A Lifestyle Lesson for Real Love in the Real World
Growing Baby Sunflowers 🌻
I am loved and loving.
This was the mantra playing in my head this morning from the moment I woke up. No doubt it was inspired by my recent mini-movie marathon: A Man Named Otto and My Octopus Teacher.
Without spoiling them, I can tell you they both center on the profound meaning of life and the depths of universal love.
There is an especially powerful moment in My Octopus Teacher where you can see clearly the purest purpose of universal intelligence: to love itself through the expression of all beings everywhere.
All beings.
Everywhere.
Both films are on Netflix if you want to watch. Just make sure you have a box of tissues on hand.
Watching these movies was a reminder for me of how important connection to life - real life - truly is. The modern world has an amnestic quality to it though, thrusting us in front of screens as a substitute for the real life going on outside.
Screens are dead. Money is meaningless if not imbued with purpose. Social media is a ghostly, paranormal projection of real life. And the news these days barely reflects the vibrancy and sanctity of life on this planet.
Modernity makes it easy to forget that we are not just living a life, we are life.
And life, itself, is a miracle.
If our planet settled into the solar system a bit closer or a bit farther from the sun, life here would never have existed. There would be no water, so there’d be no air, no animals, no plants, and no people. Universal intelligence would have limited itself to a collection of rocks spinning in the ether without much else to do but worship the sun.
But universal intelligence didn’t stop there. Water does exist, so air, animals, plants, and people thrive on this precious planet (and probably others), with a beautiful ability to express life in a trillion different ways.
Life on this planet is a miracle.
You are a miracle.
It took universal intelligence billions and billions of years to make you. The sun had to spin herself into existence and nurture her gravity long enough to call in her planetary friends. And then those planets had to spin in their orbits, refining themselves, cooling down, and becoming who they are today.
When she finally settled herself, Earth then went through many iterations of life over billions of years making billions of life forms before ever arriving at humanity at all.
And then after all that, the human species still had to wait some 300,000 years for YOU to be born.
You are a spectacular expression of Mother Earth’s energy spinning itself into its own unique planetary person with their own unique planetary orbit. There is no one like you and there will never be anyone like you again.
Even if you believe in reincarnation, like I do, your soul will be manifested over and over again - but you will never have the opportunity to exist exactly as you do right now - in this body, in this lifetime.
Your mortal body gets one chance to express its magic, and that is a magnificent thing.
This sacred truth is obvious every day, and if you take a moment or two to let it sink in, it’ll quickly become evident why you’re worth a daily dose of celebration.
Modernity makes this miracle easy to forget. Most of us are far removed from real life because we spend more time in metareality than we do in the real world.
Metareality means all artificial forms of life: social media, television, computers, smart phones, radio, artificial intelligence, and anything else that projects images and lives on screen.
Sometimes metareality is a beautiful reflection of real life - as I saw in My Octopus Teacher. But more often, metareality is a complex compilation of programming designed to grow global capitalism because without the money from capitalism, metareality would cease to exist.
Animals, plants, and people can continue to repopulate without money. Computers, screens, and smart phones cannot.
To fund itself, metareality relies on media and marketing to program certain impulses into your brain so that you’ll keep contributing to the system.
For example, if you constantly see extremely thin people on screen, your brain will start to believe this is the only acceptable reality and will motivate you to contribute to the billion dollar weight loss industry.
If you constantly see young people on screen, your brain will start to believe this is the only acceptable reality and will motivate you to contribute to the billion dollar beauty industry.
These motivations to purchase and consume are not an accident. They are by design. And they stem from one simple state: self-hate.
Media moguls and marketers know that we humans need one another to survive and that your brain is hardwired to keep you alive.
If metareality can motivate you to dislike yourself in very specific ways, inevitably your brain will want to do something about it - buy the weight loss program, purchase the wrinkle cream, go into debt getting yet another degree - so you can fit in and feel safe.
Metareality is meant to disrupt real life, and it does this by creating loads of self-criticism, self-sabotage, and shame. The only remedy to this toxicity is to disrupt the cycle at the level of your cells.
You must rejoin the real world and learn to love the real you.
This means delighting in everyday miracles and feeling the joyful vulnerability of life as the precious gift that it is. It means reacquainting yourself with real-life - with animals, plants, and other people. This means not wasting one more day worrying about weight loss or wrinkles, and instead falling ridiculously in love with yourself.
In essence, it means reconnecting to the infinite adoration of universal intelligence, delighting in the beauty of your body, and learning to celebrate self-love.
When you can touch the truth of who you are - an astoundingly unique expression of ethereal and earthly energies, and what you can do - create life everywhere you look, you become impermeable to the programming of metareality. It can’t touch you because you are cocooned in an armor of your own indestructible self-love.
As I move closer and closer to the infinite love of the universe, I have begun delighting in my body more (most of the time), loving the way my creative mind manifests itself, and taking true joy in surrounding myself with plants and animals every day.
But I will say, the journey always requires me to be an Angel Investor in my own life.
In the business world, an angel investor is a “high-net-worth individual” who provides financial funding for entrepreneurs in exchange for ownership in the company. Angel investors are sometimes friends and family who receive a bit of the company in exchange for their investment.
The problem with angel investing is that it’s contingent on the generosity of other people - there’s no true autonomy or empowerment in it. You have to rely on others believing in your worth in order to receive the love and support you believe you deserve.
I’m privileged to be surrounded by friends and family who unconditionally support who I am and what I do, so it took me an extra long time to learn that even with their abundance of support, I had to become an Angel Investor in my own life.
This demands that I believe in my own unique manifestation magic and tap into my own infinite Creative Source Energy.
It means giving up codependency and the victim identity that makes me ask permission to be paid what I’m worth. It means recognizing the sanctity of my singular life and worshiping it in ways that honor its sacred nature.
And above all, it means funding my own planetary life force by investing time and money into the things that serve my self-love: Milo, my plant babies, my morning dance parties to my feel good playlist, watching the wildlife from my patio, meditation, singing, organic food, sky-diving, hiking, and more.
When you break away from the programmed self-hate of metareality and return to the life-giving energy of self-love, you ascend to the level of Angel Investor. Quite literally, you access the infinite resources of your soul. This inevitably frees you to create a life you love and to get so filled up with that love that it runs over into the world around you.
Fill up your cup so it trickles down and fills others. This is how human design is meant to sustain itself and the world around.
Metareality doesn’t want you to become your own Angel Investor. It would much rather that you keep hating yourself and continue your ongoing investment in it.
But your own personhood, the planet, and the people, plants, and animals around you need you to ascend to your Angelic self. Unless we all reclaim self-love and return to real-life, humanity will lose itself in the mirage of metareality and the real world beneath our real feet will wither away.
Most of us don't even know where to begin with self-love because we don't even know what we like. It's serious business giving yourself time and space to reacquaint yourself with your cells. It's serious business giving yourself time and space to reacquaint yourself with your cells. It took me a while to find out what fills me up, but it's been worth every invested minute.
MAGIC MANTRA: I am loved and loving.
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