Not every moment of every day can contribute to a perfect sequence of life experiences, but you will find purpose in the most subtle moments.
Even the most senseless series of choices and coincidences will bring you somewhere profoundly clear; it’s impossible to know the full impact of the moment you are in right now.
You don’t have to trust in what you cannot yet see but be willing to give yourself wholly to this moment and let it transform you in the ways it’s trying to.
You know more than you think you do.
EK #02
Nobody tells you that death and rebirth can occur all in the same body.
That the past, once so familiar, can begin to feel like a fact that can be recalled but holds within it no attachment, as every cord to it has been released.
Nobody tells you that the experiences once so clear within your mind can fade into nonexistence; nobody tells you that you will eventually think about every last thing that haunts you for the very last time, and you will not even realize it is the last.
Nobody tells you that there are parts of you that you will come to meet that feel like new beings emerging from nothingness, right alongside the pieces of you placed down years ago that you assumed you’d never find again.
And nobody tells you that some things will always remain.
Nobody can explain the intricacies and complexities of what your life will be about, because that is for you and you alone to determine.
That is the revelation that you alone are meant to experience the part where every dead-end weaves together into a storyline more beautiful than you could ever consciously write.
This is what it means to be fully alive not to always know where you are headed, but to know that eventually, you will arrive.
EK #03
There’s something about learning to live with a positive curiosity to course-correct the constant wondering of what may be going wrong, what is hinging on collapse, what grave error or misstep you have not accounted for.
Turn your capacity to down-board-think into something that supports your growth.
Consider, instead, how you might be pleasantly surprised, how it may be easier than you think, that there might be some vital lesson or realization attempting to emerge through your current experience.
Consider, instead, how infrequently the worst-case scenario has ever come to pass, and then consider how ruminating on it isn’t protecting you from it,
But allowing your mind to piece and filter that particular reality more clearly into form.
EK #04
You don’t have to run forever.
The answers you’re looking for have probably been with you all along.
And the journey is about strengthening your inner resolve to choose what you have always known is right,
even if the world would not understand,
even if you might disappoint some people,
and even if it might scare you challenge you,
or make you feel vulnerable in a way you never have before.
I hope you will discover that making it is not always about where you end up, but how you take each step.
When you change your relationship with today, you change your relationship with tomorrow.
EK #05
You live in a world that tells you to work in eight-hour stretches, and that is productivity.
You live in a world that tells you to devote forty years of your life to a career you are lukewarm about, and that is safety.
And you live in a world that tells you to surround yourself with as many people as possible, and that is connection.
You live in a world that tells you to pack your schedule with as much as you can, and that is fullness.
You live in a world that aims to slowly lose what it is that makes you feel most alive, and that is responsibility.
Of course, you feel disillusioned.
Of course, it hurts.
We have built a society that does not often cater to the layers, intricacies, and changes that a human soul phases through.
You will have to learn to create your universe within that world and maybe, just maybe, the waves you initiate for yourself will touch someone else, and inspire another person to move in the same way.
Maybe your life will be a lighthouse for the other aching hearts yearning to know that there is another way to walk through their years, that there is still hope amid it all.
EK #06
If it keeps bringing your attention back toward it, there is a lesson within it that still needs to be extracted.
There is a piece you still need to pick up.
There is an element you need to dissect, a wisdom you are meant to carry forth.
You are not broken for not being able to effortlessly release.
You are being asked to look at yourself with full honesty and see a space in which you are primed for the most dramatic growth.
It keeps calling to you because there’s something it wants you to do with it, there’s something within it that still wants to be seen.
EK #07
Your authenticity is not your stream-of-consciousness.
It is not doing whatever you want, whenever you want, without any regard or consideration for the ripple effect it might cause, or where it may lead.
What you do consistently comes to be characteristic of you.
Not what you think, feel, or even fear, but what you choose.
If you display sincere kindness even if you feel the hardness of judgment first wash over your awareness, you will come to be known as kind.
If you display resiliency, strength, and courage even when you are facing the deepest unknowns, resilience will come to be associated with you, too.
You are in some ways fixed, but in others, adaptable, mendable, and shiftable.
You are not the culmination of what you once were.
But you can defy the past.
You can become what you decide to be.
EK #08
Instead of trying to figure out whether or not something is right for you, just notice what creates resonance or dissonance.
Ask yourself if it makes your body gently contract or expand.
Ask yourself if it gives at least as much energy as it takes.
And also, ask yourself if it intrigues you, fascinates you, or compels you.
Ask what is there to be found.
Ask where walking this path might lead.
Pay attention to your body’s most subtle responses: the way you lightly open or close yourself to the experience, and tally up the smallest coincidences.
EK #09
Not giving up on yourself and not giving in to your worst impulses doesn’t always look like winning an invisible war, but rather, putting your hands up and finally asking yourself, what do I need to change here?
It’s finally surrendering to the strength within that has been trying to tell you that you’re off track.
It’s finally learning to work with yourself, to follow your guidance.
To listen, to hear, to respond. To love yourself in the most basic ways.
To understand that your lack of constant momentum is not a defect within you, but a guide so strong, that even your strongest attempts cannot overpower its wisdom.
It is coming into the knowing that there is something within the quiet that needs to be heard.
EK #10
What if you knew that you were never meant to get it right the first time, but to build it through trial and error?
How much more grace would you give yourself, how much more human might you be?
How much more could you gain from your experiences if your expectation wasn’t that you were supposed to be initially and unquestionably perfect,
But that the sculpting of your soul would emerge through the consistency by which you showed up and kept trying, kept going, kept forging yourself through the fire of your fear?
EK #11
Your experience of today is constructed from the minor choices of yesterday.
Where you left your shoes, the email you didn’t answer, and the appointment you forgot you made.
The lingering emotions wandering through your insides are undigested, unplaced.
The more you get better at anticipating your future needs, the easier it becomes to be present in your life.
The more you learn to live in this equilibrium, you find it easier and easier to sip the tea and not worry about so many other things, because they’re settled.
Even if they’re not, you trust yourself to handle them.
You do not need to reactivate your nervous system and pump yourself full of adrenaline-fueled focus to remember to take care of what needs caring for.
Your choices must begin to reflect not just the person you are, but also the one you are becoming.
EK #12
You either see things through a critical lens or a creative one.
You either spend your life constantly evaluating how each thing around you is not enough, or you shift your perspective to wonder how you can turn all that you have into anything you ever wanted.
You either seek out and focus on how you are imperfect, or you see within those imperfections’ cracks through which your greatest growth, your greatest purpose, and your greatest vision will emerge.
EK #13
Your inner wisdom isn’t supposed to give you every answer to your entire life but to show you to the next right step.
You are not supposed to be able to intuit every turn the road may take, because that would defeat the entire purpose of being here; that would defeat the entire purpose of being alive.
Nobody not one of us knows everything that might unfold.
Our job is not to get better at predicting, projecting, or becoming attached to uncertain possibilities, but having sincere faith that what we know needs to happen next is the key that eventually unlocks everything we’ve been waiting for, everything we’ve ever wanted to be.
EK #14
Heavy feelings are not asking for your intervention, they are asking for your attention.
When you come into full awareness of what you feel, the feeling will gradually release itself.
You participate in your suffering when you take action to delay, avoid, resist, or fracture that awareness of your feeling states and end up stuck beneath them.
You will probably feel reactive when you start to pay attention to the sensations going on inside your body.
When you begin to come into awareness of each one that makes you uncomfortable, you’re going to want to jump to fix, change, or do something that could make the feeling go away.
It doesn’t, though, because the feeling isn’t in the things you’re fixing, changing, or distracting yourself with.
The feeling is in you.
It is not asking to be put onto some physical form within the world, but simply to be metabolized, processed, and eventually churned into an unconscious wisdom that will guide you forward in ways more powerful than you can even perceive from where you currently stand.
EK #15
It is okay to want a quiet kind of life.
A life that is biggest within the little things, the moments that are not so overt in their impressiveness,
But if you pay attention, opens up a space in your chest that most people have not yet realized even exists.
It is okay to want an easy kind of life.
A life that is filled not so much with reaching, but simply placing your hand down on all that is in front of you right now.
A life where you move at your own pace, and create in your own time.
A life where you hope your legacy will be one of a constant, loving presence.
Where you reminded others of how much goodness can exist within a human soul.
EK #16
The truth is that it has to challenge you to change.
It has to make you question whether the parameters you live within are truly your limits or simply the edge of what you’ve grown comfortable with.
The truth is that it has to stop you to redirect you.
It has to test you before it can reward you; it has to trust you before it can open the floodgates.
The truth is that it has to bring you to your knees before it can lift you back up into an entirely new reality.
It has to show you what’s wrong for you before you’ll understand what’s right.
EK #17
If you spend your days trying to make every piece of the picture fit prematurely, you’re going to miss out on what the journey was supposed to be about simply being in it.
Allowing all of the mismatched elements of who you are to coexist, come together, or fade apart when it’s time.
Loving some, losing others, and noticing who stays.
Realizing that there are a thousand forms of love that ask to come to you.
Letting your inner guidance led you to a story far more beautiful than you could write on your own.
You don’t have to know the ending to be perfectly on the path.
You don’t have to understand right now.
Peace awaits in the acceptance of the things you were never supposed to change.
EK #18
The very nature of your hurting is a sign that something within you is still fighting.
Still fighting for peace. Still hoping for something beautiful.
Still knowing that there is so much more to you that you have yet to experience.
Despite all it has been through, your heart is still asking you to let it be seen, to let it be loved.
Something within you cares enough to shed all the layers of all the people you never really wanted to be.
See, healing is a hard thing. It requires you to live in a way where you are no longer numbing yourself.
To experience a high, you have to also embrace the low. Not because one necessitates the other, but because life is an unpredictable, unmistakable, gorgeous mess,
And if you start showing up for it, you’ll realize that the mark of a life well lived, a soul most loved, is not a person who is permanently composed.
It is a person who can move all the experiences they desire without scaring themselves into the corner of just one.
EK #19
Resilience isn’t always toughness.
Sometimes, it’s the softness to simply let things move through you.
Sometimes, it’s the willingness to not act on emotions you would not want more fully expressed,
