This article by Irina Yugay originally appeared on Mindvalley.
From the outside, you can look like someone who has it all. Just like Sorelle, who was living her dream life and had everything that society tells you should have. Although she was living the high life, speaking on multiple stages, hanging out with the most successful people, traveling around the world, and experiencing the best that it can offer, she didn’t like the person she was becoming.
Because it wasn’t coming from her authentic self.
When COVID hit the world in 2020, she had to give up everything that made up her existence — she was locked in her dream house, face-to-face with the naked truth that her life was… fake!
“Everything I did was exhausting and coming from a place of competition,” she shares during the Mindvalley Summit, bursting into tears.
Having an audience of over 5 million people on multiple platforms, watching her seemingly perfect life, she had to keep up with the image she had been cultivating for years. She had more than enough to be utterly grateful, but she wasn’t.
The Fear of Death
Just at the beginning of her career growth, she suddenly developed a phobia of death.
“If I ever stopped and slowed down in my existence, I would be lying on the floor in panic attacks,” she says.
Although she never believed in panic attacks, it was happening for her for real. Even the tiniest mention of death would make her crumble for hours. Living her high life, having millions of people looking at her and expecting her to be strong, she couldn’t talk about it to anyone.
Building her booming business and working hard for her success, she was facing two unbearable truths: she didn’t like her reality and she was afraid of death.
She says, “but the real truth was that I was so afraid to die because I never actually lived.”
Her career was her life, but the only reason she was working so hard was to distract herself from going within. She was working hard to prove herself that she was worthy. In other words, she was living from a place of competition.
By the time the global pandemic shattered her reality, she had gone through all the stages of grief: from shock and denial to anger to pain and depression. She had no zest for life whatsoever, yet she still had to keep going to fulfill her contractual agreements.
While she could normally produce at least two videos per week, she could hardly pull off two videos per month. She hated the idea itself that she had to pretend — what was even more devastating is that nobody would see her real pain even if she didn’t.
Nevertheless, you alone are responsible for your own life. So when your world is crumbling, here is what you can do.
1. Start Small: Eat, Sleep, And Exercise
If you aren’t dying, you will still live for at least a couple of decades – you will still have to eat well, sleep and exercise to be in shape. So start small by taking care of yourself as if you are learning to walk again.
2. Socialize With Friends And Family
We all know that people are paramount to our happiness. It might be terrifying in the beginning, when hanging out with people is the last thing you want to do. But you can start small. You might want to stay in your room, in your own darkness, screaming at the top of your lungs. But it won’t help.
You might be giving away your dark energy, and people won’t want to be around you. But if you have your close friends, little by little, it will help you get through your darkest times.
3. Do Pointless Things For No Reason, Just Because You Want To
Because her entire life was revolving around her career, Sorelle realized that she never had a hobby. At some point, she was introduced to a woman that inspired her to take music lessons.
She recalls that she was so stunningly feminine and grounded in her presence, that she wanted to be a little bit like her. So she took her classes and found great inner joy for the first time in her life.
“I wasn’t progressing fast enough. I wasn’t good at it at all. And there is no greatness coming out of this. But there’s a great joy,” she shares, laughing.
If you don’t have a hobby, find one. Cook for yourself, decorate your house, start doing small things for yourself. At the end of the day, life is a sequence of tiny moments of joy. And when you do things that come from inside that fulfill you, your energy shifts.
4. Find Your Bliss
Society tells you what to do to achieve material success, but the material world will never fill your cup. She explains that it can open your eyes to other cultures, but it cannot make you happy from within. If you feel numb, look for a tiny moment of inner bliss. Feel it in your body, and build it over time.
Here’s how you can do it:
Say Yes and notice how it feels in your body.
Then say No, and notice how it feels for you. It’s always either Yes or No – there’s nothing in between.
You can use this exercise of feeling into your body for small things and big things.
When opportunities come to you, ask yourself if it is Yes or No for you.
5. Don’t Be Attached To Your Identity
They say, find your box and master it. But the truth is that you don’t need any boxes. Identity crisis happens when you’re attached to your identity. But once you realize that you are constantly evolving, you will finally become authentic.
When you are authentic, people cannot help being around you. You can do the same things from the outside, but there’s an enormous change inside that never stops.
“The Universe was meant to destroy everything fake that I was so that I could start working from inner joy and peace,” she says.
We are moving to a place where what really matters is your frequency identity. It has nothing to do with what you represent but how you make others feel.
And you can only make others feel great when you feel great about yourself. And it’s only possible when you live from your inner bliss and joy.
- Mindvalley
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