What did I learn today? Lessons on the Journey to Unconditional Self Love

  This month, I am choosing authenticity. Not the version shaped by old wounds or the fear of being too much or not enough. I mean the real thing. The me beneath the armour. The me I sometimes hide even from myself. Over the past few months, a couple of  questions kept circling me : Who really knows me?   Who have I allowed to see all of me — the soft parts, the fierce parts, the uncertain parts, the sacred parts? And the truth is… I couldn’t answer with certainty. Not because I don’t have people in my life. But because somewhere along the way, I learned to tuck pieces of myself away. To manage people’s perceptions. To avoid conflict. To keep the peace. To be agreeable. To be “fine.” But “fine” is not authenticity. “Fine” is survival. And I am no longer living a survival life. When I look honestly, I see how past experiences taught me to shrink, to edit myself, to stay safe. But safety at the cost of self is not safety — it is self-abandonment. And the price of that ...

  There are seasons in life when we cling tightly to the plans we made — the timelines, the expectations, the versions of ourselves we thought we needed to become. We hold on with both hands, believing that certainty is safety, that structure is protection, that if we can just keep everything in place, nothing will fall apart. But life has its own rhythm. And it rarely asks for our permission before shifting. Sometimes the paths we plan with very little room for flex end up becoming the very things that limit us. Not because they are wrong, but because they are too small for who we are becoming. Too rigid for the wisdom that is trying to move through us. Too narrow for the future self who is waiting on the other side of our surrender. What I’ve learned — again and again — is that there are possibilities available to your future self that your current self cannot yet imagine. You don’t have the vantage point. You don’t have the lived experience. You don’t have the clarity that only ...

  Every day, I remind myself of something simple but not always easy: the ego’s main goal is to survive, I=Yung Pueblo said this and I agree one hundred percent  It will defend itself — sometimes blindly, sometimes loudly — even when there is no real threat. This is the human condition. This is also the human work. I’ve learned that the ego is not the enemy; it is simply the part of me that wants to feel safe. But when I cling too tightly to my thoughts, when I treat every perception as a fact, when I let old stories run on loop without question, the ego becomes a restless narrator. It pushes me into defensiveness, into proving, into circling the same point over and over instead of listening, softening, or expanding. So my intention — my daily intention — is to live from a place of balanced ego. Not ego erased. Not ego inflated. Ego balanced. Balanced ego feels like this: I am not threatened by every disagreement. I am not unsafe just because I feel uncomfortable. I can notice...

  There are some truths that arrive  — gentle, but impossible to ignore. Lisa Olivera’s reminder was one of those taps for me today: Words don’t just describe. They summon. And it made me pause. It made me listen to myself a little more closely. Because if words are seeds, then every sentence I speak — to myself, to others, even in the privacy of my own mind — is planting something. Something that will grow. Something that will shape the landscape of my life. And so I found myself asking, just as Lisa: What am I growing from the words I use to describe myself, my life, and the world? What am I making more vivid that I actually want to release? What am I refusing to allow simply because I refuse to practice new ways of speaking about it? What truth have I not yet put into words because some part of me is afraid of summoning it into being? These questions sat with me. They still are. People often tell me I don’t speak much. And they’re right — I am mindful of “wasting w...

  There is a distinction between being and doing. We know this in theory, yet life has a way of calling us to live it out in real time. You can be doing all the “right” things — showing up, checking the boxes, moving with intention — and still feel untouched, unmoved, unchanged. When the doing is loud but the being is quiet, something inside begins to tug. A restlessness. A whisper. A knowing. And that whisper says: Go deeper. But what does deeper mean? I’ve been sitting with that question today. Letting it breathe. Letting it stretch itself out inside me. Deeper can be releasing control.  Deeper can be surrender — not the passive kind, but the holy kind that says, “I trust what I cannot yet see.” Deeper can be making a different choice when life presents you with the same old pattern. Deeper can be sitting in the stillness without an agenda, without a performance, without a timeline. Deeper can be listening — truly listening — to the quiet voice beneath the noise. Deeper can ...

    Delays have a language of their own. I would in the past believe that delays came to frustrate us or throw us off course. I have now learnt that sometimes they arrive as quiet teachers, asking us to slow down long enough to hear what we’ve been too busy to notice. Other times they come as mirrors, showing us the places where we still rush, still grasp, still try to force life into our timing instead of trusting in divine timing. I’ve learned — and I am still learning — that every delay carries a message. Sometimes the delay is asking me to endure, to hold steady, to not let panic make decisions on my behalf. Sometimes the delay is asking me to pause, to breathe, to gather myself before I move again. Sometimes the delay is asking me to pay attention, because there is a lesson tucked inside the waiting. And sometimes the delay is simply saying, Not yet. Not like this. Not from that place. I am one who likes to rush to the solution, rush to fix, rush to do something — anythin...