Do you remember who you were before they told you how it should be? Do you remember who you were before all the pain, all that doubt, all the clutter? Before you listened to the outside and swept aside your insides?
Do you remember who you were before you started carrying that weight?
The light might be slightly dim, but it’s there. The light – your truth, who you really are, your essence – is right there within you, but it needs you to do some letting go before it can start to shine brightly.
“The soul is covered by a thousand veils” Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sufi teacher
Shed those veils and you get to radiate your true magnificent self.
But how? And what veils?
A good place to start is to immerse yourself in quiet. The more you make time for periods of quiet contemplation and meditation, the more discerning you are about how you fill your time and the more you can tell whether you’re actually lighting your soul on fire, or numbing out and tuning out of you.
You become much more perceptive to clutter in your life. And here’s the best bit: the less tolerance you have for it.
So be choosy about what floods your ears, passes before your eyes, enters your psyche, fills your inbox, lines your bookshelf. Create space by saying yes to that which makes you soar, and no to everything else.
The more stillness you allow yourself, the more you can begin to notice how your mind gets carried away with thoughts and notions that don’t make you feel good. If that’s where your focus lies, Life will keep on giving you more of the same.
In the same way we need to address our physical clutter to bring in the new, we also need to recognise clutter when it’s ping-ponging in our minds so we can get rid of it. So that there’s room to hear Life’s subtle nudges. Those nudges don’t shout or carry on like your mind chatter does; they whisper to you, so get quiet.
But those obstacles you have in your life…
Those outer ‘obstacles’ we have in our lives are there to point us to our inner obstacles. It’s all divinely orchestrated to call us forth and grow. It’s not that we’re being tested (although it can feel like that at times!); it’s more an invitation to rise and ask what within us is holding us back.
What if we decide we want to see things differently so we can begin to bring more ease into our lives?
What have you been carrying and holding onto that you don’t want to carry forward into the rest of your life? What baggage (physical, mental, emotional) can you leave behind? What stories and patterns are you ready to let go of?
And what are you ready to usher in? What can you do to feel able to receive? How can you get out of your own way so you can welcome what comes your way?
Decluttering, healing (and reframing) old wounds, understanding your fears, cultivating sacred rituals, being present to guidance can all serve to expand and intensify your dance with Life. They will invite you in, on and off, as you make the choice to remember who you are.
When you step up to that higher perspective, there’s so much waiting to meet you. You elevate your life. The new can’t co-exist with the old. One has to go first. So let it go. And then just you wait.
I’ll be telling my own story, and exploring this in more depth, outlining actual steps you can take in an upcoming workshop at Embrace Life Festival – Northern Beaches. Plus I’ll be talking about the ONE thing that I believe is absolutely crucial for this kind of transformation.
Vanessa Teklenburg is a Radical Surrender Visionary and a Remember Revolutionary committed to empowering those who want to believe there’s more to Life than what’s out there, who yearn to reach their essential truth in a way that feels sublimely freeing, who wish to follow the divinely guided path of joy and resonance.
You can find her on Instagram and Facebook, and through her website.