🔑 Inside-Out Living: Your Key to Happiness

Read time: 5 mins 
 

🗣️ Quote of the Week:

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Rumi

The voice within tells us we aren’t good enough.

It says we need more before we can feel successful.

We grip on tight to our external world because we fear who we’d be if we lost it.

Relationships, money, jobs, houses, clothing, etc...

But when did we learn this?

When did we first learn that who we are isn’t enough?

When did we first learn we needed to prove ourselves to be worthy?

Or to earn money.

Or be more attractive.

Or people-please in order to gain love & acceptance.

At some point, we learned that we need to behave a certain way in order to feel love.

And so the cycle continues into adulthood.

We get stuck in a world based on relativity and comparison.

How much money I make…

How nice my car is…

How perfect my little family is…

How big my muscles are...

Compared to my neighbor.

These things are based on the subjectivity of the mind.

There’s no substance in them once your mind & perspective is removed from the equation.

And there is no suffering if we don’t accept the story our mind is telling us.

The nature of the mind is to fear. To be human is to have a mind. To suffer is to be human.

We try our best to hide our fears of insecurity, inadequacy, and scarcity from the outside world.

Acting as if WE must be the only ones who have these thoughts.

A tiring, exhausting balancing act of always feeling like we have to wear a mask and put on a show.

Never truly able to dip into our real self beneath it all.

The Self that has been calling for us ever since we “learned” we weren’t enough.

The Self that has unlimited capacity to handle all of life’s challenges.

The Self that is an endless supply of love.

The Self that has been waiting for us to come back home.

To remember who we are at our core and drop the facade we give to the outside world.

What would it feel like if you could be truly, authentically you?

If you weren’t run by the judgment or fitting in every moment of every day?

If you could live, think, and feel freely?

Who would you be in the absence of your biggest fears?

How would that change how you showed up in the world?

To express your true nature and allow creativity to channel through you.

You have this power.

This version of you already exists within you, and it’s been trying to make contact with you your whole life.

Most of the world is living from the outside-in.

Trying to get every ounce of their outside world perfect before they allow themselves to feel happy, content, loved, successful, fulfilled…

Because we don’t control the outside world, this is a futile and disempowering effort.

Instead, we need to shift to inside-out living.

“As within, so without.”

To realize everything we’ve ever needed has been living within us.

To focus on creating a deep, loving relationship with ourselves first and foremost.

To tap into the inherent source within and find everything we’ve been seeking.

4 years ago, I thought this was BS.

That the answers were out there somewhere and I just needed to find them.

But when I heard life is neutral and only the mind creates meaning, everything shifted for me.

The answer to overcoming our fears is to face them head-on, not to run from them.

Not to numb, bury, or override them with external stimuli.

It takes deep work, introspection, devotion, and a lot of tears, but in the end, it’s worth it. 

Tim 🖤