You have such a beautiful soul, it’s infinite and ageless. You’ve always seemed older and wiser than your years, a twinkling bright star in a dark, desolate sky.
You’re at that crossroads where you’re no longer a girl but you’re not quite a woman. You’re changing and your emotions are up and down like a roller coaster while you make sense of who you are and how you fit within this world.
You’ll deal with situations throughout your school years that will swing wildly along the spectrum between euphoria and hurt. Most days will be filled with laughter, new adventures and making memories as you grow and explore. Some days, however, will feel like the worst thing in the world, like your life is crashing down around your little ears and you’ll believe that nothing will ever never be the same again. It will be fine. We all feel sad and need to withdraw and recharge our energy. Now and again you’ll need to calibrate your focus, dust yourself off and relocate your path.
I wish you could see yourself as I see you, you’re tougher than you can imagine.
You’ll look back one day and realise how free and easy your life was and that you wasted so much energy and emotion worrying about issues that were simple and insignificant. The people who you spend so much time and effort on will probably fall by the wayside and you’ll go your separate ways. Don’t worry about what they think of you, their opinion won’t matter soon enough.
You’re so sensitive at the moment, you haven’t toughened up to this harsh world and believe me, there’s a multitude of challenges to overcome before you feel ready to grab hold of your life and shake some confidence into it.
But, you have something that I never had at your age, you have me and I’ll always be there to fight your corner, help you slay your inner dragons and encourage you to keep following your own bliss.
You and your brothers taught me how to love, you make me proud every day and I worry for you every day as you go out and make your way in this confusing and sometimes scary, world.
I wanted to give you the advice I wish someone had given me, so you can let go of the negative baggage faster, learn how this life stuff works and be the best and most authentic version of you sooner. These things may not make sense right now, but what I’m doing is planting a seed and trusting that your limitless universal mind will take care of the rest…
You only ever feel your thoughts, not your external experience.
Forget emotional tags like ‘happy’ ‘anxious’, ‘excited’ or ‘annoyed’. All these ever point to is the quality of your thoughts within that moment. Your thoughts are feeding your feelings 100% of the time and the power of your consciousness brings this process to life.
So, nothing outside of yourself can make you feel anything, it’s all an inside job.
If you don’t like how you feel, realise that you’re stuck in a thought, don’t try and analyze or change anything about the thought, there’s no need. Analyzing or trying to change a thought implies that there is something wrong with the system that is you, that there is a problem to fix. This couldn’t be further from the truth. You’re not broken, you are just looking for something where it is not.
Just becoming aware that you are feeling a thought and then taking your awareness into the feeling for a few moments will dissolve the thought & feeling completely. You will have a new thought in a moment, or it may even be the same one, but it matters not. Breathe and come back to the present moment.
You will realise that you’re not really feeling apprehension for an upcoming exam or audition, it hasn’t happened yet and you can’t see into the future. You’re actually feeling the thought of the exam. It’s a trick of the mind.
Joseph Campbell said, ‘I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.’ Awaken to your own innate power, create some space in your thinking and allow your soul to shine.
Thoughts are energy flowing through consciousness
They have the capacity to make you feel good or bad but you’ll realise that just because you think it — doesn’t make it fact.
Your thoughts exist to help you make sense of the world. You don’t have to act on them and you don’t have to dwell on them. They help you plan and problem solve because they’re a great tool for analytical thinking but again, they’re not real. They’re just energy moving in and out of your conscious awareness, like waves rising and falling on the ocean.
Fear and attention can’t share space
Fear is essential to human survival, it tells you when you’re in danger and helps your body produce adrenaline to fight or run. As you get older, your self-confidence will be tested and the approval of others may make you feel fearful, believe me I’ve been there, bought the T-shirt and wore it ragged.
Everyone gets scared, some are just better at hiding it. If you avoid doing things because of fear (of judgement, making a fool of yourself, etc) you’ll never know what you’re capable of.
What you’ll realise is that fear and attention can’t coexist. Whenever you become aware that you are feeling fear, understand that you’re stuck in your head — you’re stuck in your thinking. You may be thinking about what you’re going to say or what could happen if you decide to speak up. Whatever it is, as soon as you become aware of the feeling of fear you can get out of your head by paying attention to the situation you’re in and the fear will instantly dissolve.
This won’t make you less responsive, if you are ever in a crises, your thoughts will automatically quieten and you will know exactly what to do. Fear won’t come into the equation, you will just do. Fearful thoughts are an illusion, smoke and mirrors!
Outside-in & Inside-out
You love buying new things, possessions can make you temporarily happy but soon the novelty will fade and you’ll be on the look out for the next beautiful thing that catches your eye. Nothing outside of yourself can really make you happy and content, permanently. If you want to be happy you have to explore your soul, reconnect with your innate health and live through the feeling of connectedness.
There are no mistakes, you’re who you are because this world needs you, just the way you are.
You’ll sometimes be fooled into thinking that something outside of yourself will make you feel a certain way when you get it. That once you attain that ‘thing’, you’ll be happy, confident and life will be wonderful.
You’re actually giving your power away.
Expecting something outside of yourself to make you feel a sustained emotion on the inside of yourself is a trick of your ego.
When you focus on life from the inside-out, you become quiet, peaceful and insightful. Your innate health and wisdom helps you via intuitive thoughts and your inner light inspires others to be true to themselves too, because they see and feel the ease at which you float through life, putting the peaks and troughs into perspective and believing that everything is exactly as it should be.
Everything you will ever need to feel completely peaceful is already inside you.
Listen and show up as you are
The more you turn down the volume on your internal chatter the more your inner wisdom has an opportunity to show up. Being present is not always easy but by choosing to listen consciously to your thoughts and to what’s going on inside you is a good place to start.
You’ll learn that your internal critic is comparing every situation and conversation to your beliefs, your upbringing and your cultural prejudices. If new information doesn’t fit, your internal critic will be there in the background to complain and confuse everything. It will aim to convince you that the information is wrong because it doesn’t match your current model of your world.
Because of this you could miss something huge, a new theory or opportunity that would otherwise rock your world and send you off on a new trajectory. You could miss it because your subconscious has already dismissed the information as irrelevant so it never appears in your conscious awareness. You’ll know that you are listening to your ego if you see that your thoughts are based in the past or the future.
Your ego can only survive in time. As we are only ever living in the present, your ego will aim to pull you into your history or your future, as much as possible. Self-preservation is all your ego is concerned about. By listening consciously, showing up in your life and turning down the volume on your inner critic, you open your mind to a world of possibilities.
You’re enough
One of the greatest things you will come to realise is that you’re enough.
There’ll be moments throughout your life where situations will challenge that concept. You need to understand that people who are not as deep as you will not appreciate the effect of their negative words. Just remember that their words and actions are a reflection of them, not you.
You’ll come to understand and appreciate that people will get stuck in unhelpful thinking and will become emotional because they’re feeling their own thoughts. Because you understand this, you will be able to move forward without taking things personally and you’ll be able to help others understand their humanness. You will be able to locate that place within you that has innate mental health, a peaceful expanse of energy where you will be free from fear and concern. You will realise that you are enough, you always were and you always will be.
She is clothed in Strength & Dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future. Proverbs 31:25
Awaken and awaken others
One more thing — You are already awake, you just don’t know it yet. You are already connected to the energy of life, you just don’t always feel it because you are looking in the wrong direction. You have perfect mental wellbeing 100% of the time, you just feel Thoughts sometimes that make you believe otherwise. As you look inside (and by this I mean to acknowledge that this experience is coming from you) you will be less in your thinking and more in the moment, then at some point it will happen. You’ll relax and your core being will unfold within, filling you with an immersive feeling of connectedness to the universe.
You will have dropped out of your head and into your heart. You will be free. In that moment, you will be a lighthouse to others who are still in the dark.
Shine brightly, Seren, you were born to light up the sky.
You are so loved, you’re strong and you’re resilient. You have your Mother’s Gypsy soul and your Father’s warrior spirit, but what makes you so powerful is your own innate intelligence and an appetite to make the world a kinder more peaceful place, there’s nothing that you can’t do.
You just have to put your mind to it…
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