The journey is not how you place down what’s weighing on you, but how you learn to stop picking it up.
Not when you decide to stop, but the strength of your resolve not to begin again with the habits, the people, the thoughts, and the behaviours that you know can only lead to your self-destruction.
It’s how you release your familiar unhappiness,
How you decide you’ve outgrown the emotional crutches that have soothed you and distracted you and held you when you most needed it.
How you move forward is what you begin to reach for in their place.
EK #2
You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it’s just knowing how to be where your feet are.
It’s learning how to take care of yourself, and how to make a home within your skin.
It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of.
A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you it’s okay to slow down.
That you don’t always have to prove yourself.
That you don’t need to fight forever, or constantly want more.
That it’s okay for things to be just as they are.
Little by little, you will begin to see that life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won’t fully find us.
EK #3
You cannot desire what you do not already contain.
Desire is a projection outward that is proportionate to potential inward.
There are so many possibilities within this world, so many things to hope for and to aspire to.
There are so many things one could want, and yet, it is a very specific vision that awakens you on the inside.
There are very few things that excite you in a way that makes you nearly uncomfortable with your wanting of them.
Desire is so integral to who you are, it is part of you even if you are not conscious of it even when your ego chooses to shield you from your awareness of it.
What you are waiting on is your willingness to accept the mountain you must climb to pull those desires out of the deepest parts of you and create them in the world you already inhabit.
EK #4
Self-protection is learning how to pause what you feel and how you react.
When there is no awareness between what you perceive and the way that you respond, anything can control you.
Practice the pause.
Widen the space between what you sense and what you do about it.
Decide what’s worth your energy, because what you engage with is what you empower.
EK #5
There is great power in not knowing.
Not knowing what is next, not knowing what to decide, not knowing how you will make it to where you know you want and need to be.
Every given moment contains within it doorways of opportunity, and when you choose to walk through one, you make realities available to you that were once invisible.
When you do not know what is next, you enter the realm of infinite potential.
Instead of trying to plan your life so safely and so succinctly, you can begin to plan for the moment, the joy, the journey.
Instead of living on autopilot, you can learn how to continuously meet the ever-changing, ever-possible now.
When you finally admit that you do not know what is next, you enter the golden vortex the space between everything you know you’re meant for and anything you had previously imagined to be.
EK #6
Heal your relationship to the now, to the moment, to the liminal space in which your eyes can contract and see fear, or expand and realize that you are one particle in this massive daydream, and without you, the fabric of the world would not hold the way it does.
Release yourself into the dreamscape, and follow your heart’s deepest calling, as it is leading you to the actions that will continue to weave your life into the story of humanity.
Without you being here, nothing not one single thing would be precisely the same.
You are an integral, irreplaceable thing.
You came here to do what only you can.
EK #7
Move toward the people who expand your perimeter of possibility, who believe in your potential just a little bit more than your reality.
Move toward the people who remind you of the person you know you’re meant to be, the ones who stretch your soul and make you feel something real.
Move toward the people who remind you of what you contain, who help you fall a little more in love with life.
Move toward the people who energize you more than they drain you.
These little signs are not so little they are the markers of our soulmates, in all the forms they come.
EK #8
You may fear the quiet times in your life when your soul goes through a winter.
However, it’s often those same times when the most profound and human work of all is being completed.
Be still.
Do nothing.
It is both the quiet and the noise that writes the symphony,
The blank canvas and the paint that makes the picture,
The rest, and the movement that gives you the wisdom,
Insight, and clarity to press forward more boldly than ever before.
EK #9
Every hour is a new beginning you just don’t realize it until you remember that every soul-shifting, life-changing experience you have happens on an otherwise ordinary day.
In an instant, you meet a moment that changes your world forever.
You find the job, you book the flight, you sign the papers, you choose to make the change that changes it all.
Chapters of great transformation often feel like they carry on forever, but the truth is that they are often gardens that grow from tiny seeds that you’ve been planting for a very long time.
EK #10
Other people will see you the way they intend to.
In the same way, you have put the people you admire on pedestals and glossed over all the unseemly aspects of another human being you were hellbent on trying to love
In the same way that the souls closest to you seem the most beautiful and most easily forgivable
In the same way, you must understand the perspective of the people whose journeys you have witnessed from the beginning, whose shoes you can imagine yourself in
Other people see you the way they need to and intend to.
What matters, in the end, is the way you intend to see yourself.
EK #11
You have overcome every single thing that has been unexpected, that has been heart-wrenching, that has not gone your way.
You have built a life within the completely unknown
You have reconstructed a new version of yourself from the pieces of what you thought would be.
You have always contained within yourself the remarkable strength of the human spirit, and no matter what tomorrow will bring, you will carry that power into it, too.
EK #12
You are the peace between the highs and the lows
The sky that rests forever behind whatever storms may form and release themselves in time.
You’ll always return to what you are, you will always come back to your truth.
If there is anything greater than happiness, it is coming to this realization and living with this knowledge.
You are all that is steady and safe within you.
EK #13
Finding yourself also requires losing who you once thought yourself to be.
Cultivating the deepest and most lasting forms of inspiration often requires the most rote kind of consistency.
Figuring out what’s right for you is acknowledging that different things are right at different times and alignment shifts as you do.
Healing is often a process of being able to hold and embrace the contrasts of your experience, to embrace them, to let them be.
EK #14
Nothing feels all the way right at the beginning, because nothing is completely familiar at the beginning.
What you often don’t account for is that your sense of comfort and correctness tends to be rooted in familiarity.
The question is not whether something makes you feel immediately as though you’re unquestionably fated for it, but whether or not it grows with you.
Whether or not it allows you to stretch, to change, to become better.
That is the true test of what is right not what instantly falls into place, but what entwines its roots with yours, and allows you to most fully blossom.
Not what shows up instantly and unexpectedly, but what stays, what remains through it all.
EK #15
Eventually, you will have to stop pouring yourself into the things that will give nothing back, that take without any intent to give.
You will have to stop trying to make yourself fit into places you are no longer meant to be.
If you are going to give your energy to anything, give it to what’s already working.
To the people who already love you, to the things that show potential, to the places that make you feel more alive.
Life speaks to us in subtleties, in the smallest possible ways.
In the little clicks, the funny coincidences, the ways the ordinary collides into the serendipitous.
Sometimes, the whispers are the most accurate ones.
The voices of pride, ego, and attraction are louder, but they are often devoid of the fullness of truth.
Listen for the quiet yes, for what gently sprouts, for what grows, and grows.
