Relatively early in my healing journey I had a revelation. It may not seem like much, but it is the most profound realization I have ever had, and it greatly helped me to shift my life in a nano-second. It is that I am the only human being on this planet who gets to live MY life.
I know that sounds simple and not all that profound on many levels, but to me that realization was like gold. Up until that point, I had done everything to please other people – my parents, my family, my teachers, my bosses, my friends, my clients, virtually everyone in my life. I had built the life that I was “supposed to” or “expected to” live. I had followed the “right path” as it had been laid out for me by other people. But it wasn’t truly my path. Yet for so many years I felt tied to it and constrained by it. And although I was good at many parts of it, it never felt quite right, outside of my conditioned response to gain love and approval by meeting other people’s expectations.
This very simple realization was such a freeing epiphany for me. If I am the one and only person on this planet that gets to live my life, then my opinion of it needs to matter to me more than anyone else’s opinion of it does. I realized that anyone who had opinions about my life and how I should live it and who I should be in it gets to make their own decisions about their lives, but they don’t get to make decisions about mine. Only I get to do that. Just like only I am responsible for, and capable of, creating my own happiness. No one else can do that for me.
I realized I had been giving my power away for my whole life up until about the age of 41. Because I cared more about what other people thought of me and my choices than what I thought about myself and my life that I alone was building. I trusted other people’s opinions more than I trusted myself and my own inner guidance. And in doing that I gave away my power.
When you create a whole life based on what other people want for you, it can feel pretty hollow at the end of the day. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t feel right. You always feel like a fraud, because in many ways you are. You aren’t being true to yourself and everything in you can feel that, although our minds are great at justifying it away. It feels “safer”, but in reality, it isn’t at all.
I was so disconnected from myself that I had no idea what I wanted or how to really create it. I just knew I wanted something different. Something that felt real, more authentic and connected to me. And I quickly figured out that I was the one and only person on the planet who could figure out how to create that for myself. Even if it was messy and imperfect. Even if no one else understood what I was doing or why. I did and that was all that mattered.
Wayne Dyer was an early spiritual teacher of mine that I really loved, and I regret not ever getting to hear him speak live. I first came across him in one of his many PBS specials, and his teachings gave me real hope that I could figure this out. From him I learned that if you change your thoughts you can change your life. That anything is possible. That we have the power to create the lives that we dream of living. That we can get out of our own way by ceasing to make excuses for why we aren’t living our ideal life, and take actions instead to make it happen. That we had to take responsibility for what was showing up in our lives, and just as we had created those things that maybe we weren’t so happy with, we could create different and better things just as easily. Listening to him share his vast wisdom in his kind, calm, friendly voice always made me feel better, happier, more optimistic, and I will always be grateful to him for that. There are a few special people who I realized that when they left this earth I felt like the world had been a much better place when they were here, and he is definitely one of those people to me.
This was the beginning, but definitely not the end, of my process of learning to trust myself and the universe. That all is exactly as it should be. That we learn the things we need to learn at the exact right time. That there is purpose in everything that has brought us to where we are today. That we alone are capable of tuning into and trusting our own unique paths, and reconnecting to what we are here on this planet to be, do and experience. And that our biggest guiding light through this life is what brings us joy.
From that day forward, I decided that I was going to follow my own path, no matter where it led me. That for the rest of my life I was going to do life on my terms, to the best of my ability. I had done it their way for 4 decades. Now it was time to find my own way.
Since you are the only person on the planet who gets to live your life, what is one thing that you might start doing differently to honor the life you most want to be living? Let me know in the comments to this post.