This is the final week in our Soul Gym Group together, and I want to express my sincere gratitude for being on this journey together.

Thank you all!

As I felt the gratitude of being gifted with the community of so many wise and compassionate souls, I remembered something that I learned many years ago, and that has stuck with me since then.

Truly grateful people speak a slightly different language than ungrateful people.

They use the language of 'gifts', 'blessings' and 'humility', which mean that they move from taking things for granted to taking them as granted.

We can take the amazing people and goodness in our lives FOR GRANTED or AS GRANTED.

This is such a powerful distinction that literally turns your life upside-down!

Think of the benefits you received today as gifts. 

Then feel what it feels like to relish and savor the gifts you have been given.

For example, we often take for granted all of the astonishing modern benefits that make our lives possible: like a warm house, fresh water, a car, the Internet and all the other magical marvels of modern life. 

Or maybe we take life for granted and think that: ‘life owes me something’ or ‘people owe me something’ or ‘I deserve this.’

Making the shift to see that it’s ALL one big GIFT is at the heart of gratitude. 

In order to truly see the blessings in our lives as being granted we also need to cultivate humility.

In gratitude and humility we turn to realities outside of ourselves. 

We become aware of our limitations and our need to rely on others. 

In gratitude and humility, we acknowledge the myth of self-sufficiency. 

We look upward and outward to the sources that sustain us. 

Becoming aware of realities greater than ourselves shields us from the illusion of being self-made, being here on this planet by right—expecting everything and owing nothing.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.

The humble person says that life is a gift to be grateful for, not a right to be claimed.

Humility ushers in a grateful response.

Once again: Thank you all for the gifts you've brought to this group 🙏😊❤️

I went to a dinner party at the weekend and met some new people.  It's a rarity for me these days as most new people I meet tend to be online!  (And, to be honest, as a highly sensitive introvert, I tend to prefer my own company.)  In fact, I'd forgotten how delightful it is to engage in interesting conversations with interesting people, who aren't necessarily business owners (like me) or spiritual (like me).

We connected over our mutual love of food - cooking, baking and eating.  Quite apt since each guest contributed a dish they'd prepared and so we enjoyed each other's cooking.

Afterwards, I realised that much of my headspace is focussed on my business and I haven't been giving much space to my other interests.  

I also realised that there's space on my life for all parts of me and all of my passions.  And I deepen these passions not just by exploring them solo, but also in the company of others.

And so, my takeaway from this past week is to embrace the joy of connecting with others in person and enjoy the delight of fun conversations.

Yet trying to be perfect in my life had me feeling disappointed, stagnant and always lacking.

Because, the truth is the idea of "perfect" is pretty unattainable, so a person who has this as an intention, will always raise the bar higher. 

Raising the bar higher can sound like a good thing and it can be, when it comes from a place of:

"I've accomplished this level in my life, now it is time to get to this new level and I'm now going to work on it."

But when it comes from a place of:

"Whatever I've achieved so far is unworthy, no one will appreciate it, I need to to try harder and make it better than what it is. It needs to be perfect"

It needs to be perfect 

...before I present it

...before I share anything about it

...before I move to the next step

This can be a slippery slope of endless loops of having to make what we are working perpetually better and more perfect, before someone witnesses them. 

Whoever has worked on an art work, knows that there is point where if we work on something trying to make if better and more perfect, we actually make it worse. And many times, going back to how it looked like before it's impossible anymore. Ending up making things even worse.

It is a complete disappointment when this happens. Because all the work that has gone into this artwork is destroyed just like that. 

So, there is a point where progress meets perfectionism where things start to become dysfunctional. 

It has been a journey to learn to define this point for me in my life and be able to be ok with imperfect action. And it still is, as I have grown to think that perfectionism is a skill, while the truth is that perfectionism is beautifully masked procrastination.

This past week I came across this paragraph from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. I think it is so timely as I am ready to do my inner work. 

“There is no need to investigate the unconscious past in you except as if manifests at this moment as a thought, an emotion, a desire, a reaction, or an external event that happens to you. Whatever you need to know about the unconscious past in you, the challenges of the present will bring it out. If you delve into the past, it will become bottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become more free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key.”

Although I'm a deeply spiritual person, a lot of the mainstream spiritual understandings are in my opinion dangerous and greatly misleading for people.

Like the notion, that everything we are looking for is inside of us. So, we just need to look deep enough and we will be able to bring in in the surface and live happily ever after.

A lot of the people that have shaped those kind of quotes are the people who are advocating for looking on the inside for everything and that if we can't create something for ourselves when we are on our own we will not attract it on the outside.

They also carry a lot of relational trauma. Which means that they might have had to look on the inside for everything since their childhood because the outside was extremely traumatising to look or experience.

The result is people who have a difficulty accepting that happiness can come from other people. Love, compassion, understanding, joy, pleasure have to be created on the inside because the probability of them coming from the outside is thin or non-existent.

Of course there is value on actually looking on the inside, created that fertile ground for manifesting the things we want, but if we were supposed to create everything on our own, we would incarnate on a planet on our own and explore that for a lifetime. 

We live in a world were other humans exist, because we NEED their help in order for us to feel, expand, create, understand, evolve. 

There are numerous people that I've worked with that will tell me things like:

"I'm trying to create my happiness from within"

"I'm lonely because I spend a lot of time alone, but I shouldn't be feeling like that, I can work it out from the inside"

"I can't have a partner that loves me because I don't love myself enough"

The result of this is:

- More loneliness

- Confusion as to why the outside is not responding to the inside

- Moving into addictive and overindulging habits or stagnant emotional states

- Burn out from thinking that they are supposed to be their own best friend, counsellor, father, mother, teacher, partner, entertainer etc instead of asking for help

- Resentful, seeing others getting more results with less effort 

Yes, there things we can achieve on our own from the inside out, yet nothing will actually change in our lives if we are not witnessed by other humans, sharing our experience, asking and giving support, relating and learning from our interactions with others.

Staying on the inside work is doing half the work and means we are too scared to actually relate to others. 

I wonder, how many people would say that their happiest moment in life was a moment they were alone at home trying to be happy. Probably not many.