The following quote by Lana Schafer came across my radar this morning.

“Don’t scream for justice and peace in the world if you are mean and judgmental with yourself. Be the change you want to see. And it will be mirrored back to you in infinite ways.”

These words are filled with so much truth that it buzzed in every cell of my being and inspired me to dig into this idea a bit more. It really sums up the idea of taking full responsibility for who we are from the inside out. The truth is we all have desires for the world and for ourselves whether it is peace, happiness, success, or abundance. I have also noticed that there can be so much confusion between having desires and actually giving ourselves real permission to experience them. This was my struggle for a long time and I just couldn’t seem to bridge the two together. I have come to learn this is a struggle for most of us simply because we live in a world that teaches us to believe that change happens somewhere “out there.” We strive to change everything outside of us in the hopes of finally reaching a destination that we think will be better than the destination we are presently in. We work so hard to change everything on the outside believing that if our relationships, home, job, body, or bank account were different, then somehow we would feel better.

I am here to bust this illusion. The whole idea of this is backwards and can’t be further from the truth. Experiencing peace from an authentic, real, lasting place must begin in the one place that most of us resist looking at. It can only truly happen from inside of us. And this is because if we define how we feel based on our external world, we have set ourselves up for failure and we give away our power.

What we all truly want is to be connected to our authentic power. The way to stay in connection to this place of truth is by having the ability to sit in the knowing that we can only be responsible for ourselves. We must also know that everything and everyone else around is simply mirroring back to us who we are being from within. The reason why we try so hard to change everything outside of us is because we believe we will somehow feel different inside. We believe that we will finally feel good enough, worthy enough, rich enough, skinny enough or perhaps we believe that we will finally fit into the world around us so that we don’t have to face the feelings we are trying so desperately to avoid.

The key is to know that what you desire is already within you. You must feel it in every cell of your being. You must experience it on a deep level of knowing. There is no thinking involved. It is a knowing that nobody or nothing can ever take away from you. There is nothing to prove. There is nothing that needs to happen and there is nobody to blame. It is about you and only you being the example of what you wish to see in your outer world. It is about you demonstrating it in your words, thoughts, actions and behaviors not to or for anyone else. It is for you and only you. It may appear selfish and that is ok. The message here is that it’s healthy and empowering to be selfish. It is quite the opposite of the message that we may have received in our past. If we aren’t selfish then how will we ever really know who we really are? And if we don’t know who we are, then how can we ever expect to be feel the peace that we all long to experience in our outer world. It starts with you – you are the answer.