“What you don’t realize is that when you are nurtured, it changes the way you interact with the world around you. It changes what’s attracted to you . . . When you live like this, you find what you’re looking for in ways you didn’t even know you were looking for it to show up.” —Brianna Wiest, The Pivot Year

From self-help books to well-meaning blog posts to IG carousel posts full of quotes, if you’re looking for ‘how-to’ guidance to start the new year well, you’ll find it. What you specifically will discover is what you want to find, because unconsciously you already know what you need; you’re often seeking approval that your inner compass is as wise as it seems.

Even blog posts found here on TSLL will land differently, resonate more powerfully at different points along life’s journey, depending upon what you are looking for, because the good news is, all you are looking for is what feels nourishing. And it is sometimes difficult to trust that caring for ourselves, tending to our needs, something only we can know for ourselves uniquely, is exactly what we need to do.

I came across this quote below while reading Brianna Wiest’s The Pivot Year. Read during this past week, the final week referred to Between the Years when life takes a breath for the modern world, my intention is to carry this wisdom forward, and if you need to be reminded of this wisdom, then I want to share it with you today:

“If you have spent most of your life just trying to survive, things that make your body surge with fear will seem incredibly appealing to you—you will want to be functioning at unrealistically high levels of energy and productivity and development. That is another kind of survival, just with a prettier face.”

If we have been caught up in the striving, which often is a nice way to say, surviving as Wiest shares above, or trying to keep up with what we feel we have to do to be seen as successful, then I encourage you to step back and apply your learned mindfulness skills (a new weekly esries began yesterday to strengthen the skill of meditation – explore it here) to recognize that you might have habituated an approach to living that feels ‘normal’ when in reality it is far from nourishing, and is in fact, pulling you away from the peace you seek.

The peace you seek is already here. It’s already within you, waiting for you to acknowledge it, to slow down enough to witness and experience it.

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How to Stop Surviving and Start Experiencing Peacefulness

“Living life to the fullest… is really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of . . . composed of things 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.” —Brianna Wiest

Seeing that a simple life, a thoughtful life lived with intention, is the way to experiencing the ahas we thought we had to pursue by striving and bustling and hurrying gives us peace of mind. Yes, we have to let go, and it is in the letting go that we savor the now, able to take in the nourishment that is available all around us.

“Where you repeatedly step becomes where you ultimately land.” —Brianna Wiest

The ‘repeatedly’ stepping involves choosing nourishment and focusing our attention on what lifts our days, rather than on what we do not want. It is a conscious mind shift that will, in the beginning, require our full and determined attention, but gradually, as we explored in this post last year. This naturally will cause some things to fall away (the unwanted and unnourishing things), but we won’t miss them because we never needed them to live well and in fact, they were impeding our ability to do so.

“Nothing feels all the way right at the beginning, because nothing is completely familiar at the beginning.” —Brianna Wiest

Keep this reminder at the forefront of your awareness when you begin to live a simple life that nourishes you. It will feel awkward and even foreign at first. Much like we talked about at the top of this post, when we become conditioned to busily rushing and striving throughout each day, to slow down with intention feels ‘wrong’ as though we are wasting our time, our life! But we are now finally fully living our lives by choosing to slow down. We are not looking to next month, next week, or next year, imagining it as the life we desire; instead, we see that the life we have right now has everything we need, all the ingredients to both nourish and provide the growth we actually want.

“There is no need to put anything in front of us and run after it. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become.”—Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching

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Be Where You Are

“Your life begins the day you are willing to toss aside the ancient blueprint of what you thought would be and witness instead what is in front of you and use it . . . Because your younger self, in all of your dreamy-eyed wonder and naivety, could not conceive of a life for an adult that you did not yet know how to have.” —Brianna Wiest

Thich Nhat Hanh reassures us that “We don’t need to become anything else . . . We only need to be happy in the present moment, and we can be of service to those we love and to our whole society . . . happiness is already available.” And to know this is to be free.

~Learn more about TSLL’s Contentment Masterclass here – explore the detailed syllabus, read student reviews and watch the trailer. ALSO! Look for a new Lesson to be added to Lesson #4 (8 mini-lessons) focused on the Nervous System – understand how it functions, how to regulate it and how this knowledge contributes to living a life of contentment uniquely designed to our needs and talents.

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