By the looks of all the memes on social media, 2019 grabbed all of us by our necks and gave us a good shake … and I, for one, really needed it!
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you’ll know that 2019 has given me so much clarity with a multitude of life lessons for which I cannot even express how grateful I truly I am to have experienced this shift.
In the thick of it though, it wasn’t that easy to express gratitude. How’d I get through it? Lots and lots of support from friends but also I found solace in the wise words of some of my favourite spiritual leaders and thought gurus who had been there before me.
I let these words guide my thoughts to change my behaviours so that I could be more aligned with and more true to my inner self. I hope that by sharing these it might help someone else out there soothe their bruised ego and find themselves in a place of peace and harmony with their inner self.
Love and light to you, always.
About Love & Fear
Why put these two together?
Most of the quotes in this section come from A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson – a book that my life coach suggested that I read while I was working on building a self-love practice that made sense to me.
The more I read the book, the more I realised that almost all of my ideas of love came from a place of fear. In my life, the two are opposites working against each other. Where there is fear, love cannot exist.
Fear is our shared lovelessness, our individual and collective hells.
Marianne Williamson
When I think about this quote, it makes so much sense! When we are growing up we’re afraid of nothing! We try, try, and try again until we figure it out with no regard for who is watching or what they might say. In fact, people are cheering us on because they love to see toddlers learn!
As we get older, they start putting us into boxes predetermined by so many aspects of our reality (gender, social status, race) and we’re taught fear. Once we’ve learn’t and checked off all the developmental basics we start learning who we cannot be, what we cannot do or say and the curiosity and wonder that we were once encouraged to use quickly starts to be stripped away.
Love isn’t material. Love is energy.
Marianne Williamson
Love is the centre of my universe.
Affirmation
About The Ego
Through therapy I learned that my ego was out of control. To be honest, I kind of always knew that but I didn’t know how to tame or keep it in line. Thanks to Eckhart Tolle, I learned how to quiet the ego by focusing on exploring and reframing the thoughts that empowered my ego.
We get in life that which we focus on.
Marianne Williamson
This quote really helped me to stop identifying with my ego’s need to always criticise other people because now I was looking at it as me criticising myself in others instead.
Whenever I found myself irritated or annoyed by another person’s behaviour, words, or mannerisms I would automatically check in with myself to see what was it about this person that I saw in myself and did not like?
Sometimes it was the opposite. The fact that they could do say or do something that I never would upset me and so I’d find myself criticising them. Now, instead, I take note of it as something I need to work on for future me to be more confident, brave, comfortable etc.
Our egos are not where we are bad, but where we are wounded.
Marianne Williamson
About Being Present
Like many people I would lay down to sleep at night and find that my thoughts were constantly racing and fixated on things that happened in my past that I couldn’t change but seriously longed to. This was an exhausting process that cost me a good night’s rest and would also interfere with my daily activities. It really needed to stop.
Eckhart Tolle’s description of the past as a series of memories that we have no control over really set off a shift in my mind. Not only are they just memories but by constantly reliving them I was letting the present moment get away from me too often! This was why I would often feel like my weeks were a blur – because I spent too much time in my own head wrapped up in thoughts about my past and most of the present moments were just me running around trying to catch up with things left undone.
The past is merely a thought we have.
Marianne Williamson
One of the hardest things for me to do at the start of the year was answer the question “who am I?”.
My first thought was always to label myself by the roles that I have always played in my life whether that by sister, cousin, daughter, friend … but this felt to me to be very superficial because many of these labels were from my past and most of them weren’t active roles as I found myself abroad and away from my family anyway.
So who was I, now?
Labeling ourselves based on things outside of us causes us to feel unfulfilled in my honest opinion because we are constantly trying to live up to other people’s standards for us in those roles. “I am…” turned into two of the most powerful words for me this year and I started to use them sparingly and more cautiously, always trying to figure out how best I can describe myself based on how I feel within.
Our identity isn’t static was what I learned through practicing being more fully present and noticing the ebbs and flows of emotion that coursed through me day in, day out. When you practice being more instead of doing, you begin to tap into the feelings that flow through you everyday. For me, I started to focus more on feelings of fulfillment, of gratitude, of love, of peace that flowed through me and in leaning into those feelings more I learned to be a better version of myself.
The past has no power over the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle
I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time – taking time to be more fully present.
Oprah Winfrey
A lot the things in my past caused me severe anxiety and I had to learn to forgive myself but most importantly to practice compassion towards self because there was now way I could have done anything differently without knowing what I know now.
I remember hearing Oprah say this and I had an “aha!” moment that immediately pushed me into an inner conversation with self in which I forgave my past self for things that she had no idea she should have been doing better.
The past me did what felt right at the moment and because of that I have learned so much about myself and about other people. For that I have come to be grateful. Now that I know better, I do better so as not to repeat those harmful cycles.
Rewriting the Script
Throughout the year I have been using affirmations to rewire the way my brain thinks. Why is this important?
I described to an old friend of mine as having to struggle constantly with being positive when it felt like my negative thoughts were always stronger and more aggressive than any ounce of positivity that I could ever try to cultivate.
Affirmations for me worked as a pathway to acting my way to a new way of thinking. So whenever I thought that something was too difficult I had an affirmation lined up as a rebuttal to that thought to immediately disconnect myself from that old pattern of thinking. In turn, this would then push me to act differently instead of falling into old habits and patterns.
I am my own kingdom of fulfillment.
Affirmation
This year when it got tough I realised that I couldn’t do it on my own and desperately needed an external ear to just LISTEN to me. The thing was, though, that I had never liked speaking about my past because once I verbalised it or shared it with another person that made it real.
For me, I never felt like I had the space to be vulnerable as a child. Growing up, I quickly noticed that when you were vulnerable with others they either disregard just how deeply this affects you or they later throw it in your face.
I had to learn to open up to others who were offering me a place to lay down my burdens even though I was so grateful for their compassion. This affirmation helped me to see that by sharing my pain points with others I was not only being strong but allowing myself to heal and grow as a result of their advice and wise words.
I set my past free and forgive my participation in it.
Affirmation
I am melting into an ocean of self-love and self-forgiveness.
Affirmation
You know the saying, “everything happens for a reason”? This affirmation takes it a bit deeper.
When you reframe the way you see difficulties, it changes the way you act in response to them. This affirmation taught me that every situation presents a lesson to be learned. We like to focus on the negative situations but I also applied this to the good ones. “What is this teaching me?” and “How can I pass this on to others?” became my reflective questions of choice whenever I felt like I had a valuable lesson emerging from a random, every day occurrence.
I release what hurts and welcome what heals.
Affirmation
My Quote of the Year
So at the last minute I decided that I should choose one of these 19 quotes as THE quote of 2019 … and if you were paying attention as you scrolled through this mammoth post of emotional life lessons you’d have realised that the underlying theme in my life this year was learning how to give myself the space to release all that I held within.
At the start of the year I was definitely the person that didn’t know how to open up to others fearing that they would only hurt me in the aftermath. A lot of that fear was rooted in the past and unlearning that took me a while but through understanding my ego and learning to deconstruct it and rebuild it in a healthy way with affirmations and giving myself the gift of time, I have undeniably come a long way as I grew to be the person I am today.
It feels great to sit here and reflect with these quotes and I hope that one of you reads this and it resonates with you and helps you to build yourself up in 2020 and beyond.
Astrid Oxford Travels 