Have you noticed that you live in anticipation of something that will finally make your life happy and fulfilling?
Years pass this way, life goes on and changes, but it feels like you haven’t really lived yet, and the main thing still hasn’t happened.
You live in anticipation of a happiness scenario you’ve invented yourself, not allowing other possibilities to occur. Or, even worse, you live by other people’s standards.
Why this happens, how to break this pattern and start living your own life, read in this article.
What it means to live someone else’s life and by someone else’s standards
How familiar is the following to you?
- You wait for happiness, but only under certain conditions: having a husband/wife, when I earn a lot, change jobs, buy my own home, children leave for their own lives. And then I will START LIVING!
- You search for your purpose, without which you simply cannot feel the fullness of life, set goals and pursue them, not feeling joy from the process, striving only for the final result, hoping that there, finally, it will be good.
- You live someone else’s life under imposed masks that you have voluntarily put on.
- You are afraid to be yourself, and driven by the fear of revealing your true self to the world, you escape into solitude. And you run out of it even faster, trying to find happiness in others.
- You look deep inside yourself and don’t find alignment with others’ demands, so you run into the outer world, trying to prove you’re not inferior. You constantly compare yourself to imagined idols and imposed standards.
How long ago did you unlearn how to hear and listen to yourself, amidst the external noise, unable to distinguish where your thoughts are and where others’ are?
If you are tired of this and want to understand what is YOURS, and how to finally start living your own life, use my recommendations.
See also Living for Yourself or Living for Others
Watch the video to learn how to put yourself first in your life, and why this is so important.
How to start living your own life
1. Acknowledge your thoughts and emotions and let them go
Your soul, your inner Self, the Universe, call it whatever is comfortable for you, communicates with you through feelings and emotions, only they are inaudible amidst the external chaos.
To reach you, the soul uses the body, or more precisely, the blocked emotions stored within it.
If you carry an unbearable burden — your back starts to hurt, you go to a job you hate — your leg “suddenly” breaks, you hold back irritation at your husband — a skin allergy appears.
Your body sends you important signals this way, beacons pointing the direction to the door you need to enter.
Of course, we were taught to be strong and not pay attention to our body’s weaknesses, but that is precisely where the catch lies.
It takes great courage and inner strength to begin to relate to yourself and your needs consciously.
By brushing off your body’s needs, you show weakness and slip into a victim state, taking responsibility for nothing.
You allow others to control your life when, by ignoring yourself, suppressing your emotions and body signals, you go along with external circumstances.
See also Emotional Immaturity. How to Move from Emotions to Feelings
You will learn about the stages of emotional maturation and how emotions differ from feelings.
Practice:
Close your eyes and try to track all your thoughts, one by one.
Say to each one: “I see you, I acknowledge you, I give you space.”
Continue doing this until not a single one remains, because strangely enough, they will all leave. Observe the emptiness in your head.
Then drop down into your heart and do the same with your emotions, acknowledging each one until they completely dissolve.
And finally, work with your body, with physical sensations, pain, tension — give everything space and acknowledge it.
When I first started practicing mindfulness, I was amazed by the silence living inside me.
The outer world seemed to freeze and stopped having its former influence on me. And the biggest shock was that I didn’t realize my true desires — other people’s desires stopped affecting me, but I had none of my own.
Read: How to identify a true desire — 3 signs.
2. Start feeling
I remember just a year ago, I would literally fall into some emotional pit every single day. And each day was a surprise for me — I never knew which emotion would “attack” me.
This led to total distrust of myself; I wasn’t sure of anything. Today I love — tomorrow I don’t, right now I like my job — but tomorrow I’m overcome with hatred for it.
Such emotional instability will be characteristic of you too, until you learn to become aware of your emotions, accept them, and understand what purpose they serve for you.
There are no bad or good emotions, and when a kind of demon awakens inside you, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. Under no circumstances should you brush off negative and unpleasant emotions.
Your task is to fully experience each one, and then, strangely enough, it will release you.
Such inner “swings” are a sign of trapped emotions: they are intense but short-lived and unstable.
Harmony and peace come into your life when you begin to live through feelings.
Go into the depth of your consciousness specifically for feelings. They are truthful and constant; they will fill your life when you start to feel — you will begin to LIVE YOUR LIFE!
It is through feelings that you become aware of your true desires.
See also: How to maintain the joy of life
Instructions for bringing joy back into life
Practice:
Take a sheet of paper and write down all the negative emotions you are experiencing right now. The main task is to “catch” each emotion and give it a name.
Because behind irritation with your husband, suppressed anger is often hidden, and behind fatigue from work — the fear of losing it and being left without money.
Single out the most intense one and find the place in your body where it “lives.”
Feel its size, shape, density — maybe it has a sound or a color, how static it is, or how fast it moves.
Rate its intensity on a scale of 1 to 10 and how long it has been with you.
Thank it and yourself for deciding to experience this emotion, ask what purpose it serves for you, what it protects you from, talk to it, and let it go.
Say it directly: “You have fulfilled your function and you can be free. I am grateful to you and I am ready to live without you.”
3. Fill up and share
The ability to fill yourself with energy and share it is one of the components of a woman’s purpose.
Let me clarify right away, I am speaking specifically about feminine energy. About energy that is calm, sensual, cool, flexible, and flowing like a river.
And if you are an active woman with a bright energy, you will most likely say while reading these lines: “Well, this isn’t about me.”
Your grandmother and mother, and you following in their footsteps, took on so many masculine functions that at some point they became so habitual that you decided they were yours.
You learned to manage active solar energy, which allowed you to survive and endure difficult moments.
But if you stop, slow down, let go of control, you will soon understand that fighting, achieving, and winning at all costs are masculine tasks.
And ours, the feminine ones, are to feel, to desire, to enjoy the process of achieving a goal, to give the world our positive emotions, to be happy and to share this happiness.
Remember? “What a woman wants – God wants!”
I will repeat once more – this is about true feelings and desires, it is about honesty and sincerity towards yourself, when we are not afraid to go deep, to bare our feelings and show them.
And it is such incredible freedom when you open up and simply live!
See also 6 steps of a woman to her true freedom
4. Cultivate a sense of self-worth
Living in a society built on a masculine model, it is difficult to be a woman.
She has been equated with a man and the same demands are made of her. Women are not protected from attacks and insults, and have forgotten how to trust men.
But once upon a time, the birth of a girl in a family was considered a gift.
A girl, and later a woman, was considered ideal simply by right of her birth and worthy of all respect.
She was always under the patronage and protection of men; she did not need to prove that she was worth anything, or to earn the love and recognition of those around her.
A girl was considered a value in and of herself.
Can you imagine with what dignity such women carried themselves, and how difficult it is to imagine them competing with men in their abilities and wanting to defeat them?
To understand that you are worthy of happiness simply because you exist, that you don’t have to earn it or prove your worth to anyone, and to yourself first and foremost – this is so important and valuable, and I truly wish this for you.
5. Live a simple life
When you simply exist – it doesn’t matter what tomorrow will bring.
Let go of all ideas, turn off your mind, allow everything to happen and unfold.
Real life is in the simplicity of the moment: simple situations, simple relationships and feelings.
Allow all of this to be. Let go of the idea that you know what you need for happiness. You don’t have enough courage or imagination to envision what fate has in store for you.
Until you understand this, all joy from possessing something will be temporary, and blessings will always seem insufficient.
Surrender the management of your destiny to the universe. There are no goals other than the one you are pursuing right now.
See also How a child’s perception of the world can help you return to your true nature