The greatest gift you can give to someone

I have to say this topic is very close to my heart, because I have been the recipient of this wonderful gift more than once in my life. One of my most memorable moments was at a time where I felt my life was falling apart, and I couldn’t see a way through. I was blessed to have a friend who understood the pain I was in and gave me the great gift that quite possibly saved my life. She heard me. She reached out and cancelled whatever she had for the rest of her day and gave me her entire day, without any hesitation. She dropped everything to be there and witness my pain. She knew that allowing me to share what I was feeling would lessen the burden of holding onto such suffering and she listened. She didn’t just listen, she validated my pain, and my life. In those few hours I had her complete attention and compassion. She listened, she cried and she got angry with me. She felt my pain as if it were her own, and in some ways it was, she had gone through a similar trauma in her life, and in that moment I felt something remarkable. For the first time in a very long time I did not feel alone and I felt the strength to face my problems. I will not go into what it is I went through just yet, but as I write more blogs I will start to reveal aspects of my personal journey. Suffice to say I am a young women who has faced a lot of tragedy and setbacks in a very short amount of time.

After my experience, I gained insight into what it is every person needs at some point in their lives, if not all the time, and that is the need to be heard, to be understood, and for their opinion to matter to someone. Human beings are hardwired for connection and companionship, there is no greater form of suffering or more insidious cause of illness amongst people than the emotion of loneliness, and the feeling of unworthiness. We all want to feel we belong somewhere, and we all crave to be heard. Not merely for the sake of attention, although don’t get me wrong there are many who are just attention seekers, but this is generally caused by a deep seated insecurity or exhibitionist tendencies. I am talking about the desire of ever human being, irrespective of status, social or economic class or educational background, for validation of their life. There is nothing that bonds us as people more than our ability to listen and understand each other from a place of non judgment and empathy.

I read an article recently of a man named Matthew, who was searching for a mystery man who he claims saved his life. One Monday morning Matthew had decided he would take his own life and went to the highest bridge near his home with the intention to jump off. When he got to the bridge, as fate would have it, there happened to be a young man on his way to work who noticed what he was about to do and stopped to speak to him. The young man pleaded with the Matthew to stop what he was about to do and discuss what was troubling him. Matthew was touched by the strangers concern and decided to speak to him. The young man recounted a period in his life where he was dealing with serious depression and also contemplated doing the same thing as Matthew, but he thought of all his loved ones and the pain that his actions would cause them and made the decision that day to seek help. He managed to turn his life around, and now has a career he is excited about and a future he looks forward to. He reassured Matthew that no matter how grave the pain he was in there was always a way out and he deserved to live a good and happy life. He asked Matthew to tell him what was troubling him so much that he would resort to such drastic measures and Matthew discussed his troubles with him for over an hour. After the hour Matthew felt much better, and apologised for taking so much of the man’s time and promised he would return home. Matthew felt invigorated and was deeply moved by the strangers kind and generous gesture of stopping on his way to work and spending an hour listening to his problems. Years later Matthew could not get that young man out of his mind, the generosity he displayed that saved him from suicide, he felt compelled to thank him and see him again; that young man probably does not recall that hour of his morning on the way to work, but for one man it was the most treasured gift he could receive.

You have the opportunity to give someone the most memorable gift they will ever receive, one that offers love and care that no amount of money can buy. It doesn’t require much effort on your part except the genuine desire to really hear someone without judgment or condition, and you never know, it may even save someone’s life.

(This article is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Thao)

How to find your life purpose?

This is one of the most common age old questions that every person at some point has asked themselves, regardless of their race, gender, culture or differences. It is the question that ultimately goes to the core of our happiness, because a life lived with purpose is one that is both more fulfilling and most in line with our authentic selves. At the end of the day, most of us are striving to live the best versions of our selves. As trite as that may sound.
So with such an important question, and with so much at stake it is crucial we get this right…but we are never given clear tools or direction when it comes to this subject. If you listen to the people around you, you run the risk of receiving very conflicting advice. So what is the best advice? Follow your heart, do what you are good at, go to University and get a good job, do something that can make you a lot of money, do something meaningful. All this advice, while well intentioned can be too vague and in most cases potentially damaging. When we value the wrong things and head down a path that isn’t reflective of our truest desires the results can be catastrophic. They can lead to depression, addictions and cause us to make reckless and hurtful decisions. Psychologist and Behavioural Modeler Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka, combined scientific research data with ancient Eastern spiritual wisdom gaining groundbreaking insights to our “in built” life navigation system we know as our “brain”. However, what is so intriguing about their research is the discovery that we actually have three classified brains within our bodies, these are the head brain which is responsible for cognitive functions and imagination and creativity, our heart brain which possesses brain neurones and harbours the emotion of compassion, passion, joy and love and then there is the gut brain also known as the enteric brain which deals with our intuition, fear and courage and deep rooted emotions. Their fascinating book called mBraining, goes into great detail about how each of these brains work and why it so important to fully understand their functions in order to gain optimal use of each brain for the benefit of our lives. I will discuss the concept of the head and gut brain further in my future blog posts, but today I want to focus on the heart brain and how it is essential for finding our purpose in life.
There are a vast number of medical reports of heart transplant patients retaining the memories and even developing the same likes as their donors. There are reported cases of a professional boxer’s heart going to a young teenage girl who suddenly developed a desire for boxing classes, a young man who died in a motor bike accident and donated his heart to a women in her 40’s. She reported having strong cravings for chicken nuggets and beer after she awoke from surgery, both of which she had never consumed prior to her transplant and it was revealed later that the donors favourite food was chicken nuggets and beer. There are also disturbing cases of recollection of the donors death being passed on to the transplant recipients. There was the case of a young police officer who was shot in the face, the transplant patient was not aware of the circumstances of his donors death. A few months after he received his transplant, he began having very vivid dreams about a blunt force to the face, and would wake up with the sensation of being hit in the face. He became quite distressed over the events and began asking doctors about the details of his donor, upon further investigation he eventually discovered that his donor was a young policeman who was shot in the face in the line of duty.
So, what does this have to do with finding your life’s purpose? Everything… Ancient spiritual wisdom talks about how the heart is the conduit for receiving information from our eternal source/ infinite selves, it is the centre of that which connects us all through the feeling of compassion, that which compels a person to place his life in imminent danger to save a stranger from drowning, or a burning vehicle. Our heart is the key to our happiness and living authentically. Basically in order to know what you are meant to do in life, we are born with a directional navigator, it is directed by the feeling of joy and passion. You may have heard of people who are able to make a substantial and enviable living doing what they are most passionate about, they are usually revered as the rare and lucky ones. But they are just ordinary people who realised this basic truth. Your sole mission in life is to live as joyfully, passionately and excitedly as possible, without harming others. That state of being is your guiding post for how you should live, when you make a choice that is not the most exciting or passion filled, you may be told by those around you that it is the most practical or lucrative but this is where you must trust yourself and the Universal energy of life as being one that works for you and not against you. Your passion and excitement is the emotion from your heart brain that reveals the most about who you are, and when you follow that no matter how impractical or daunting, it will always lead you in the direction that is most in line with the path you are meant to walk on this Earth. However, the other brains are important too, your heart gives you the directions of where you need to go, but you must utilise your head brain to imagine how you will get there and the gut brain to develop the courage to take the necessary action. Your excitement may even change over time, and you may not necessarily end up where you first planned, but one thing I can guarantee if you live most of your life this way with unshakable faith, is it will lead you to a life of fulfilment and abundance, and your life will be filled with passionate excitement. Isn’t that what most of us want to be able to reflect on when we are on our death beds?
A friend of mine recently referred me to a Ted talk that coincidentally was about this very topic, the talk was made by a woman named Roz Savage who had walked away from her high powered office job because her heart always longed for adventure. She discussed how she grappled with this urge for many years, she had a very lucrative career and felt that was the “usual” path to a successful life. But she never felt fulfilled and realised that she wasn’t getting any younger and didn’t want to waste any more of her life not pursuing her dreams. So one day she gathered the courage to quit her job and seek adventure. She is the first women to have sailed the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean solo. She noted that her bravery in leaving the security of her job for a life of adventure was attributed to the day she sat down and wrote two obituaries for herself, one obituary was in reference to the safe life she was living and the second based on a woman who lived fiercely with adventure. She realised she wanted to be the latter. So there was really only one real option, to do it. These days she spends most of her life devoted to raising awareness of the environmental impact of man made waste in the oceans, and the need for changes in our waste disposal habits. Her life has now become one of passion and service. The ingredients to having a most fulfilling life.

However, there is one major catch to this, and this is the predominant reason why most of us are prevented from, or held back from, fully embracing this way of life and listening to our heart’s messages. Our deeply entrenched subconscious belief that we will not be supported if we pursue this form of life, and that it is not feasible or that we simply will wind up broke, homeless and worse off. This is a serious problem, many people have set so many limits on themselves and when we hear of stories of people who are able to break the mould and achieve their goals, regardless of how impractical it may have seemed, we tend to separate ourselves and pin point aspects of their story that makes it impossible for us to replicate; which ultimately means we can never be like them or achieve the same success. But what we fail to realise is that we are the ones setting these limits in our lives. Our imagination is the single most potent tool for making anything we want happen in our lives, and occasionally we are just a few inches off hitting the mark. Sometimes the problem isn’t not knowing what our purpose in life is, it is finding the courage to pursue it, coupled with the imagination and creativity to make it happen. You will not live forever, and you do not have forever to figure this out. Start by really examining why you have made the current choices in your life, what beliefs you have that are severely limiting you from living your most fulfilling and authentic life and work on how you can change it.

Introduction to the evolution

This is the beginning of my journey in communication with the world, my aim is to share with as many people as I can the lessons I have learned during my life, it is my hope that what I have to share will provoke a new way of thinking about the world we live in, our lives and who we are. We are the only civilisation in the known galaxy that is born into complete and utter darkness about who we really are? Where we come from? What is the purpose of our lives? After years of pain, trauma and suffering I searched desperately for answers…and one day I received a response. Synchronicities in my life became so prevalent I could no longer ignore what I was learning. Eventually I realised how my life was beginning to transform in the most miraculous and incomprehensible of ways. I started to change as a person. Evolve. And deep within my heart I know humankind is heading to a major shift, we are evolving as a civilisation, and soon our wars, hate, crime, dis-ease and suffering will become nothing more than historical accounts of our journey from total darkness to the discovery of our light.

Hello world!

I am very excited to become part of the blogging world! (finally) Thank you for taking the time to read my posts, I hope to provide some interesting articles that will start tantalising discussions about life.