Get clear about the type of life that you prefer. What is part of that life? What isn’t?
Next, passionately go about creating that life. Live that way. Allow the feeling of your preferred life to influence your actions so that they are automatically creating the type of environment that reflects that feeling.
The feeling must come first; it must be second-nature to you. The external experience follows.
— Sohail Desai
The thought that holds the idea of your dream is made of the same stuff as the thought that holds the idea that your dream is out of your reach. One thought is not more powerful than the other. Both are equal and either can be chosen just as easily.
— Sohail Desai
LOVE YOURSELF UNCONDITIONALLY. The fact that you exist is proof enough that you are loved by the Universe. Don’t argue with the Universe by judging yourself or doubting your deservability. You belong, just as you are.
But WHAT ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? These are the first questions you must ask of yourself. Are you who you think you are? Are you who others say you ought to be? The answer to the question is deceptively simple: You are who you choose to say you are. That is what it means to be unconditionally loved. You get to be whoever you want to be and the Universe will support you in being that person. So, if you say you are only acceptable if you conform to what others say you should be, your experience shall reflect your declaration. On the other hand, if you say you are who you want to be, you shall instead be that. You are utterly free to choose who you prefer to be. You always have been. You’ve been choosing every moment of every day and you’ve been experiencing the results of those choices. Not happy with those choices? Choose again.
To choose your true preference, however, you must BE HONEST with yourself and with others. Always be honest about what you prefer and what you don’t prefer, for yourself. Lying to gain acceptance from others is an act of allowing others to dictate who you should be, by their acceptance or denial of you. By being honest, you sift through your life experience, choosing what you truly prefer to incorporate into your identity and what you prefer to leave out. You then create an identity based on your honest truth, rather than the truth of others.
To do a good job of sifting of life experience, you need to get out of your head and PAY ATTENTION to that experience. To not pay attention to your experience is to repeat it. Paying attention to your experience, concluding your own preference about it and creating new desires is the process of your life unfolding. Those preferences and desires give shape and direction to your life.
It is then up to you to FOLLOW YOUR DESIRE, which will lead you on the path of being you. Live according to what you have concluded. Follow your own intuition and your own passion. You will then fulfill the reason you were birthed by the Universe. You will have realized the joy of being you.
For you to follow your own desire, however, you must TRUST THE UNIVERSE. The Universe is supporting you in numerous ways, many of them implicit. Your distrust of it has been unreasonable, because if it truly was out to get you, you probably wouldn’t even be here to read this. Realize this and open yourself up in trust to the Universe. Your joyful expansion depends on it.
Lastly, spread this message of wellness, not by telling people about it, but by living it. Be yourself and allow others to be themselves. HONOUR OTHERS’ CHOICES. They are just as free as you are to choose whatever they prefer. Allowance is the key. Allow them to be.
No matter who you are, your past contains just as many, if not more, triumphs than shortcomings, and it is not more virtuous, no matter how much you think it is, to highlight those shortcomings over those triumphs. What you highlight from your past, in the present, creates your future, so you must step outside your shortcomings and highlight your triumphs if you are to move into a triumphant and desirable future.
— Sohail Desai
To experience true freedom is to give up the need to control. This is what makes freedom both our greatest aspiration and our greatest fear.
— Sohail Desai
If you’re not happy with who you now are, don’t be afraid to start over. Don’t be afraid to re-invent yourself. Don’t be dissuaded by others who think they know you, who hold a concept in their minds of who you should be. If you have to, surround yourself with new others. Make new friends. Meet people who have no concept of who you should be. Move to a new part of town, or to a new town altogether. Start over, and over and over again until you’re happy with the self you’ve created.
— Sohail Desai
At some point you will decide to take that leap of faith and simply allow yourself to be who you want to be. At that point you will decide to follow your joy and to trust the process of life from that point forward. It’s just a matter of when you decide to make that decision, whether it’s right now, 5 years from now or 5 lifetimes from now.
— Sohail Desai
All is perfection. It is only due to our limited perspective that we do not see the perfection in everything, in every moment of life. When we declare something as imperfect, we are making that declaration from the same limited perspective. We are making a declaration that what we call imperfect does not belong and has no purpose in existence, when the very fact that the “imperfection” exists is proof of its validity. Its validity and purpose may only be to facilitate change, but in that context it is perfect, if we perceive it as such. By seeing the perfection in the imperfection we can accept the imperfection and allow it to serve us positively, rather than resist it and be served negatively by it. All moments are perfect in that they hold lessons to lead us to the next moment. All “imperfection” is an invitation for us to expand our perception so as to include the imperfection in our definition of perfection.
— Sohail Desai
Surrendering to life is not giving up your reasoning. It is accepting that your reasoning is limited and so cannot truly grasp the reasoning of life itself. The reasoning of life, that is the way life finds solutions to problems, is infinite. Life is literally full of an infinite number of solutions, since it is, by definition, all solutions. Surrendering to life means you understand you cannot grasp the truly infinite number of ways your problems can resolve themselves, because your mind is but a limited idea, capable of thinking finite thoughts. Surrendering to life and living in openness to it, rather than restricting it with your mind’s reasoning, allows life to show you how problems can be solved. It requires trust on your part and it requires you to accept that the solution sometimes may not make sense, or it might, or it might only make sense in hindsight.
— Sohail Desai
Sometimes it is more beneficial to act in the way you prefer before your mind gets in the way and starts analyzing your actions. In other words, sometimes it’s better to act before you think. This is especially true when making a significant change in your life. For example: say you’re a shy person and want to become more outgoing and confident. If you have already made the decision to be outgoing and confident you may get the urge or inspiration to suddenly say hello to somebody, or start up a conversation. At this point, if you think before you act you may start to anticipate what will happen in the conversation, and since you were previously a shy person, you may anticipate the worst, which will lead you to ignore the inspiration and revert back to being your normal shy self. Instead, it would be more beneficial to start the conversation and feel the change within you. The consequences of the action may surprise you in that they may be completely different than what you used to imagine as a shy person. Even if the conversation goes nowhere, you will have moved out of your comfort zone and grown a little, which is always relatively exciting compared to staying in your comfort zone and staying the same. To put it another way: when making decisions, you can literally think a decision to death, creating no action because you are too afraid to take any step, which then creates stagnation and misery. Many times growth requires you to be out of your mind.
— Sohail Desai
Does it feel weird when you imagine yourself living your desired lifestyle? If it does, the weirdness is telling you that you are resisting changing yourself to become the self that lives that life.
The question now is, why are you resisting? The reason is simple: you have identified with your current lifestyle so completely that the change feels alien to you. You can’t comfortably imagine being the self you desire to be because you cannot identify with that self yet. Your identity, your sense of self, is derived from your current life and so changing your life leads you to the unknown. It leads you to a new alien identity and so you resist changing for fear of losing who you are or who you know yourself to be. This resistance is what is keeping your life the same. You want to be the other self but at the same time you don’t and so you feel conflicted, keeping you exactly where you are, yet unhappy with where you are at the same time. It’s a recipe for misery.
What would happen if your life completely changed this instant? What if tomorrow morning you are living the life you dream of? How would you truly feel? Would you feel comfortable stepping into those shoes and living that life fully? Would you feel comfortable being joyful, spontaneous, creative, loving and abundant, assuming those are the attributes your desired self expresses? Would you feel comfortable smiling, laughing, playing, and just generally behaving as that desired self behaves?
What if you started behaving that way right now? What if you identified with your desired self right now and behaved as that self even if your life didn’t change? How would you feel? Would you feel like you’re deceiving yourself? Like you’re acting or pretending? Be honest. If you would feel like you’re deceiving yourself you are still too identified with your current self or your current life and it will most likely be very difficult to make the change into your desired life- because all difficulty rises from resistance, from not being willing to change like you desire to change.
The trick is to stop identifying with your current life, stop identifying with your current identity, your current story. Instead, you can start identifying with your desired story, your desired life.
This doesn’t mean you deny your current life, but it does mean you stop deriving your identity from it and stop becoming it. Instead you step outside of it and see it as a story you were playing, which you can now change. You need be able to see your true infinite identity, which is the creator of all stories, not the limiting story itself. This happens through understanding that your identity must be outside of your life situation, otherwise you wouldn’t even be able to see your life situation or your desired life situation. You and the situation would be one, and you would truly be stuck in it, without even knowing there was a way out.
Become aware of this true identity and you will have found the key to your freedom and to the reality of your dreams.
Once again, the difficulty in making this change arises because you don’t know who you are, but you think you do. You think you are your current personality, your current story, but you are not that. You are the undefinable awareness that gives birth to the story. Remember this and you’ll be free. Remember this and you won’t feel as weird when imagining the life you desire, and you will be that much closer to living that life.
Don’t allow life or anyone else to define you. Don’t even let your own mind define you, unless those definitions work for you, unless those definitions bring you joy. You are the awareness that allows the mind to be. Don’t let others who have confused their own identity, who have become trapped in their own limiting definitions to cloud your perception. Become clear. Become the grandest vision of yourself that you can imagine. Live the life of your dreams. Live through the uncomfortableness, let go of the old limiting definitions and become comfortable with the new self and the new life.
What if money was no object? Narrated by Alan Watts
Misery is greatly underrated. We like to avoid it as much as possible, but a period of deep misery can be one of the most productive and beneficial periods of our lives. Misery occurs when there is resistance within us that hinders us from being who we wish to be. It arises when we have desired to be a certain way, but stopped ourselves from being that way due to baggage we carry from our previous way of being. Misery allows for a period of sadness, anger, and depression, which takes our focus away from the external world and redirects it to our inner world, within which we can release the old identity we no longer want to identify with and move into the identity we desire to move into. It allows for introspection, to help find out why we hold onto our past, a past that no longer serves us and actually hinders us as we choose to become who we now wish to be. So the idea is not to avoid misery but to feel it fully so that we can find out what the misery is conveying to us. By doing so we can then let go of the old resistant ideas that create the misery. This is the path to being the people we wish to be and it is the path of happiness that we seek. The more resistance we hold, the more misery we will create and the longer our path to happiness will be.
— Sohail Desai
The feeling of doubt arises when you’ve attached your identity to a previous form of life so fully that you do not fully believe you can create a new identity by attaching to a new form just as easily and naturally. Releasing resistance by letting go of your previous idea of yourself and fully moving into the new idea of yourself allows the doubt to dissolve.
— Sohail Desai
All progress is made when there is refusal to remain defined by the past.
— Sohail Desai
