If I had one wish for you, it would be to grant yourself permission to live the life of your choosing. To courageously understand the reasons behind your life’s choices to date, and allow for new choices to emerge that are generous towards you.
These choices would exclude pleasing other people, considering everyone else’s feelings first, making your life about only serving others and not yourself.
Whether it comes from kindness or societal pressure.
This letter is for you if you are constantly sacrificing yourself for others.
Always making choices that would benefit your family, your friends, your neighbors.
First and foremost thank you for your contribution.
Please know how much value you have offered to everyone in your life.
Some of this selfless giving will continue but let that not be the default setting of your actions unless you are in the aftermath of a war, natural disaster, poverty stricken community, or in a hospital where everyone is in need of help.
If you are a full time caregiver, this also pertains to you, as it is critical that you give to yourself the right kind of daily life experience. Even if it can only last an hour. That hour can nourish you profoundly.
Now that all of the above is said, let’s dive into what it means to choose a life, a day, a dream, an experience for yourself and only for yourself.
It starts with the thought, the act, the willingness to view yourself as a valuable and finite part of the world.
It is the quest of valuing your existence enough to accurately witness life through it while given this opportunity to be alive.
The irreplaceable source of inner health relies on your ability to do just that.
Offering experiences to the self where the noise of the voices around you are quieted down, equipping you with the ability to listen to your own.
Especially the noise coming from the tired part of you, the whispers of suppressed truth, the inhales of burdens that are not meant to be in your life’s bucket.
When you spend time just occupying the true space of you, you change the direction of your future.
You change the fabric of your reality.
We have undoubtedly been conditioned to think of the self as selfish.
We are being quelled. Squashed, subdued, suppressed.
In this context, we have devastatingly quelled ourselves as well as being quelled by others to live a life that either no longer belongs to us or never has.
Whether for meaning, for helping, for doing good, if done without balance it can diminish our existence.
It can cause grief.
Grief for the unrealized true nature of the self that has arrived here to become.
Imagine if you were born a daisy and you lived your life as a rose.
Still extraordinary, and beautiful but never a daisy.
Dying without ever seeing your white petals in the sun, living among the abundant wild greens, is the grandest invisible loss there is.
Don’t finish this life without shedding the rose costume you’ve been wearing.
Start by giving yourself one hour to be, do, experience whatever you want. I call it the petalling, the Greeks before me, called it petannynai, which means to spread out, to fly.
Here’s to granting yourself permission to petal every day of your life, unquelled.
With self generosity, from a modern day Greek 🙂
Christina