Do not remain loyal to your negativity as though befriending it might protect you from it.
To desensitize yourself in this way is not a form of strengthening yourself quite the opposite.
You must lovingly cement your belief in yourself, you must be able to hold the contrast within you up like two scales and balance them.
You must be able to see yourself honestly and focus only on the bad.
That’s not honest.
That’s not whole.
And that’s not who you are.
Receiving disapproval from the outside only shakes us if there’s something inside of us that is beginning to believe the same thing.
EK #02
You are worthy of love because you are willing to love.
That’s all it takes.
We often think love requires us to tally up all of our flaws and all of our strengths to see who matches up with whom.
We often think that if love does not transpire into something long-lasting, it’s because we are in some way lacking something that would make us a clearer choice.
Love rarely works like that. We connect with who we connect with.
It’s mysterious; it’s a force from within us and beyond us and it rarely ever makes sense until we’re reviewing it all in retrospect.
Sometimes, our hearts and bodies know things before our brains can rationalize them, and one of the hardest things is to see if we will trust that, if we’ll believe in that if we’ll pursue that.
Sometimes, doors close even when we beg them to stay open because we are being protected from what we cannot yet see.
We meet people, it’s electric, and we can’t understand why.
But sometimes too, we are just not ready for that and that’s okay, too.
Sometimes, there’s someone or something else waiting on the other side.
Sometimes, we’re not quite the people we need to be to sustain that level of connection. Love is not always linear.
EK #03
The people who have not yet come to see their envy as a signal to the spaces in which they are destined to excel will see your growth as a threat.
Grow anyway.
The people who have not yet reconciled their desire for deep change in life will see your changes through only the lens of fear.
Change anyway.
The people who have not yet found their voices will think yours is too loud. Speak anyway.
The people who have not yet healed their wounds will find your wholeness naive. Rejoice anyway.
EK #04
You are often most afraid of what you are meant for it is one of those funny little things about being alive.
You are afraid of the unknown but life is almost nothing but a series of unknowns.
But you are afraid of change, and growth, when you are designed for nothing but.
You are most afraid of love when you want it more badly than anything, most afraid of your greatness when it’s practically pressing out of your skin begging to be released.
That is why facing your worst fears often leads you to your greatest growth.
It’s often behind that wall that you find what you have been searching for all along.
EK #05
An under-stimulated mind is one of the most quietly dangerous human conditions.
You exist with the fear of how you might be incapable of achieving what you desire when the true barrier is figuring out what you want to work toward, what you want to fight for, and what you want to use all of that untouched energy inside for.
When that momentum has nowhere else to go, it tends to turn inward on you, to make you question and doubt and feel as though something is fundamentally and irreparably wrong with you.
The human mind needs to be challenged: it needs to be given questions to answer, solutions to find, and consistencies to familiarize itself with.
Your journey is not what life is easiest or most direct, but what engages you at the fullest level.
EK #06
If you do not yet know what choice to make, then it is probably not time to make it.
There is probably another area of your life that is asking to be nurtured, developed, and strengthened instead.
New factors to your decision-making have not been introduced yet you don’t know what you don’t know.
There is a strong possibility that you are premeditating a future decision that will need to be made eventually, but not today.
When that day does arrive, you will know what to do.
You will know what to do because you spent this preparation period strengthening your sense of self, clarifying what it is you want and what it is you value in life.
If you do not yet know what choice to make, then it is probably not time to make it.
Give yourself space.
EK #07
Sometimes, you sabotage everything around you because you don’t know how to ask to leave; you don’t know how to say you’re ready to go.
You sabotage relationships because you think you aren’t ready for them, even if you want to be.
You sabotage opportunities because you don’t want them, even if you think you should.
Sometimes, your subconscious mind speaks to you most clearly and not through what you choose, but what you don’t choose.
It serves you to look beneath your impulses and inquire why would want it to be this way.
That answer is the beginning of the rest of your life.
EK #08
When you repeatedly tell yourself that you’re going to make it to the life of your dreams, your brain begins to do something magical it begins to seek out the route.
We often look outwards at our lives to tell us who we are, to define us, but in truth, it begins oppositely.
Life affirms what you consistently think. It finds ways to the visions you hold for the longest periods.
Your work is not to look around and find the door but to just believe in what you’ll find on the other side.
EK #09
Growth is not always predictable.
Sometimes, you are closest to your greatest breakthroughs while you are moving through shadows so thick, that you can barely see an inch ahead of you.
Sometimes, the strongest lessons come through quickly because something is waiting just around the corner, though you do not yet know it.
Sometimes, you are exhausted because your attention is being guided to what’s draining you, what’s taking more than giving.
You may think you know where you are on the journey, but you don’t always.
Healing can be spontaneous, it can be prolonged, it can happen in waves and bits and pieces and in the most unexpected ways.
Let it surprise you.
EK #10
If you follow the silent guidance within, the part of you that’s leading you, intuitively, to the next right step, and the next right step after that,
You’ll discover that many of the experiences you chalked up to random life encounters were not that at all they were forming you into the person you were meant to be.
You’ll look back and realize that every piece of the path was, in some way, an answered prayer something you wanted, something you needed, or something inevitable that you had to learn to deal with.
Every turn was strengthening you in ways that would have been inconceivable at the time, but here you are, standing, with an inner wisdom deeper than you realize.
One day, you will see the purpose of it all.
EK #11
It is interesting how often you are in the grips of conviction that you cannot live without something, very often the same thing that you also feel you might not be able to live with much longer.
That sense of dependence is not a sign that you’re meant for that thing, person, or place and that your consideration of parting with it is an error.
It means that there is some part of your self-concept that is so wrapped up in its presence it is asking to be released.
Begin there with the mending of the part of you that thinks you might not survive if not for this singular, transitory element of your life.
Once you are back on steady ground, the answer to how to move forward will become obvious.
EK #12
More than a five-year plan, you need a vision for the next hour, the next day, and the next week.
If you fill your immediate future with the things, you know are good for you, the things you know are productive, you will arrive somewhere worthwhile, even if you cannot see beyond that horizon right now.
If you learn to live with integrity in the present, one day, you will wake up and realize you are fully immersed in the peace you have been practicing for a very long time.
EK #13
Sometimes, the things that feel good aren’t really good for you; and sometimes, the things that don’t feel good are what you need.
Your life has to be delineated into segments where you engage with both what soothes and what expands, what nurtures and what fulfills, what is wanted, and what is necessary.
One without the other will not do, and will not last.
You must both strengthen the edges of the life you have already drawn out for yourself and be willing to stretch beyond it not just outward, but inward.
Making way for a deepening, a homecoming.
EK #14
Prioritize the depth of your connections as opposed to the width of them.
It is entirely possible to find yourself in a crowd where you have never felt less alone, less understood.
What matters is not how many people you can surround yourself with at any given time, but how much time you spend with the ones who see you,
Who values and prioritizes you,
And who feels like the family you’ve chosen?
EK #15
If you are not yet where you want to be, go find the souls who are standing on your desired horizon.
Surround your- self with the people who you admire, who you trust, who you would want to grow to be.
Much of your development happens by osmosis, an unconscious acquisition of the traits and thought patterns of those around you.
If you are not yet where you want to be, surround yourself with those who are.
It will light your path.
EK #16
The world will begin to see you the way you see yourself because;
you will hold yourself differently,
you will carry yourself differently,
you will speak differently,
and you will love differently.
Your self-concept is the root of it all, the end and the beginning, the place from which all other relationships stem.
You owe yourself your approval, your appreciation.
You owe it to yourself to become as you’ve always wanted to be.
EK #17
What’s true for you now will likely not be true forever.
You are not the status you hold within this world; you are the awareness behind your eyes that can absorb interpret, and feel into what it sees.
You are a field of momentum, you are a visitor to this world, from the next.
And you are the colours you see and the chords that make you feel something in your chest.
You are divine, you are human, nothing and everything all at once.
If you learn to define yourself outside the lines, you find a certain kind of freedom.
No longer is your worthiness hinging on what you think you have or don’t, how you’re seen or not.
You are not what you’re holding, you are the hands that are holding it.
That distinction is the difference.
EK #18
The compulsion to prove oneself does not reinforce your sense of self-worth; it slowly diminishes it.
It leaves you living on the cusp of constantly finding just one more thing to prove you’re in the right group, you have the right things, and you’re on the right path, like everyone else.
It does not come from a place where all things beautiful will emerge, it comes from a place that denies that beauty, that assumes it to not be enough.
When we seek affirmation from the outside, it’s because our first-person experience is being numbed out by the wall we built around our hearts, our feeling capacity.
Dismantle it, piece by piece.
The more your life is enough for you, the less you will need it to be enough for other people.
EK #19
You will become most concerned with how you are seen when you are not okay with how you are feeling.
It is in actuality far simpler to convince the outside world that you are confident and free, and a much deeper process to become that way.
It requires an unfathomable amount of bravery there is nothing more trying than letting your pent-up pain pass through you, extracting the lessons that need to be learned, and moving on with faith that brighter days are ahead.
There is nothing more trying, and nothing more crucial.
EK #20
I hope you find the courage to change course as often as you need to.
I hope you never let your ego keep you on a path you know is not right for you.
And, I hope you understand that life was never meant to move in straight lines and that most of us live in a state of being too scared to even admit that what we spent so much time constructing around us was built with fragments of foreign, unfamiliar dreams.
It takes a lot of heart to release it all into nothingness and begin again, building a life that is specifically, simply, and perfectly your own.
