Awareness Begins

 Have you ever started to recognize how different you are from the people around you? How you don’t fit into your environment? Don’t worry—you are not alone. For most of my life I was the “shy” “quiet” “unrecognizable” kid that blended into the background. I ate most of my school lunches alone, and didn’t make friends very easily throughout junior high and high school.  When I reached “adulthood” and made my way into the workforce, a pattern started to recur that I wasn’t aware of until it sent me down to the ‘Dark night of the Soul’. That pattern was telling me that “I’m not likeable”, “Everyone hates me”, “I’m not good enough at my job”, “I don’t belong here”, “No one cares about me anyways-why try”—this went on and on at every job I had (which always lasted for about roughly 2-3 months, until I wanted to quit and start again) until I finally started to take a closer look at what was happening within myself. I’m going to be honest, this took YEARS to understand and recognize what it was that I was going through in correlation to how I saw myself. It took narcissistic relationships (romantic and friend of a friends), abusive relationships, on the job bullying, long nights crying and thoughts of everyone's life would be better without meーkind of years.

   I’m going to be honest, substances also played their part. I recall times when I was new to the use of substances—as I never partook in them whilst throughout high school, but that one relationship changed everything for me. He introduced me to his world, and at first I was of course naive and just did and took what he thought was best for me. If you count yourself lucky to never be as gullible as me, then I applaud you. Nonetheless, it came to the point where that was the foundation of how the relationship would go. I’ll skip some of the sob stories and how I was the butt joke of almost every party, to how when I was introduced to mushrooms—they started to slowly change how I viewed myself and the world around me. I began to see images of myself inside a butterfly and the Love that is within me being expressed inside my mind's eye. Let’s just say I started to fall more in love with this being and all that she is. While psychedelics opened a door I hadn't known existed, they didn't do the work for me. They simply showed me there was another way of seeing. The real transformation came afterward—through months of reflection, learning to sit with myself, observing my thoughts, and choosing, every day, to become someone new. Now, I’m not saying that this is the answer by any means for just any and everyone. Just how it played a part in the shift of how I viewed my life and everything in it. 

  This was the awareness shift that I needed in order to figure out who I AM and what it is that I needed to live a life that I’m not only happy to wake up to, but to be able to share this experience with others. As I said before, this takes YEARS of practice and the will to improve your life and cultivate it each and EVERYDAY! Being mindful of the thoughts that you experience, not attaching yourself to them, learning to sit in stillness—yes stillness, I could not preach this enough. Stillness gives the mind time to recalibrate and experience just being without all of the noise from the external world that has its own ideas on who we are and what we should be doing. I discovered that my most meaningful moments of creation came from stillness. The world that we experience is created from what’s within each of us, and once we realize this as fact—you begin to see things shift in your favor in subtle ways. Life flows within you, and from you. This is your time to decide who you are, what you want, and how your life moves from this point on. The map to your destination lies dormant waiting for you to realize what you need—you already have. Don’t wait for the world to tell you, because you’ll never be able to fit in their box. When you finally start to Love and accept yourself no matter what voices or noises you may hear from either externally or internally will slowly fade away, and you will be born again. This is the cycle of death and rebirth that we all must go through. Constantly shedding parts of our ego to transcend reality by knowing that this is all a part of the plan. I’ve observed that everything happens for a reason, and that you were guided here for a reason. 

   Awareness is where every Journey begins. Before there is healing, there is seeing. Before there is change, there is recognition. This first Chapter isn't about having all the answers—it's about noticing the patterns that have quietly shaped your life and finding the courage to look within. Everything that follows begins here. Remember who you are.