than what’s on the surface, will tip the scales eternally in your favor. Because it is that love — the unconditional, practical, grounded kind — that does not just last, but roots, and makes you stronger than you were before. It is that kind of love that does not always give you what you want, but rather, supplies what you need. It tells the truth. It does not cater to your self-defeat, but reimagines your becoming, your way forward. It serves the sake of your future self, the person you most hope to be.
This is the kind of love that can think long-term. The kind of love that knows what you need on the simplest and most fundamental level. Giving this to yourself requires the grace to endure the temporary discomfort in favor of the greater peace you foster by taking upon yourself your own real self-care.
So rather than attempting to see yourself the way you’d want to imagine someone you are romantically in love with — as perfect, and beyond your own humanness — try to see yourself the way someone who actually loves you does. To take into consideration your goodness, and allow it to not erase the unseemly parts, but make them also worth loving, and holding, and seeing to the other side.
This is your evergreen reminder that the greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you do not like.
And to remember that the pathway to that change — though inspired at the onset, is often more tedious, more unknown, and more challenging than most care to consider. However, there is nothing kinder you can do for yourself, or for your life, than to start organizing your feelings into what feels good and what does good, as opposed to just what feels good, or not. The very things that often bring us the greatest peace and wellness and stability long-term are uncomfortable at the start.
We can only find what we are meant for, when we stop running from what we are not.
When we are not writing the story of this chapter, we give our minds no choice but to continue re-reading the last. We do not let go by standing in the ruins, running our minds in circles trying to more deeply understand how the pieces came apart.
We let go when we begin building a new life in its place.
There is a time for sadness and at time to grieve. There is a time to feel and a time to reflect. A time to seek wisdom and a time to learn.
… and there is a time to simply go on.
And go on is what all of us will have to do, not just once, but at many points of our lives. Because the truth about loss is that it is not something that happens when we fail, but something that happens as we grow. It is as natural as the changing of seasons. It can be as effortless as an exhale, or as painstaking as a death to the selves we used to be.
If we do not learn how to let go, we do not ever learn how to live. We did not come here to stand still. To hold within our hearts and heads the details of everything we have ever known and loved and wanted and felt and wondered about.
We came here to experience, we came here to grow.
We came here to learn that nothing presses us to release it unless something new is imminently waiting to arrive.
I hope you allow your life to be bigger than you ever thought it could be. I hope you don’t get trapped by the small stories, the little ideas you had about what the future may be. I hope you don’t long for the things you’ve outgrown just because they’re familiar. I hope you don’t consider everything you lose to be a loss. I hope you don’t define yourself only by the limits of what you’ve known. I hope you do not cap your potential at what others have said is possible. Most of all, I hope you recognize the light when it hits you. I hope you let yourself do more than you ever thought you could.
— from my book, ‘Ceremony’
The last slide is an excerpt from the commencement speech I gave last month, which is being turned into a book. I can’t wait to share it with you all. 🤍
Sending you all so much love, always and forever.
A book you read this weekend can teach you something that changes your life for decades to come. A decision you make tomorrow can do the same. When you get better at relationships, your entire life becomes more connected. When you get better at managing your emotions, your entire life becomes more leveled-out. When you get better at managing your money, your entire life becomes more stable. When you get better at managing your reactions, things last. They last because you know how to take care of them — because you first learned to take care of you.
You are the most constant relationship in your own life, you are the most constant presence in your own life, you are the most common denominator in every experience you have ever had, and will ever have. Investing in yourself is an evergreen task, the ripple effects of which are often greater than you can imagine. You have to decide how you want to be. What you are going to value, what is going to matter. You have to choose, and cultivate, the kind of person you are going to become, because a beautiful life rarely happens on accident. You are your own vessel, and the way you build it changes the way you experience everything — every last thing that will ever come your way.
You have to decide which version of you is going to show up to the days you are dreaming about. Which version of you is going to meet the love of your life, which version of you will create your legacy project, which version of you will step on the flight or open the door to your future home for the very first time. And that work will not instantaneously click into place just because you have arrived at an end-goal, or a milestone. You are the foundational element of every single thing you will ever touch and see and feel and know, and that is why it matters.
The variable is not whether or not the future will arrive — the choice is what version of you shows up to meet it.
Maybe you don’t really find it, at least — not in the way you think. Maybe you get your dream job and then eventually, it’s just Monday morning. Maybe you find a new house and then eventually, it’s just a home that you have to clean. Maybe you fall in love and then eventually, find yourself once again wondering if you are enough. Maybe the big things carry us over thresholds and into new lives and then when the dust settles, we find that we are right back where we started and maybe, we never really left.
Maybe one day, when every milestone has been passed and everything has been achieved and everything has been saved and acquired and completed, we all wake up and realize that if we are lucky, it’s still just us, savoring our morning coffee. Maybe one day, we come to find that if the joy was not in the little things, it would be nowhere else. Because maybe one day we realize that the path was only ever walked with ourselves. And yes, there were times at which our roads ran parallel to others, times at which they intersected and disrupted one another, formed around each other and carried on. But while we steadied our gaze onto the horizon, the experience was only ever how each foot hit the ground.
Maybe we become ourselves when we stop trying to have the best of everything, but make the best of anything.
Maybe the wonder we’ve been seeking all along was the way in which we’d come to admire our own selves, and that is not a throwaway alternative. In fact, it might be the most challenging thing of all. Though we may be able to gloss over what others see, we cannot fool what we feel inside. You will know when it is right, and you will know when it is not. You can live up to everyone else’s standards and still not be fulfilling your own. You can have everything you assume others would ascribe to a life well-lived, and know whether or not you will arrive at your final hours feeling like you did what you came to do.
Maybe we were never meant to keep going forward for the sake of it, but to stop every now and then and ask ourselves: if it is not where I am going that will fulfill me, is the way that I am carrying myself there enough to make my life complete?
