The Beauty In Obsession

I’ve been deliberate about trying to get free. Rid myself of anything (or anyone) weighing me down. The idea of having non-stop bills, rent, credit card debt, it all started to feel like an endless cycle of working just to pay bills. Only to have brief moments of leisure or me time on the weekends. Something just didn’t add up. So some place in my consciousness decided, a few years ago, to try to untangle myself from the web. To release myself from the obligations. To write a new narrative about my lifestyle and life story. 

It meant some real big changes. Downsizing. Humbling myself. Consolidating. Telling myself that the whisper that kept telling me “get out” was coming from a valid and real place. 

There’s something to be said about persistence though. Something to be said about repeating things to yourself even when you don’t believe them. I’ve proved it to myself more than a few times in life now. How possible it is to reinvent. Recreate. Reimagine. Shift ones circumstances entirely.

My process begins with identifying what I am wanting to get rid of. A job? A city? A routine? A relationship? The first step for me has always been to identify, truly and inwardly, what is no longer serving me. The thing that no longer feeds my soul. The thing that feels more like a burden than illuminating. I reject THOROUGHLY that we are simply meant to deal with shit we don’t like in life. I hear people often echo “you’re not supposed to like your job, it’s a job.” I couldn’t disagree more. And quite frankly, I deserve to live a life of ease, harmony and grace. 

So I begin by identifying what no longer works. And what I’m done with. From there I can start thinking about what I want to usher in. What is the new mental picture I can create that begins to make me feel alive again. What is it that I want next? Where am I? Who am I with? What does it feel like? I try to picture myself in this new chapter. This next stage.

And then I begin to obsess over it. Every detail. I talk about it endlessly with everyone I know and don’t know. THERE ARE POWER IN WORDS. I research things. Watch countless YouTube videos about it. I almost can focus on nothing else for many weeks. I inundate my mind with images of this new chapter/place in my life that I’m trying to usher in. And maybe it’s just a new line of consciousness that I’m working to adopt. No matter what it is, I temporarily obsess over it. And what I find is that I become knowledgeable about this topic. Which then opens new avenues of learning for me in it. 

Say for instance I decide I want to go back to school. Or change careers. Or move across (or out of) the country. Whatever my next step chapter is, I find there to be countless areas of research I can dig in to that only help to bring my goal closer to me. 

Having made major life changes more than most people I know, I can truly say there is a method to it. We all may have our own, but my method is one of WILLING IT TO HAPPEN. Quite forcefully so in the beginning, in order to get the ball rolling. I believe that I’m in control of my destiny. Nothing is permanent unless you choose for it to be. It can all be changed with a switch in your thinking about it.

Whenever I want to clean up my diet, go back or deeper in to being vegetarian, I read watch and think constantly for weeks about it. Shifting lifestyles or patterns is hard, so it takes time for us to get out of our existing habits. Which is why a persistent and relentless approach seems to work best for me. But it ALWAYS begin in the mind first. I condition and penetrate my mind with the things it needs for months before I take any real action. 

The mind is the soil that fertilizes any new seed of thought. And once you break in to your new world, once you have stepped out in to your goal, you realize how many stories you held on to in the past to justify staying there. 

The universe countless times has opened doors for me I never would have imagined. But in some regards, I can imagine it when it does happen cause it’s all I’ve been thinking about prior to for months. The universe has no choice but to confirm and support my will. It’s a simple law of attraction. 

So what is the next thing in your life you’d like to see come to life? What would you like to shed and replace? And more importantly, what is your process for birthing something new in to existence?

It’s a journey of endless evolving, change and courage. The beauty in it though is that we continue to grow as the world unfolds a beautiful playground for us before our feet. 

So start with your mind and the rest will follow. 

"A comfortable, convenient life is not a real life- the more comfortable, the less alive. The most comfortable life is in the grave." - Rajneesh