Reinventing Yourself Takes Practice
Whoever travels without a guide needs two hundred years for a two-day journey. Rumi
Remember the times when you've had to reinvent yourself, but you could not get started? It's that dark place where you begin to feel weak and totally demoralized as you realize your current life situation is unsustainable.
You stare into space with vague dreams of retirement and future goals while sitting in a blah haze of pharmaceutical drugs, TV, politics, religion, and routine.
If you lose yourself now — years can go by.
It looks like Alzheimer’s disease . . . the mind goes, but slowly enough that you witness your own dissolution and understand perfectly what that means.
It can be devastating for those who “signed up” for normalcy.
Miserable comes in many forms as you start over
One is trying to change the constrained circumstances planned out for you regarding how you live, work, and play. You think of all the opportunities you wanted pass you by.
It becomes a challenge to see into your future.
Many will reach this point and give up — unless you are consciously ready to reinvent yourself.
You can spend years in this stupor, then wake up to — “What the F*ck?” Then there's all kinds of trauma — drama because you never practiced change.
Who practices reinventing themselves?
I think you should.
Some wait a lifetime to have a defining moment. But you know you could shine again if only you could get out of your own way.
Remember when you were young?
When your creative non-conformity was so full of infinite potential? Crazy ideas turned into stories of reality, each with its own unique conclusion. No matter the risk.
It’s because you were not afraid of your creative Freedom. You always had wild, seductive alternatives.
Can you stay as you are another ten years, denying your potential? — all because you no longer think you can access your brilliance?
It's depressing if you hunt Freedom.
When you decide to change your life circumstances, start in a grand style.
You need to plan a Mission!
The Strategy . . . go covert.
I’ve learned it’s best not to announce all the changes you’re planning. It will blow your whole mission—it always does.
When you first get started, wasted memories and lost time are turning your guts inside out as the reality of years of callused pain numbs your thinking.
So, to begin, just start putting together a glimpse of what your revolutionary Next Chapter will be.
Write, draw, and collect pictures of what your Mission looks like –
You could do this during what I call a Monk Break.
A Monk Break is going somewhere off the beaten path to be in a nurturing, creative place.
During a Monk Break, you HAVE to go it alone. Being alone is the whole point.
It’s not easy being alone with yourself. This is where you meet your own dissolution of the past and emerge with new energy just waiting to take shape.
During your Monk Break, take time to envision new plans and ideas.
Start by writing your own Constitution. This is the Foundation you will live and work by. It’s like defining your Warrior Code for new Personal Power.
Create new plans based on your skills and personality. The world cannot help but respond to such authenticity.
Map out your strategy of what it will take to make each step doable. Really DO this.
Your bravery will help you escape the conformity of the sanitized mediocrity you’ve been living.
You need to stay stealth and not let others suck your power before you are ready.
And you can’t just dabble with your new creative Freedom — it’s all or nothing.
Start executing your plan.
Remember, we are creatures of habit. Practicing new ways to focus is essential.
Perhaps it's getting out of the gym and taking up something new and cool - like Kyudo — or something else that is out-of-the-box of how you usually live, like training for a marathon hike on the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
You could also make it a vision quest. (by traveling to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, for a psilocybin vision quest with me to get started)
The point is to do things that take you away from your everyday complacency.
Start practicing change and reinventing yourself in baby steps around how you want your new life to look. If not, you’ll stay behind with thoughts of failure as your depression sets in.
Your reinvention and new evolution will feel like a slow tragedy. I know!
You are still not announcing yourself, but people start seeing changes.
It begins to look like you’re getting something new and powerful put together. These are landmark moments.
Remember, most people just like the idea of something new—you decide to become one of the courageous and actually do it.
As you practice change, you need to keep creating.
Don’t waste your pain; use it to create new brilliance.
Slowly, start sharing time with other crazy, imaginative, passionate people — those driven souls who brave the complacent, celebrate risk, and do not fear losing it all.
Because it’s not all about money.
Your new Freedom will be a delicious addiction. And your loved ones who felt abandoned will appreciate the emerging new you.
Do whatever you need to do to grow an unshakable conviction of who you are meant to be—everything else is secondary.