When you watch TV, go on the internet and explore social media you can immediately see that today society demands perfection. We are expected to be super fit and healthy, successful and rich, perfect parents that don’t hit or shout at our kids ever, have the perfect relationship where we travel the world together and never fight with our partners, and we’re positive all the time because since the “law of attraction” is all the rage if you’re “negative” you’re immediately cancelled.

Imagine the pressure that is always put on us!

I know it’s not that you see it written anywhere. “You must be perfect or you’re not enough.” But, lack of self-intimacy, emotional maturity, and unhealed trauma leads so, so many people to unconsciously create false identities and masks in an attempt to feel enough.

We put up fronts. We only share our best moments and achievements. We smile on camera even when we don’t feel joy in our hearts. We applaud the fantasy fairy tale social media stories, and don’t even realize that it’s making us feel like the problem in our lives is that we don’t have enough and that we haven’t done enough. That we aren't enough.

So instead we do, and do, and do, and do, and take action, and take action, and take action. Because we have goals to achieve and identities to hold onto. We feel like we have to “be somebody” to be enough. We have to prove our worth. We feel like everything falls on our shoulders and that if we stop acting, if we start being, if we let go, it will all fall apart. It’s as if our entire life depends on our capacity to sustain the hustle, to sustain the image, to sustain the identity, and we simultaneously require ourselves to be in control and “okay” all the time.

It’s the modern day version of hunter-gatherer survival.

And let’s face it. It’s exhausting. It’s life-sucking. It’s unnatural.

We try to do it all. We try to have it all. We try to mold ourselves to the social blueprint of what it means to be worthy, and the consequence lives in our bodies, our emotions, and our energy.

Fatigue, fogginess, disconnection, sadness, depression, confusion, disappointment, shame, guilt, stress.

Our emotions reflect the negative consequences of no longer knowing how to just be. No longer knowing how to rest. No longer knowing how to be joyful for no reason. No longer knowing what alignment feels like. What our true, natural state feels like.

We have been stressed for so long, and seen everyone around us stressed for so long, that this “normal” lives as physiological programming in our bodies. Our bodies don’t know how to let go of tension because they have been taught to live in action, protection, survival, problem-solving and anxiety states, all the time.

It’s gotten so bad that resting today is equal to distracting. We rest by looking at social media, watching TV, or numbing through alcohol and substances because we don’t actually know how to turn off survival mode.

If our bodies remain in subtle levels of stress because of our internal (mostly unconscious) dialogue and physiological programming then overtime this eats away at our health and quality of life.

Sadly, for many, this means disease later on in life, general unhappiness and dissatisfaction, and in my opinion, worst of all, seeing life pass us by because we never actually learned to live in the present moment.

It is my belief that the most beautiful and precious gift that life gives us is the opportunity to experience the joy and magic of the now. The beauty and sacredness of the simple. The love and fulfillment of presence. And if we don’t learn to move through life a little slower, to be more relaxed, to experience what is in front of us without mentally being somewhere else, then we lose the very essence of what it means to be alive.

This show’s us how drastically important it is for us to learn to trust in life again. To trust that it is taking care of us. To trust that we are exactly where we need to be now. To know that we are not alone and that everything does not depend on us. Everything does not fall on our shoulders. In fact, we are so much more free than we know. We are so much safer than we can imagine. So much more held than we can see…

It is in coming back to this inner knowing that we can learn to relax and let go again. That we can remember what it feels like to surrender, and that it is in this experience that we find the truth of what joy looks like for us.

That may not and does not have to fit into societal expectations. It can look different for everyone of us, and is beautifully imperfect for all of us.

Our souls are calling for a deep reprogramming of our minds and bodies. For to learn to trust and surrender is a matter of shifting the unconscious belief structures and habits that give us the illusion that we have to control as much as we can and stay productive all the time in order to create a beautiful and joyful life.

This has to be a conscious effort as the programming that keeps us in these states of stress are old. They’re ancient. They’ve been in our collective programming for hundreds and thousands of years.

We must recognize that the nature of being human is to be greatly controlled by our subconscious mind as science says that unconscious thoughts make up 80% or more of our daily thoughts… So, a big part of us will continuously time and time again bring us back to the old default programming, and we have to consciously choose over and over again to act differently, to think differently, to feel differently so as to rewire ourselves to a new way of being.

And, as everything else, it all starts with the honest recognition of self and embracing the truth of how we have been and how we are in our day to day life.

Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to others, like in my case. Many tell me I always seem calm and relaxed, and sometimes I am, but often deep inside there is a subtle level of stress and anxiety, still, after so many years of being committed to my healing.

You don’t have to be in extreme, obvious levels of stress (though many people do live this way!) to be impacted by what I share here. There are levels and intensities. And, I suggest that a low level of constant stress and anxiety is extremely unhealthy even if the person is functional and successful in other areas of life.

How can we become more relaxed and conscious in our daily way of existing? How can we let go of our addiction to doing and being busy, so as to find our truth that is often hidden in the silence and stillness? How can we prioritize happiness and spiritual well-being instead of achievements and goals?

For me personally, this has meant reflecting on my own stress levels and getting really honest with myself about how much it is actually impacting the quality of my life and asking myself, sincerely, if this is actually how I want to live.

It’s not.

I have some shifts to make and some healing to do. There is nothing wrong with me for feeling this way, as I promise there is nothing wrong with you either. Our bodies, our emotions, our energy are talking to us. Are calling to us! Are telling us that something is wrong. That something needs to change.

We need to learn how to rest again.

We need to learn how to be again.

We need to learn to embrace fully and openly the raw, messy and imperfect nature of what it means to be human, so we can remember how worthy we are WITH all our flaws, weaknesses and fears.

It is time to let go of our need to take on more responsibility than we can handle, to manipulate our actions and emotions, and situations so as to be seen a certain way, the idea that we have to live up to expectations of either our families, friends or society, and essentially of our tendency to be fake and deny the reality of our messy humanness.

It is this addiction and programming, or in other words, this mechanism of self-protection, that dims our light and eats away at us, little by little, day by day.

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