Ever had that uneasy feeling when you think about something you said or did. Playing it over and over in your mind because it somehow seemed a little out of character or that it wasn't you even though it was.
In life we are taught to go to school, to learn, to become but we aren't taught about our emotions, about our minds. How our thoughts and emotions affect how and why we behave the way we do. As we transition through life we build up layers around our true selves like layers of an onion through the things we are told and the thoughts we have about ourselves. These are then reinforced over and over and they become our beliefs about ourselves. They are ingrained and cemented over time, that at times we cant really decipher where they originated, where they came from. Leading us to loose touch with our truest selves at the core because it is swallowed up by all these layers.
So we start to seek, looking for what we think will make us happy, what others say will make us happy, what the world has taught us is the measure of success and we believe that this will give us happiness. We seek things that are outside of our control and this leads to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness leaving us unable to live the lives we want because we are suffocated and drawing in feelings of despair and negativity.
We have societal norms we aspire to and when we begin to interrogate these we realise that the way we see our lives is not based on our truest understanding of the aspirations of self but instead on ideals that we were taught.
But what is happiness to you? what is success? When we stop looking outside of ourselves for an answer and turn inward instead we start to peel back the layers and unearth our truest selves. We interrogate where these beliefs came from, where the thoughts that turned into beliefs originated and we start to break them down. We remove and replace these with thoughts that serve us better and cement these into our beliefs. By doing this we are building ourselves afresh so that we are able to connect with ourselves better and find what happiness means to us and what our true measure of success is.
By changing our learning and breaking the cycle we can have a better impact on those who will come after us. When we begin to truly face ourselves as a society we will begin to drive out these baseless ideals about happiness and success perpetuating a cycle of despair.
So break free from the chains and challenge yourself to look inward and discover your truest self because when we know and understand ourselves better, we not only change ourselves but we change the world and make it better.
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