Are You Living Your Best Life?

I’m sitting here – over a week after Canadian Thanksgiving and pondering the idea of “Living My Best Life”. This is after being quite unwell for the past couple of weeks. I haven’t had any type of illness for the past four years and it took out of me much more than I thought possible. The thoughts behind this article have been running around in my head since mid-September and I have already done an interview with Tom Campbell on this topic. But no matter how often I sat down to write this I just couldn’t put the words together prior to my illness or during it. But here I am. So … What does Living One’s Best Life look like?

When we are sick – all we want to do is get better. In my case I continued my daily walking during the entirety of this illness but not with the same energy or distance/duration as I had prior to this illness. I had the same high energy and duration in the beginning of this health issue but I it appeared to take a while for my illness to settle in. But, even today in retrospect: I’m unclear if the health issue was exasperated by the walking as I refused to let anything interrupt my schedule.

Eventually I had to let go of the need to move, as much as I was, mostly in the hope that I would just get better. And eventually that happened. I also found that ‘living my best life’ became clearer when I looked on the inside in my journey to get better.

I see three parts to my eventual understanding of Living My Best Life. First I want to explore the themes that came up – and in the sequence that they appeared: Giving Up, then Letting Go, and finally Living your best Life.

Giving Up is losing all hope. It is allowing our fears to win and we become despondent and depressed. It’s our ‘dark night of the soul’. It’s when we can’t see a way out of whatever is happening in our lives. This isn’t a place we want to stick around in. We all have our moments in this place – it feels challenging and it never works out well for anyone by taking up permanent residence in this isolating place. If we stay here too long we are stuck in a depression and nothing is feeling like it is going our way.

We all strive to be authentic – but giving up is a place that keeps us stuck in the muck and is ‘giving up’ really our authentic representation of ourselves? We have to find a way back from this state and this can be difficult if we stay stuck too long. Yes, it can happen but we don’t need to stay there – we always have a choice.

Once we know we are depressed we can typically make choices to climb out of the mess and find positive reasons for what happened. But we first have to recognize what and where we are. This can sometimes take longer than we realize. Fortunately we can choose differently once we are more aware – more aware of what is going on when we are stuck. Our choices become: do we choose to stay stuck and depressed in our fears or do we remember our power and choose to Let Go of our fears?

Letting Go is a step that is conscious and positive. Letting go means we are consciously choosing to release our fears. My experience tells me that this is done by acknowledging our fears – being honest with ourselves – and BEing aware that these fears keep us from making better, positive choices. Our fears are what continue to keep us from Living Our Best Life.

By learning to Let Go we are taking our power back and recognizing that when we Give UP we have no power. We feel like we have no choices. When we feel that we have no choices – we make decisions that are unhealthy. So when we allow our fears to make our choices – because even when we feel we have no choice in our state of powerlessness – we are still making choices and they are unhappy and disempowered choices.

Letting Go is consciously making an effort to BE in Charge of how we respond to life. We acknowledge that our fears are taking our power and it is then when we can consciously Let Go of our fears and begin the process of BEing responsible for our own Happiness instead of what holding on to what is occurring around us – and even within us – that makes us feel sick and sad and powerless.

So in letting go we step out of the muck of our fears and step into the gentle healing of ourselves through the Power of Love. We always have a choice in how we respond to Life – we can either let Life dictate our emotions through our fears or we can choose to allow Love to EmPower us. I know what I would choose.

The last piece of this is Living Our Best Life. This piece of the puzzle is taking the next step in our EmPowerment and Letting Go of our fears. However, when contemplating Living MY Best Life, I have to wonder what that looks like. I can’t always say I have been Living my Best Life.

So what would that Best Life look like to you? Most people get stuck on the financial aspect of this: We can only live our best life if we are financially secure. That is just an excuse we hold onto because we give money so much power. The thing is money has nothing to do with living our best life. Money is just a way to give our power away – especially when there isn’t enough to cover our basic needs. Of course we have to look at what our basic needs are and establish different choices.

Currently, we are experiencing a time in history that a lot of people are taking a hit financially. Due to the pandemic our spending would have changed for most of us – our priorities were different. But the fall out of the pandemic are rising gas costs that impact our food sources and essential needs. I believe this is going to become a problem over the next six months or so until we make different choices.

Other than financially, what would Living our Best Life look like? We must BE present. This means we can’t be stuck in the past or worried about the future. We need to consciously choose to BE connected and living in our hearts. And I believe that it suggests we are consciously choosing how to respond and BE positive regardless of what may be occurring around us.

Now I like to believe that I live in my Heart – but I know that there is still more to the process of Living One’s best life. Such a Life has to be more balanced. Remember the Blog I wrote on the Pursuit of Happiness? It was about Spiritual Growth, Creative Expression and Joyful Living. Our lives require more balance with these attributes if we want to Live our Best Life. We can’t be stuck only ‘working’ or distracting ourselves because we feel uncomfortable.

To Live our Best Life requires living a Balanced life where we are authentic and positive most of the time. We should strive for that … and strive, at least, to be conscious of that. When we are very conscious of most moments we don’t easily let others influence our emotions. So it takes a lot of effort to Live our Best Life.

I’m not confident that I am Living my Best Life – but I am very willing to make this effort; especially after spending more than two weeks feeling unwell. I also recognize that it is a process of taking smaller steps to discovering what areas of my life require more balance. I know that the effort to Live my Best Life is an ongoing process of LOVE and Harmony.

I invite you to join me and Play on this Journey with me. I know that it will be worth it – even if I – and all of us – can’t see the outcome quite yet. I am excited about the possibilities and encourage you to offer your examples of Living Your Best Life. Let’s BE this! With Love and an Open Heart, Laurie❤️