After you write that book(or anything else: letter, essay, book, etc.) that you do, there is one more thing that you must do to complete your hero’s journey.
You now can teach one or more people how to do what you have done to heal yourself.
Our world has a pandemic of loneliness.
As you now see, the pain of loneliness is misunderstood by many.
When you teach others what has helped you, you are changing our world. You are healing our world.
You are making this world a better place.
What if everyone who reads this book does just that? What do you think could take place in our world?
We would have a different world.
We would have a changing world.
We would have a healing world.
I am sure you see that our world is in desperate need of true healing.
What if our world can heal by all of us helping another to heal?
What if small acts of a continual and consistent habit of kindness can heal our whole world, one person at a time?
What if that is true?
What if we can change our world?
What if we can heal our world?
What if this is the time to heal our world?
All the chaos, hurt, pain, fights, misunderstanding, all of the mountains of things that have been taking place in recent history is an indication that it is time?
Why should some be so poor as others live so posh? Why should some live happy while others drown in pain?
When we could make it better, why not? What if it is time that we no longer put up with those conditions to go on when we can be of help, to be healing agents of our world.
What if every small proactive and positive thing that we do ripples out toward everything else to change our world?
Once you have diligently been practicing the new habits that lead to your great healing for eight weeks and following it up with what I talked about in blog 6, you have another gift that you can give yourself.
It’s a gift that you produce for someone else and, by doing so, create an excellent gift for your inner self.
The gift that I am talking about is to write.
You can write about your unique healing experience to help another person experiencing loneliness in the way you had.
You can write it for just one person or more. You decide. Follow your heart.
What matters is that you do it for someone else other than you. The act of helping someone else empowers you in ways that are beyond this world.
When your heart is involved in bringing healing and joy to someone else, you become doubly empowered and find strengths that you had not known about previously.
There is something powerfully empowering about being driven to do something to help someone else.
We, humans, are made this way.
We have something inside of us that awakes our will and determination when we are inspired by our desire to help someone else heal.
I was reminded of this just recently.
Every year I do a 30-day raw food cleanse. I have not been on top of it for a few years, and this last year I tried several times and did not successfully carry it out.
A month ago, my best friend and my housemate came to me and shared how scared he was about his health, that he had been experiencing pain and discomfort in various parts of his body.
He expressed maybe he should do a juice fast for a few days or so. I told him that if he did raw food eating for a month, I would do it with him.
So we did.
He has since lost all of the pains and discomfort in his body and is feeling very healthy, and we just surpassed thirty days two days ago.
I have always struggled with thirty days of raw food eating every year. I have almost always, especially at the tail end, feeling like I was missing out on real foods, leading to little cheating at the last phase.
This time, I never felt the sense of losing anything and have had a lot of fun learning about raw cooking.
I have done this because I have been trying to help my best friend heal, making various menus for him to eat.
This is the first time I did raw food cleanse to help someone I care about instead of just myself, and I never felt any sense of loss but enjoyed all the good feelings that clean eating provides.
It is most amazing what happens to us when we are doing something for someone else.
We become more creative. We become wiser. We become inspired.
I have learned so much this time around. Three days have passed now after the 30 days of cleanse, and I am still eating raw and learning new ways to prepare extremely healthy cuisine.
I am not yet prepared to give up other foods, but I am learning as much as I can about raw cooking. I am interested in learning more about the vegan diet in addition. With a vegan diet, I will be able to cook some things.
My friend’s worry was so powerful that I did something good for me with ease and inspiration instead of a drudge that I experienced every time I had done it before.
That very instinct that we have to help others move us forward in our human development. We are made this way.
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When you write about your healing journey that has taken you from experiencing that toxic, painful loneliness to an emotionally independent state, intending to help someone else, your learning and healing take on a whole other level.
Your learning deepens.
Act of writing, organizing your thoughts, pulling out of yourself more profound wisdom, and getting to see just how limitless your expanding can be is more excellent than any words can describe.
You learn more.
You learn more about how you have healed.
You learn more about how to flourish.
You gain a more profound sense of yourself and your potential.
You gain more profound self-acceptance.
You learn to see for yourself the misinformation that you have picked up.
You learn how to accept yourself unconditionally in ways that you never imagined that you could.
There are countless things that I have learned writing about my healing journey, and one of the ones that I love so much is the continual “ah-ha” moments. I am surprised again and again every time it happens to me.
Writing about my healing to share what I have learned has developed my ability to further access learning and wisdom in ways that I don’t think I fully understand. I say that because I am amazed every time more education and more understanding happens.
It has been the most fantastic gift.
I continue to learn to love myself more unconditionally.
Writing that I do to teach others what I have learned is largely responsible for my continual growth and powerful healing.
I am simply awed every time I watch myself react emotionally in ways that are new, healthy, and peaceful
I want you to experience this for yourself, again and again, as I do.
I have been on this journey for about three years, and I will never quit writing because of this and other reasons.
The educational power of writing is almost like magic. Its power is unbelievable. As I write this, I still have not grasped just how amazing my growth has been. I feel like the luckiest person in the world.
You have so many beautiful reasons to write about your healing journey for others and, in the end, for yourself.
What heals the hive, heals the bee.
What if your letter that you write for that one person powerfully helps her?
What if that essay you write causes the awakening from long funk and suffering?
What if that book you write helps change countless people’s lives?
What if your unique experiences help people in ways you never imagined possible? What if?
Do you see now why writing can be so powerfully important?
Do you want to know how to start?
First, I secretly hope that you have decided to write a book. If you find yourself feeling intimidated th the idea, if you think that you cannot write a book, if that is how you feel, then you must write a book—just saying.
There is no length required.
You will write just want you want to write.
Once you have decided that you will write this book, however long, even a letter length, or an essay or a short mini-book, or a short book, or a fast read book, whichever you have decided to write, carve out a time that you will write each day, at the same time each day.
I could be one hour, two hours, three hours. (at least one hour)
First, outline how you are going to tell your story.
For example, you might want to talk about your story, how you got to a place where you had learned to feel lonely in the way that you did.
You can talk about your beliefs around it.
You can then talk about why you decided to change that and to feel better.
You can then talk about what you did that worked.
You can also talk about what you did that didn’t work.
You can talk about the powerful changes that have occurred in your life because of the self-work that you did.
You can talk about how your life has changed and is changing because of the changes that you have made in your life.
It is just that simple.
If you want to make your writing better, rewrite. Good writing is rewriting.
It is always worth our time to focus on changing an emotional habit that hinders us from living our best possible lives. Loneliness is one of them.
The time you spend on healing and growing yourself out of a negative state like loneliness or any other negative state is worth everything. No money, nothing of earthly good can match what you can gain by powerfully empowering yourself this way.
When loneliness plagues your life, it is imperative to get free of it.
To get free, you must get into the driver seat of your life
Getting at the root of the problem of loneliness and tackling their causes are you taking the wheel.
So let’s drive.
As I mentioned in my last, “How to stop being lonely,” there are the root causes of this plague, the loneliness.
The first step is getting in touch with a very important truth. This is truth is that you are lovable.
Getting in the driver’s seat of your belief, of your lovability, is the first cause to root out.
If you have believed that you are not lovable, you learned that belief from someone. That, someone, taught it to you by not loving you, or not knowing how to love you in the way that you needed to be loved.
The first thing you have to understand and see is that every human being on earth was born lovable.
When I say that we were born lovable, I am saying that it is our most natural state. It is our most natural state because we are nothing but love on that day.
The only thing that changes for us is what we begin to take on as we grew up. More specifically, our perception in our minds about our lovability. And that perception that we gain affects how we feel about ourselves and how others treat us.
The good news is that you have the power to give yourself all that you need right now. It is time for you to begin loving you in action.
The following are core loving actions that you must begin taking.
Practice self-compassion
Practice self-forgiveness
Practice self-kindness
Practice self-honoring
Practice good self-care
As you begin the practice of loving yourself, you have to become mindful of mindsets that likely exist in you right now.
They are powerful contributors to the loneliness that you feel.
Negative mindset and victim mindset are very harmful friends who we must let go to stop being lonely, start being happy and start truly living our lives.
Negative mindset and victim mindset are highly seductive and addictive while being hidden too quickly from the beholder’s view.
When you have a negative and victim mindset, you are like that of Odysiuss’s crew of men from the Greek mythology, who were charmed in the Aeaea island. Like those men during the charmed state, you have no idea that your life is far from what you truly want.
To get free of the negative mindset that has been holding you back from your life in every way and causing the pain of loneliness, you can begin practicing a proactive mindset, what Carol Dweck of “Mindset,” calls, “Growth Mindset.”
You will have to mindfully begin practicing the following action steps to gain a proactive mindset.
Begin gratitude practice
It is incredible how powerful grateful practice is. It is equally impressive how many people go without grateful practice without ever knowing the level of power this practice has on one’s life.
Doing daily, once a day is a good start, but it is only a start. Life takes over, or rather, we human beings are creatures of habit, and emotional practices are equally as powerful.
As doing it once a day is a helpful beginning, if done only once a day, the rest of the day gets filled with the old way of running your emotional life or letting your emotional life run you.
The best practice is to do a gratitude practice first in the morning and the last thing before bed. Then throughout the day, every time you pause for thought or a break, give thanks to something around you or in front of you, or something or someone that is in your life that you are grateful for(their wellbeing, what they mean to you, what they mean to their community, etc.)
Focus on what you have the power to control and let go of what you cannot control
If you have no power to control the situation, then acknowledge that fact and then move your focus to what you can do to make things better for yourself. When you figure out what you can do, then take the action steps to make it better for yourself.
Taking the action steps to resolve your pain instantly empowers you. You gain incredible insight into the possibilities of your power. You realize just how much more powerful you are than what you thought or even knew.
You become more aware of yourself and what you are capable of.
You become more aware of your character and who you are in ways you had never really known before.
You get to see the power of change and your ability to change, and your ability to grow, learn and expand.
Learning all of these things about yourself gives you the knowledge you can do and manifests so much more than you had ever realized or known before, and this is one of the most amazing wonders of this universe that you could recognize. It is truly the most amazing thing because you get to see just how powerful you are and how much you can do to change your world and make a positive dent in your world.
Practice Hero’s mindset to lose victim mindset
If you have a victim mindset, it is because you likely were victimized at some time in your life, especially when you had little power to help yourself. You didn’t have the power, knowledge, and skillsets at that time. You could not see a way out at the time.
You may have been picked on by your older siblings when you were little, and you were too small to defend yourself again that sibling.
You may have been beaten and starved by abusive caretakers. You were too little to help yourself.
The critical part of all of this, no matter what has taken place in your life, is your present life’s happiness and fulfillment level.
It is also true that you can give yourself happiness and fulfillment, that which is your birthright.
You can be and must be the master of your fate and captain of your soul.
There are excellent historical figures who faced victimizations and won the world by being a hero and not letting victimization take them over. Just some of them were Victor Frankl, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, and Epictetus.
The common factor amongst these people was that they used what challenged them, what gave them great pain, to make the very hero out of themselves. They turned their pain into healing tools and made a powerful difference in our world.
Look for what you can gain from what happened to you, how you can grow, improve skills and knowledge, etc.
Look for how you can use what happened to you to help heal the world.
Take actions to learn and figure out your unique way to make a positive change.
When you do these things, you are a hero. When you become a hero, you are no longer a victim.
When you are no longer a victim, you are who you were meant to be.
We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.” — Ram Dass
The next step in overcoming the terrible plague of loneliness is to get connectted.
With the feeling of self-love and knowing that you are enough, leaving behind a negative mindset and victim mindset, you add to your growth and expansion by regular connection practice.
When I say “connection,” I am not talking about connecting to other people in your life. Not exactly. The connection that I am talking about, when you master it, you will authentically connect to others as a side effect.
The connection that I am talking about is first and foremost to you, who you are, and your being.
How often do we move through our days, hours, and minutes and even seconds, disconnected from who we are? Too many of us walk through our lives disconnected from who we indeed are.
We are too busy looking outward.
How could we feel anything but loneliness?
The answer is to be in the practice of being connected to ourselves.
The most effective way to learn how to connect to ourselves is by Meditating. One of my favorite methods is Emily Fletcher’s Zeva method.
Another crucial thing you must do to connect with yourself is to be on your life path, do your life’s work.
“What hurts the hive, hurts the bee” — Marcus Aurelius.
When Marcus Aurelius said, “What hurts the hive, hurts the bee,” in his, Meditation, he was talking about the imperative need that we all have to work to help one another and to be about making a positive difference in our world, that we are all bees, a part of a larger hive.
We are all meant to be working toward the greater good.
As a person who is in the practice of connecting to yourself, you become genuinely complete when you do just what it is you are here to do.
You are here to do things that when you watch someone do them, something just feels right. You get a jolt of pleasant good feelings in your brain.
It feels natural if you are introduced to it right. You want to do them even if no one paid you to do it.
If you have no idea what you want to do, what your heart loves, then it is because a sequence of events in your life has established a disconnect from you and your life’s path.
Discovering your life’s path by reconnecting with yourself is a worthy journey and a necessary journey if you want to be your best you.
Living your life fully, being fully in the moments, and giving all of these things, takes you on an opposite path from where loneliness dwells.
When you free yourself from your problems’ real culprit, you will be free of the issues.
When you get rid of what or who is pulling strings to your unhappiness and pain, you have a real chance to be happy.
If what is pulling the strings of the loneliness you have been experiencing is expunged from your life, you will no longer experience the loneliness for too long.
As I mentioned before, what’s causing your loneliness is not being alone. The pain you are experiencing is not coming from those things you think, but they are coming from within you. Those feelings that you are having are not out of your control. You have all the power in the world over the emotions that you experience, loneliness included. You exert that power by first knowing you have it, then learning how to get free of what weighs you down, strengthening the muscles you have forgotten, and then using those very muscles to be the boss of your emotional life, including loneliness.
1) When you come to believe you are lovable,
When you have come to know that you are lovable, you will no longer allow people who are less than well-intentioned to remain in your inner circle of life. Your heart now knows what your head had known or suspected all along. You don’t dwell in unnecessary feelings of guilt and trust your decisions and desires, and are in a regular practice of following those inner instructions. Your second nature is to trust yourself with love, kindness, and self-compassion. Your subconscious mind is your best friend, not your foe.
You will give of yourself and your loyalty to those who genuinely deserve you and your dedication.
You will emanate a definite sense of self, attract your like, and welcome those positive, reliable selves into your life. This will reinforce your subconscious and conscious mind the realness, the valid-ness, and the rightness of true self-love that you feel inside you.
2) When you come to know that you are enough just as you are,
When you see that you are enough, good enough, and valid, you open up your life to the real possibilities of life.
You will not dwell in insecurities or think or feel negative judgments of yourself in comparison to others.
You will be in charge of your emotions and become self-aware and open to be curious about the emotional and spiritual atmosphere around you, close and far.
Bullies will lose its power in your life.
You begin genuinely winning at life, competing against you with a team and allies who are also you.
Nothing holds you back emotionally, spiritually, and financially.
3) When you begin to connect to yourself and your world,
You become aware of your needs and wants and get into a regular practice of meeting them and enjoy the sense of calm, peace, and joy.
You move through your time and space with calm courage and allowance of wonder and possibility. You become tuned into your creativity and oneness.
You realize that you belong.
4) When you become free from a negative mindset and victim mindset,
You become the boss of your life.
You no longer have reasons to feel miserable about things that you do not have control over. You focus on what you have the power to control, and that practice deepens your self-empowerment.
The remarkable aspect of having this “hero’s mindset” is that having real power over your life is habit-forming. You will naturally take on more and more of your hero’s ways.
You become addicted to working on making things that you want to happen.
You see life’s games and become addicted to the thrill of solving the riddles and tackling the game and winning.
5) When you are living your purpose, doing your life’s work,
When you are on your life’s path, acting on your passion, making a positive difference in the world, as we are all meant to do, you are living the truest and happiest life.
Your life will be filled with passion and creativity. You will experience the state of flow.
You are doing and living a life that you were born to live, and with it, you have arrived at who you are supposed to be.
When you are whole, when you are in the state of being the best version of yourself, life becomes boundless. You manifest and create things that you desire with ease. You are in an optimal state and flow through life with ease.
You will look to an outsider as if you have the Midas touch in all things, and it is because you are whole and therefore have the excess to the best version of everything that is you in this universe.
Your relationships, career, health, success, joy, happiness, and everything will be at their best because you are the best version of yourself.
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In the next blog, I will discuss with you just how you could overcome loneliness.
This blog, “How to Overcome Loneliness, part 2”, is the second part of the eight-part series to help you overcome loneliness. If you have not read the first one, please read that blog and then come back to this one.
If you don’t resolve the causes of the loneliness, you will continue to experience negative emotions that come with them. You will also remain stuck in adverse living conditions. You have had those negative conditions for so long that you don’t know how much happier you would be without them, making you miss out on being your full potential self. That means that you will continue to miss out on your true fulfillment. You will also miss out on your best possible life: the Happiness Formula.
The following are the main culprits:
1) You believe you are not lovable.
When you continue to believe you are not lovable, you will continue to allow people who are less than loving to you, confirming your already held belief that you are not. Your head knows better. You even feel guilty and foolish for putting up with people who treat you less than okay. You feel bad about the fact that you don’t treat yourself well. But as long as you do not “KNOW” in your heart, in your subconscious mind that you are, you will continue to believe that you are not, and you will not feel lovable. And when you don’t feel lovable, your less-than-self-loving-you will continue to allow those people to get into your life and remain there in the comfort of discomfort.
You will continue to feel obligated and dutiful toward those who bring you much more unhappiness than happiness by treating you in far less than kind and loving manner as they do not value you. Since you agree with those people about your value(knowingly or unknowingly), you cannot see that you deserve better.
You will continue to prematurely reject yourself from potentially positive and beneficial relationships by not entering new ones or leaving them too early avoiding potentially good and loving relationships. Doing that makes it difficult for you to truly learn how to overcome loneliness.
2) You feel not good enough, and not enough
If you don’t gain the knowledge that you are good enough, that you are enough just as you are, you will continue to downgrade yourself in too many ways.
You will continue to be prone to feeling insecure and less than others.
Others will find you overreacting to things that they do or say. You will continue to give power to others to hurt you, whether they meant to hurt you or don’t mean to hurt you.
Bullies in your life will continue to have too much power over you. Your belief that you are not enough will continue to win out and keep you under the thumb of oppressive insecurities.
You will continue to hold yourself back from trying things that will stretch and grow you and help you reach emotional, spiritual, and financial success in the way that would feed your life.
3) If you continue to stay disconnected
Not knowing who you really are, your needs, and what your wants are, you will not really know what it means for you to be happy.
You will continue to feel disconnected from your spiritual self. How could you reach for spiritual connection when you don’t even have your basic connection needs met by being in touch with your core self. How could you gain skills as to how to overcome loneliness, if you do not learn how to connect?
4) You have a negative mindset
You will continue to see life through powerfully unhealthy perspectives of thinking and feeling that most things go wrong for you.
You will spend too much of your time feeling miserable and untrusting of people, even those who may deserve your trust. Trustworthy good people will continue to leave your life feeling unseen and unappreciated leaving behind plenty of those who are not reliable and not good-intentioned, leading you to unhappy connections in your life.
The problem with this mindset is that it is very addictive. It isn’t that you are addicted to good feelings, but you become addicted to negative anxiety ridden bad feelings that lead to stress and suffering.
Your brain becomes normalized by them, and it becomes an easy ride down path, sliding lower and lower in negative states which then creates more profound and deeper roots of negative thinking and feeling habits.
This whole pattern of life is very easy to remain in if you do not change from it.
5) You are continuing not to live your purpose, not doing your life’s work.
If you are not on your life’s path, you will continue to miss out on the real fulfillment that living your purpose gives you.
There will be a deep sense of emptiness inside you, confirming the less than good feelings and esteem that you have about yourself.
You will continue to miss out on the joy that self-fulfillment can only provide. You are born to experience it. Without it, you will have a massive void in its place.
6) Not feeling whole; not being your best you.
If you continue not to feel whole, that continues to manifest adverse outcomes in all areas of your life.
Your life will remain less quality than you would want. Your relationships, career, health, success, joy, happiness, and everything will be less than you can ever want for your life.
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In the next blog, I will discuss all the benefits you will gain by freeing yourself from the causes of loneliness.
