People already know that they are flawed and feel badly enough about it, and by people, I mean you and I.

People never do better by feeling worse. They do better when they feel better. This is why in our relationships, including our relationship with ourselves, our most important contribution is to provide a loving space for people to have compassion for themselves and shift their focus from their “flaws” to their gifts.

What might change for you and those around you if you were willing to practice doing the intense work of loving people instead of criticizing them?

Is it possible that beating yourself up for things that you think you should be better at is keeping you from stepping into your unique purpose?

I sense that the universe, or our higher power, or whatever created us, would not make it difficult to share what we are meant to share. Our work is to start taking responsibility for our lives by being grateful for what our strengths are and focusing on empowering them.

Comparison, resistance, and judgment all disconnect us from our most vital energy and contribution.

What if you weren’t meant to do it the way someone else does it or the way some imaginary version of yourself would do it? What if you are simply supposed to strengthen your strengths?

Life comes in pairs of opposites: hot and cold, joy and sorrow, anger and peace. These aren’t battles to fight. They are opportunities to see how simple wholeness is.

When we feel anger, it can feel sharp and consuming, yet beneath it is often hurt. When we pause long enough to be curious about it rather than react, anger eventually dissolves into compassion. This is the essence of wholeness. We don’t need to resist our anger if we can let it return us to compassion.

The same is true of other intense emotions: fear can dissolve into trust, restlessness can transform into stillness, and attachment can evolve into love. Our greatest power comes not from escaping feelings; it comes from allowing them to transform. Every sensation or feeling carries its own doorway home.

What if your only job was to be curious enough to let it dissolve into the truth?

It’s easier to compare yourself to other people than it is to take responsibility for your own contribution and impact.

The thing is, your contribution and impact won’t look like anybody else’s. There’s no way they could. But if you waste your time pretending they should, you miss the opportunity to contribute to the person, the people, the places, and the things in front of you right now.

Where have you been letting comparison hide your contribution?

Taking the time to be curious slows us down, which we need to do so that we can discover the root causes of our challenges and the authentic sources of our blessings.

Taking the time to be curious also helps us move more quickly in the long run because we don’t waste time solving the wrong problems and overlooking our resources.

Where have you been rushing to an answer instead of being curious, and how has that rushing impeded your progress?

We either transform through experiencing the pain of what doesn’t work or through being brave enough to experience the vitality and beauty of what does work.

The good news is, we can transform either way. And, our work is to lean more into the beautiful way.

Where could you let love lead you towards transformation rather than waiting for hardship?

You can tell a lot about a person, including yourself, by how they treat themselves when trying something new. Or whether they are even willing to try something new.

How might observing this help you understand yourself and others more?

Your suffering is teaching you what it’s time to let go of.

Suffering is different than intensity. It is your resistance to intensity that causes your suffering. If you feel an intensity that you know isn’t serving you, embrace that you are feeling it and use it to teach you what belief or pattern it’s time to release.

What if even your suffering was a part of your freedom?

To experience happiness, we must experience progress. This is a paradigm shift from believing that happiness comes from experiencing the destination we imagine. However, this can feel tricky because progress isn’t linear and therefore doesn’t look the way we expect it to.

A way to experience contentment is to surrender to the idea that anything and everything is happening with the purpose of your progress. When you live into this belief, you take responsibility for your life and your learning, which turns each experience you have into an investment in your future, and into this moment right now.

Embracing the contextual shift that life is happening for you is not meant to help you turn away from or ignore the challenges of our planet and your life; it is to help you remain clear so you can continue to show up as the contribution you are, helping us navigate the challenges.

What might life feel like if you committed to learning from “failures” and integrated them as progress on your unique, ever-unfolding journey of expansion?

There is what you “should” do and what has been done, and then there is what you could do and what hasn’t yet been done.

Which are you letting guide what you are creating? No one else can do the latter for you. You will never be inspired to do something you already know how to do. What if you kept leaning into what hasn’t yet been done?

You cannot control how someone else responds to what is true for you. Your job is only to communicate the truth and take action toward it with love, and love people through any discomfort they may have around it.

You cannot control. You can only love. Or not love- the choice is yours.

When the type of discomfort you are feeling comes from being unaligned with your values, love yourself enough to make a change right away.

When the type of discomfort you are feeling comes from being in the unknown as you take action in alignment with your values, love yourself enough to stay in the discomfort.

What type of discomfort are you feeling?

Your body doesn’t know how to lie to you. It is always telling you if it likes or dislikes what you are thinking or processing, and it only likes the truth.

If your body feels drained, tense, tired, heavy, or overstimulated, it is time to examine how you are relating to something.

What if you trusted the wisdom of your body enough to help you see things clearly?

You have something essential that it is time for you to grow into.

Your job is to let go of, again and again, whatever old belief, pattern, or habit makes that thing feel complicated, hard, or impossible.

Your expasion can be simple if you let it be. What is it time to let go of?

We are designed to support one another by being a clear space for one another.

When we show up for others with our own agendas, opinions, fears, doubts, or resentments, we don’t help anyone. We often think we are “helping” people by shaming them, telling them what to do, sharing our opinions with them, judging them, showing them how they are wrong, or showing them how we are right. The truth is, all this does is make them feel bad, and no one makes good choices when they feel bad. They make good choices when they feel good. Even worse, we feel bad when we make others feel bad, even if we don’t realize it at first.

Our job is instead to show up with clarity to whomever we are with or aiming to serve. We can do this by recognizing any of the above-mentioned heaviness or cloudiness we may be bringing into a moment and consciously choosing to set it aside. We can listen with curiosity and ask clarifying questions that aren’t about fully understanding or agreeing with the other person, but about the other person learning whatever it is they are meant to learn, which we can never fully know. All we can do is hold space for people to continue to discover new things as they evolve and love them and ourselves through the imperfection.

When we can clarify our intentions, ground ourselves in the moment, and hold space for discovery over the long haul, we all blossom.

Where might it be time to stop forcing and start clearing?

There is a state we can access called choice. We often think of choice as something we do, when really it is a way of being. Being in a state of choice is like being in love or in a state of gratitude. It connects us to our clarity so we can see what is possible and discern our next best action or inaction.

The opposite of being in a state of choice is being in a state of reaction. This is a way of being where worry, fear, doubt, judgment, and unforgiveness are running the show. It disconnects us from our clarity and the possibilities available to us and instead shackles us to confusion and limitation, blocking us from hearing our own intuition, hope, and wisdom.

When we find ourselves in a state of reaction and we want to be in choice, we can begin the process by simply letting go of all the things that are blocking us from truly choosing. These might be a fear of the unknown, a discomfort of hard work, an attachment or aversion to someone else’s reaction, or an old resentment or frustration with ourselves or someone else. Letting these things go doesn’t mean we make them go away, it simply means we can allow them to be there an not value or prioritize them. We can notice fear and take action anyway. We can notice our attachments and realize our worth isn’t actually tied up in the opinions of others.

The bottom line is we are not truly creating our lives if we are not consistently shifting back to a state of choice when we find ourselves in a state of reaction. If we stay in reaction, then fear, doubt, and judgment are creating our lives. However, our job is not to never slip into reaction as that is an impossible goal. Our work is to simply return to choice again and again. It’s a never ending game that becomes more and more rewarding as you practice and play.

What is it time to let go of you so you can have your choice back right now?

If you do it as a gift instead of a burden, you will be the one who ends up receiving the gift.

Life is a gift and happens only in moments, tasks, and choices. You receive the gift of life when you create your next breath or next action as an act of generosity and an expression of gratitude.

What might you receive if you spoke, helped, wrote, ate, read, responded, typed, listened, cleaned, or anything else you might “have to” do as if it were a gift?

Not asking the correct type of question keeps us from moving forward, whether life has been beautiful or challenging.

A helpful question, no matter what has happened, that we can ask ourselves is:

How can this help me make life more meaningful for myself and others?

Trust the truth.

It's a simple idea and not always easy. Often, we fear the truth and resist it instead of trusting it and working with it.

Where are you suffering because you are resisting the truth? What if all information were good information because it was helping you know your next step? What would change if you trusted the truth rather than fearing it?

We can only begin to understand how life truly is when we understand that we will never be able to understand how life truly is.

The way life truly exists is beyond our perception. The moment we think we’ve figured it out, we’ve moved away from the one mysterious truth.

What if not knowing was the beginning of real understanding?