Lying in bed, this question popped up “What am I doing with my life?”
Recently I had a realization that I was still striving for success, so that I could provide for my family, give my future kids a better life than I lived, and…well not have to “work” anymore.
We all strive for that don’t we? For future happiness.
And we continue to live in discontentment and the what ifs, preparing for future disaster, but never looking life in the face. I remembered a 30 ish year old friend telling me that he wish he had started doing what he loved earlier, that he should have given up what he loathed to dive head first into his love, his dream. This day, he is living his dream despite the obstacles, rejections, failures…but he is reaching his dreams.
Even though I teach everyone around me to live their dreams, out of necessity, I felt myself slipping into “what do I need to do to get by, to make it”, I started following patterns that bored me and copying peoples’ tactics… I lost my creative heart.
When you lose your creative heart out of daily obligations and “necessities”, you lose your ability to create INSPIRED work out of a creative heart. A Creative Heart Derives from Love and Rest.
The other night, I was on a floatie having a heart to heart, and it struck me so hard when he said “sometimes when things are not going the way you want it to, you have to let go and then you’ll start to do things the way you did them when you were really good at it… artists paint out of their love for painting and expression, versus the need to produce an artwork“.
I posted this on Facebook-
“I had an epiphany today….what am I doing with my life?
I know I seem very inspirational and I am doing a lot of different things to actualize my dream, but what if all I want to do is lounge at the beach, get a tan, play music and be a part time hippie? What’s so wrong with that?
And maybe I really don’t want to be Asian Oprah or travel the world or manage multiple businesses, maybe I just want to grab my backpack and disappear into the jungles and deserts of the Middle East and South America.
Maybe I have still been succumbing to society pressures to be someone I am not. I believe if you focus on what you love, your dreams will chase you versus you chasing the dream.
I started teaching yoga and meditation because I was doing yoga as a hobby and posted pictures online. I was also giving people advice on how to solve their problems and create boundaries. Someone who saw my pictures asked me to teach a class, and the rest is history. Someone else referred me to a dance studio and I took the opportunity and grabbed it by the horns. I created 1 session of 4 classes, printed fliers, walked around town dropping them off at cafes, created videos, facebook invites, meetups, now I am registering people for the next 2 sessions. Was it scary? Yes. Was I doubtful that anyone would even sign up? Yes. Was I scared that I would lose money? Yes. Everything that I was scared of I faced and slapped away.
Another example of how something I naturally did turned into work was —I posted inspirational statuses on facebook and a newspaper editor asked me to compile those, NOW I write a monthly column.
If you do what you love, you will organically attract opportunities. That’s what life should and must be about.”
Life is not seeking opportunities outside of you,
It is knowing that everything is within you, waiting to be manifested into reality.