School is considered a very important, if not the only important focus in a child’s life in the Asian culture.
I was never really interested in school – it was something that I did because I believed I had to do it. Apart from the most basic foundations in language, maths and social skills, I found most of the subjects we had to study uninteresting. Going to school seemed like being in a vacuum that took me away from daily life. But more importantly, to be recognised through the education system meant I have made a pact to disconnect from myself.
As a child knowing this is what awaited me in entering our education system, I had two choices: to rebel, which is to say no (in reaction) to all that is felt to be not true, or to excel, which is to say I agree to numb from feeling the disconnection to myself that I choose. I did not know there was any other way.
I chose the latter, but not without consequences.
During my elementary and high school years, every day after school, the moment I got home I would sit at my desk and start to do homework and study. I would not break for anything except a haphazard dinner with my family, returning immediately to study until midnight. As a student I was not taught or expected to do anything else but study.
By age 11 I was put on tranquilisers before school exams because there was just too much to memorise and I was already living in deep anxiety and had insomnia at that tender age. I was encouraged to just do mediocrely at school by my parents after they witnessed the emotional distress I put myself in, but that was actually not a truly valid choice. I already felt imprisoned in a system where, no matter how I chose, I would lose. If I rebelled against school, I would be ostracized in society and suffer; if I chose to excel, I would equally suffer from further disconnecting from my own body. Whatever I chose I felt disempowered, but excellence in academics would earn me a recognition that the world bought into, so I chose to play that game whilst knowing it was not true success. What was seen as ‘A’ grades on the outside was very far from my true story that was not told.
My growing up years in school were spent crying and studying in bed with a sea of books around me.
I migrated to Canada when I was 17 with my younger sister because my family was unsure of the political future of Hong Kong, then soon to be under Chinese rule again. I got into a prestigious university studying Chemistry. I did not particularly feel equipped to study science, I just got in because of my grades.
I was very disillusioned in life at that point that I was close to giving up. I did not know what I wanted to study, I did not know what life was about, I did not know myself, I had very little confidence, I was hurt and deeply lost, and my physical and emotional health reflected all of that.
On top of that, this was considered normal by the world.
College days were also completely devoted to study, but panic and anxiety grew as now I was studying in a foreign country and had to take care of life with a younger sister. I knew there was so much more to life than just studying, but as a student in my culture, school was the be all and end all of life. And I did not know how to live life outside of studying! Without any idea of how to self-care, eating and sleeping as how I liked was common, which meant a normal daily diet would include coffee or chocolate covered cocoa beans for breakfast. I would start my day exhausted and eat fast foods or instant noodles during the day so that I could have the most time to study.
The way I had studied throughout my school days was not special, it is one typical example from many students who grew up in a culture where academic performance was the only life we knew.
Life is reduced to studying… the awesome possibilities and potential of a human being are reduced to the knowledge from books. I felt very trapped as I did not feel that I have learned anything in life at all. The anxiety that I felt not only came from having to fulfill academic pressures, it was knowing that the choices that were presented to me and that I chose, were not true: disconnecting from my body and retreating into the mind was the only way I could cope with the horror that I could feel but wanted to avoid feeling at all cost.
In my desperation I made the choice to quit studying life: I wanted to live life, I wanted to experience feeling it from my body, I wanted to truly learn.
I had to be very honest to myself and started to feel into all my choices. I made some pretty big choices at that time which had to be implemented, but I was willing to go there. From Chemistry, I switched my major to Chinese Studies, as what I truly felt to explore then was my culture because being in a foreign country highlighted a feeling on inequality within me, which I was on my way to exposing. I was still conscientious about studying but I started making friends and having life outside of school.
I wanted to truly learn through human relationships and the relationship with myself. I dropped studying science, and started to live the experiment of life.
Knowing that every moment is a living science brought back responsibility in my life. If something didn’t work out, I would have to go back and look at the data that built into the result. I didn’t want to rely on book knowledge because I knew there was a deeper way to live, and the only way to test that out was to fully give myself permission to trust in my own heart. The more I gave my heart the opportunity to express and got out of my own way, the more my life flowed with the results from this experiment as I built my foundation upon it. I knew love was a part of the equation, and it was something that was calling for a deeper exploration.
That was the time when I met Serge Benhayon in the 2012 Universal Medicine Vietnam Retreat. I was ready to go deeper with my experiment and practical tools would be supportive. From Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine I have learned that the missing link to the True science of life is self-love. The tests I thought I had been doing with love over many years were still producing results which were unloving, and now I understood why. I hadn’t given myself the permission to express this love to myself. For the last three years, this was the living experiment I tested, researched, got more understanding of what worked and discarded what didn’t work in my life.
Life became clearer. I have chosen to be born in a place and in circumstances that have offered me ample opportunities to experience the devastation of what is not natural on a daily basis, so as to come back to loving myself. Loving myself was to constantly say no to what is not natural and choose to live the naturalness that my body knows. Without a foundation of what self-love feels like in my body at the start of this experiment, I had to feel the intense disconnection I have chosen to live from the reactions I had towards the world.
Life had felt unbearably lonely and I was always seeking to escape this loneliness. I could easily give up, saying this study of life is too difficult, as it indeed was. But with the support from Universal Medicine, I didn’t give up.
Instead I have come to the simple conclusion that in self-love, I just have to give love to myself, consistently without perfection, in all moments that my awareness allows.
In moments where I was unaware I had to go back and ask why, further refine what determines my ability to be aware, and test again.
No one can offer love to me, no one can tell me how to love myself, no one can force me to accept this love. I didn’t have to do anything special or to go to a faraway place to love myself, I just have to give myself permission to feel my own love and offer it back to me. I simply had to be myself.
In this living experiment, the data becomes the confirmation. Nothing outside of me can truly confirm the success of my experiment or not, the only true confirmation is in my own body.
I have found another way to learn, a way which brings me deeper back to myself every day. Every choice that I make and how consistently these choices are made, will be everything that comes back to meet me, so taking responsibility is a given. Every moment is an opportunity to learn; if I dismiss any moment, I would have to take the responsibility to catch up and feel the consequences of that delay. In learning with responsibility, not only do I feel more energy and vitality, anxiety is replaced with joy. I am growing and expanding and always welcoming more to learn. Did I mention I am also looking and feeling amazing and beautiful?
There is a true way to learn; it involves my whole body and Soul, it involves all my movements, it is interconnected with all of life and humanity and beyond – it is The Way of The Livingness.
Inspired by the Love and Inspiration from Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine that is forever limitless.
By Adele Leung, Creative Director/Fashion Stylist, Hong Kong
Further Reading:
Livingness
Time for a New Normal
The Way of The Livingness – Where can I Register?
636 Comments
What a blessing to feel ‘I have found another way to learn, a way which brings me deeper back to myself every day’. After many years of making life a struggle that sense of finding that I only have to connect to inner heart and all the outer demands of life feel insignificant compared to the wondrous joy that I find within. Life can be so simple when we allow it.
Andrew, because this tension that we and many others have felt while growing up started so young, it then became accepted as normal. Today this feels absolutely ludicrous, as would it not be an instant alarm in our bodies that something is seriously wrong if anxiety is being experienced so intensely with our children? And if as parents we continue to hold back in expressing about this, we will then perpetuate this horror as a continued norm.
School can teach us many patterns and beliefs that are harmful for life. What does a child learn by experiencing that results are more important then self-care? How does this set us up to handle all of what life is, which we know is so much more than our results and achievements.
Your comment Adele about the anxiety associated with studying and exams brought back memories for me. I would often have difficulty sleeping at night when I had an exam or assignment looming and would be physically sick and shaking from nervous tension on the day of an exam. And yet this is accepted as just being normal. Why does it have to be this way and surely if this way of studying and learning is having such a negative impact on our physical bodies it cannot be the way to go?
I can completely relate to the comment you made about being faced with two options at school – the rebel or the over-achieve -, as I remember feeling like that also and feeling that neither option felt like the truth of who I was, but there did not seem to be a third option of just being me at that time. When I left education and went into the work-force it was pretty much the same two options – rebel/do the bare minimum at work and don’t commit to life, or throw myself into work and try to be the best at what I did. I also chose the overachiever option. I can say that this was not great for my health or my body and I still carry the scars of living in this way today. In the last 10 years I have come to realise that there is indeed a third option – to simply live me and as a result the level of love and contentment in my life has risen substantially in that time since making more self-loving choices on a daily basis.
I agree Adele that in many ways our current education systems appear to be a school in how to disconnect from yourself and all about survival and security in the world, not about true contentment and knowing who you are. And we have all allowed this to be created by deciding that survival and security are greater than love.
The thread of comments in going deeper with all of this is a deeper understanding of how the world functions the way we currently do. We are immersed in a cycle that is self-abusive by a movement that has been on-going for a long time, and we have made that our normal and accepted it to be the normality of life. In this self-created cycle we are also abusing others. We have created a world which is governed by the mind in expense of our body and heart, a world where we have made lovelessness to be normal. In understanding this brings back simplicity, the purpose of living is simply about bringing back a movement or rhythm that once again feels true to our body and our heart.
Zofia that is exposing to be confirmed by your work experience in recruiting. Parents think they are setting up their children for temporal success by enrolling them in the best schools and making sure they are well prepared academically from young. Children as young as in kindergarten start taking open exams to earn certificates for their secondary school placement. But the truth is as you have observed through your work, the stresses put on children from young stay with them in life, not just in work but in every aspect of their lives, and there is no true success in this and neither is it normal.
While attending school I found that much of what I was being told to learn didn’t ring true in my body, so my solution to this was to check out to not have to feel the untruth of what was being taught. There is a pressure in schools where there is pride on being academic over all else. When we choose this there are many other areas that miss out.
I work in recruiting and look through people’s cv’s/careers every day, and the same also applied to me too when i was a student, which is that – the stresses and pressures experienced within one’s career or job, have already been created from the way one educates or studies in this same pressured way. In other words study/education lays the foundation for what is then experienced at work. Without the self-education of love, the study or work ethic becomes not truly supportive even divisive eventually leading to breakdown or fatigue where a person completely gives up on themselves and life [commitment issues being reflected by ‘job hopping’], or goes into overdrive to excel and achieve. Both lead to depletion from not utilising one’s own natural energy resources efficiently. Hence love is what brings in or brings back the efficiency and balance.
I agree Zofia that we seem to have fallen for the notion that success in life revolves around security and getting ‘that job’ and everything is set up to get it from a young age. There is a widely held belief that getting a good job and financial security is the ticket to a joyful and fulfilling life. Of course these things are important but if the focus is only on that at the expense of our relationship with ourselves and others and supporting our health and wellbeing, then it cannot lead to a fulfilling life, as evidenced by the current statistics in illness and disease, burnout and mental health disorders.
No result is a successful result without a joyful body delivering it.
Absolutely Kylie! That is an absolute truth.
Beautifully expressed Kylie. The marker of joy in our bodies truly is a confirmation that the movement chosen is the way to be, and if there is no joy it is also simply a reminder that we can choose to move differently.
If the education system presently is a picture that the world has accepted education to be, the deep harm that penetrates people in this is that the true learning with responsibility will not something we naturally move into.
True Adele. My experience is that in school many children learn with reluctance and feel the irrelevance of what is covered, or they struggle to keep up with the demands set and feel inadequate. They either invest in the system as you did and burn themselves out, or give up. This is far removed from learning with joy, commitment and responsibility.
School has not been made so children will want to bring all of their natural qualities and unleash all of their potential, its been made first to show us rules about how we should speak and respond, and adhere to lineal processes in life but not relate everything in the spherical way in which a child knows life. Without feelings, life is only what we are told, so it is important to allow children to express their feelings.
Adele I love your sharing of your journey through Education. I see with children today that not a lot has changed and there is a huge amount of pressure on them all to conform to the picture of education as being the all, that without it your life is not worth a cracker. What happens to the individual who will not make it through to the top grades, they are often the ones who lose faith in their ability to achieve and often don’t try for work feeling less than prepared for life in the work force. Are they the ones who end up on the dole where we have pushed them, and they feel they belong?
I have read that the age children are being sent to boarding schools now are becoming younger and younger, as young as 8 years old, and no doubt children are facing more abandonment issues with this. I wonder what goes on on the side of the parents, the decision they make to send children away at this young age. Frequently I hear parents making comments such as they cannot control their children, so it is better to send them off to boarding school. Understandably, parenting is not an easy task and it could feel we are out of control or we may project that onto our children, but the truth is any ideal or picture is just a protection as life cannot ever be controlled the way we think we can. If as parents we avoid looking at difficult issues, and give this responsibility to boarding schools, we are only buying time to truly take responsibility. For do we really think by absolving our responsibility as parents, schools will take up that responsibility for us? And if our children are not “transformed” after attending boarding schools, we can then further blame our education system? If our children is out of control that is their way of expressing that something is not quite right, and as parents it is our responsibility to understand (without accepting abuse of course) and read deeper into our children. We all have a right to be responsible, whether as parents, children or even the education system, and that begins with our understanding and relationship with oneself and with each other.
Agree Adele, because a parent who does not know or live true love cannot then instil this at home and with themselves through self-love and self-relationship to have a more true understanding of the way we relate to ourselves and the quality of this – bashing and critical, or easeful and open for example. This is why so many kids are suffering or in a level of dysfunction at school, further studies and later on into working life. What you say highlights the crucial importance of love within, is love at home, study and throughout work and life.
Parents we have to wake up to the fact that what we think are benefitting our children in the current education system is a picture that actually leads to great devastation to our children’s health and well-being, that clearly does not lead to any true form of success for our children. Not only are our children affected, we are also affected, and our choice to perpetuate this leads to our future generations being affected. As parents we have the responsibility to say this is enough and halt this deeply ingrained movement we have been led to move in.
This responsibility starts with ourselves, to bring love back into our own life. And this love will be naturally shared with our children and with the teachers and classmates in school, which may take time to ripple out, but the process has begun.
Thank you Adele for sharing that the true way to learn is with the entire body and the soul. We seem to restrict learning to knowledge, knowledge to the brain, the brain to memory so ultimately to learn is to remember and regurgitate rather than truly feeling something in the body.
Learning is not just about the academic – as you say – you are learning that love is something you choose for yourself, that all are equal, that how we live is something to learn and explore. Adele what you share breaks the conventions of learning – that it is so much bigger than what we perceive it to be and that with every movement of the body, we learn.
I love this line Adele….”I didn’t want to rely on book knowledge because I knew there was a deeper way to live.”These words would be so supportive for every child in every classroom around the world.
I agree nb. I remember clearly getting to the age of 16 after taking my exams and realising I knew very little and also that I knew nothing about life. I had been at school for 12 years and didn’t feel that I had been taught very much.
Agree Rachel, school was no place of confirming me in my independence and self-certainty or trust about myself and life, and more dependency on the right or top marks/academic stream to get you all to generate a level of false ‘independence’. Being independent in life – is to know who you are by the way you hold yourself and get to know who you truly are. Combine this with studies, and wow what a winning combination. Combine this without, then wow … what disaster.
True – that is, until we have a library of books that are full of this deeper way to live.
Bring in the School of The Livingness and incorporate the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom as they were taught underneath the great pyramids in Egypt thousands of years ago. Lets learn and understand how to be social first. Lets understand who we are and how to live as the sensitive beings we are. This is not exclusive but actually includes everything we need to know to live in a world where all is energy.
It was lovely to spend time with you Adele while I read your beautiful blog. In your blog you are offering us all such great inspiration from the simple changes that you have made in your life – I feel when we all look back on our lives we can realise that we did have a greater understanding of life but that we chose to not go down that road because it felt too rocky. I know I had moments when I knew there was a different way – and then chose to be pulled back into a way of living that was not true or self loving – that is until I met Serge Benhayon and began to attend courses and workshops that offered me greater insight into the true way to live life. I am now realising that life is as wonderful as I choose to make it in any given moment as I choose to let go and surrender to the all knowing Universe.
What a transformation Adele, thank you for sharing your experience and highlighting that without self-love and connection with ourselves we only lead ourselves down a path of anxiousness and disregard living from our head and driving our body all in an effort to appear successful yet with no true quality of being.
It is such a sad and painful a reduction of ourselves that comes from the way we champion knowledge based intelligence and academic success. As when we pin our hopes to achieving recognition from the outcomes of our studies or schooling we abandon the real truth, the love and care of our bodies as we have lost sense of who we are. We are not taught how our connection to ourselves, our Love, our Soul and our bodies is the source of the greatest intelligence that we could ever know. I am eternally grateful to Serge Benhayon and The Way of The Livingness that there is another way to live and learn of this intelligence, our true and innate intelligence that is waiting to be connected to and lived, one that we all have access to through being aware of who we truly are. A way that honors, the Divine wisdom within each and every student is equally great.
The pressure to be knowledgeable and constantly be reading about different topics is huge in my workplace. I don’t really conform because I know that that knowledge is used to help us disengage from eachother as people. The idea that an intellectual conversation connects people is completely lost on me. Often it becomes very competitive with who is the smarter one, the more worldly one.
The constant seek and thirst for knowledge is necessary and understandably so as an illusive substitute for connection but it will never suffice and further alienating with the body will engage us in a cycle that would not bring us to what we are looking for. We continue this movement knowing its detriment but it is still more familiar moving in this way, until it is not–either by our own choice to stop or we are forced to stop by our bodies.
yes, and the competition is fruitless and contributes to the lovelessness in this world.
I saw the same choice being played out at school, either to rebel, or to dive head first into being the academic ‘nerd’. Either way was a form of attention, good or bad, and was a form of reaction to the education systems way of asking you to perform rather than just be yourself.
Yes isn’t it interesting Rebecca, how it seems that we have a choice but it is not a true choice, it is just the action or re-action to the same detriment. That there is a third option is rarely presented to us. The offering of this third option is what makes this blog and the teaching of Universal Medicine so amazing.
Your words here Adele so beautifully expressed, No one can offer love to me, no one can tell me how to love myself, no one can force me to accept this love. I didn’t have to do anything special or to go to a faraway place to love myself, I just have to give myself permission to feel my own love and offer it back to me. I simply had to be myself. Absolutely love it.
Yes Julie, love is so simple, does not cost anything and is available to everyone, yet we make it so complicated and create all kinds of excuses, resistance, distractions to not embrace it. Something strange is certainly going on here, that we need to question at some point.
It is a long time since I have been involved in the education system, but from what I remember, it was quite stressful in the sense that you had to start thinking and stressing about your career from the beginning of high school. What if I want to be an engineer? Oh, then I need to do these subjects, and so on. The whole process creates nothing but anxiety for students and teachers alike. Where is the love of learning? Where is the wonder? we cry out that education is everything, but some of the most successful people I ever met never received a proper education, which begs the question, is education all we make it out to be, and if not, then what is true education, if it is not needed necessarily to prepare us for a successful career.
Great question Adam. In my experience the love of learning and our current education are two things that strangely enough do not go hand in hand. Recently, after 20+ years since being in school I enrolled to study online, and the greatest lesson I got from that experience was of discovering how it is I learn, and through that reignited what had all but been extinguished during my school years – the love I have for learning. For me, true education comes not by voiding our relationship with our body but through building it with love we lay a foundation for our natural enquiry to discover the endless well of our innate knowing.
What is success anyway but a picture that was fed to us and we have bought into, and yet from the body any ounce of anxiety or stress would not lead us to true success.
‘I wanted to truly learn through human relationships and the relationship with myself. I dropped studying science, and started to live the experiment of life.’ Adele I love this, our educational systems are all set up for us not to know who we are.
This is a truly beautiful blog to read Adele and inspirational. This is true education and is what we have on offer to support our own children through a system that is not geared for self discovery and self connection. Thank you.
We are taking the children out of school for a week to come to the retreat with us next week and asked the teacher if there was any work that we needed to take with us so as they didnt miss anything. She gave me a usb stick with some worksheets on it but said she would prefer them to just get experience out of where they are going as it would be more beneficial to them. She was sure correct here.Little did she know about the truth of what she was saying, or pehaps she could feel the whole truth of what she was saying.
The pressure within the Asian culture to achieve academically is actually mirrored in other cultures (quite possibly all cultures) as well. In some cultures it is not academic success that children are steered towards from their early childhood, but to be popular and socially successful amongst your peer group, to groom yourself to become a desirable wife and to focus your attention in the late teenage years on attracting a husband, to be good at sport. In Australia, there is even a strong cultural pressure to arrive at 18 years of age ‘care free,’ ‘fun to be with’ and more interested in enjoying the culturally imposed ‘entitlements of youth’ than in establishing yourself in your adulthood.
No matter what they look like, these cultural dictates are impositions on children and young people. All give them the message that in order to be accepted and successful, they have to be what their culture tells them to be, not who they feel they are in truth.
Yes, the majority of us are living up to false ideals and beliefs of who we think we should be or what the world wants, the whole time missing our most treasured gift – who we truly are.
To live in a world where our accepted rhythm is not from love requires a body which can consistently and steadily live its natural rhythm of love.
Love this blog Adele , thank you for sharing ‘No one can offer love to me, no one can tell me how to love myself, no one can force me to accept this love. I didn’t have to do anything special or to go to a faraway place to love myself, I just have to give myself permission to feel my own love and offer it back to me. I simply had to be myself.
In this living experiment, the data becomes the confirmation. Nothing outside of me can truly confirm the success of my experiment or not, the only true confirmation is in my own body.’
Yes it is! Adele thank you for this amazing piece of writing, full of pure expression, I felt every word. The line that was of particular standout for me was ‘if I dismiss any moment, I would have to take the responsibility to catch up and feel the consequences of that delay’. The power of this truth allows me the space feel the responsibility each choice holds as not a weight but in actual fact a joy. From your commitment to studying life your mastering of teaching has emerged, thank you again Adele an absolute treasure of a blog.
‘The power of this truth allows me the space feel the responsibility each choice holds as not a weight but in actual fact a joy – SO true Giselle well said. There is great joy in being aware of the responsibility that each choice holds as we are offered to opportunity to be all that we are in every moment. And as we are Love, when we choose to be who we are we then naturally live our glory, which is joyful beyond measure.
Mind blowingly simple it can be when we allow ourselves to be who we are by dropping the images of what we think that looks like, and allow the natural emerging of who has been with us underneath, albeit hidden, every step of the way – Soul.
The images hold us prisoner from the riches that lay untapped deep within.
I saw a part in a documentary in Asia about the problem that is a result of the Chinese one child policy. The balance between men and women is gone and parents are worried about their children getting married. They have these match-markets where lot’s of parents go to find a match between a daughter and a man what struck me was to see that how important the education level and income of both people were to the parents. And what was mentioned also was that young people study for years and than work on their career. This way they do not find the time to have a relationship with someone and why the number of singles is very high.
The picture of success many of us have bought into is to excel academically, have a successful career, get married, in some parts of the world to have only one child, it includes many different things except having a relationship with our body and ourself, so life is all about dealing with complication (another picture) instead of living the simplicity from the heart.
Yes I think I also saw this same documentary too Diana, very interesting. It was striking to see the desperation and power that’s given to ‘relationship with another’ via these marriage-meeting-conventions, without there being any hint of exploration into self-relationship, and the actual quality of this. But how can it when it’s a generational thing and the defaulted position of a race or culture is to put oneself on the line, is normal and entirely expected, even celebrated. Though being here in Singapore, I’m seeing more and more people these days starting to break this buck and come out of this entrapped way of living in parental expectation that ill affects every aspect of a person’s life and work.
“But more importantly, to be recognised through the education system meant I have made a pact to disconnect from myself”. unfortunately these words are very true.
School for me was not about relationships, it could have been and I feel in the future it will be. I was there to learn what was being taught, and so it wasn’t about expressing myself, or learning about myself and life. With children of my own now I am observing that building a relationship with self enables us to have self worth, feel love appreciation and embody this knowing. There is potential for this to be the experience of the majority, simply by making the focus of life about relationships. When a child, cares, loves, likes themselves they are in a prime position to learn something with ease, no stress, pressure or trying, it can be learnt for purpose and not be hung on to emotionally. We can all support this in how we live and how we express ourselves.
This is amazing what you present here Samantha, it is the whole school curriculum of the future laid out. Learning is not the issue it only becomes an issue when we have lost the connection to ourselves. If we make education about deepening our self-worth, learning comes naturally and with ease and we will be all able to learn from each other – what a rich world this will be! And an intelligent one too!
This article really is awesome, how it feels, how it reads, the content, a package, a gift for humanity, full of lived experience.
Awesome revelations “the true science of life is self-love” and as you say “I just have to give myself permission to feel my own love and offer it back to me. I simply had to be myself.”. we spend so much time looking outside ourselves for love, for healing, for acknowledgement, but with consistent commit and self-care, self -love arises and is felt. I have had this experience, I cold feel Love and Stillness, and this had been building but I had not been holding myself in it, as you say ‘offer it back to myself’. It continues to be a work in progress but I can feel a big but subtle shift, the need, the hurt, the loneliness, wanting something from anything else is melting away as I learn to hold myself in the Love that I feel.
Self-love is an incredibly power-full tool for re-connection when it is chosen and lived in everyday practical life, it can be your fundamental building block of life that carries you through every situation, clearly setting out what the quality of the outcome of every choice will be.
Beautifully said Shami. As I have learnt and continue to learn that when we are connected to ourselves, to our Love are we are connected to our awareness and are able to be guided through our every day, through every situation, what is of Love and what is not, what is true and what is not.
Unfortunately, your experience is one of many, to varying degrees. At exam time during my last years at college, I remember the stress and pressure and the people that crumbled beneath it, cry and in hysterics because they thought they would fail and everything in life was telling them that all their worth rode on the back of the exam results.
I was so lucky to have a mum at home who never, ever pressured me to do well and was always reminding me that exams are not the be all and end all, that my health and well being is no much more important, and that not being good at exams is no failure and doesn’t show me as unintelligent, it just shows I am not intelligent in a way that can be measured in an exam. This support was vital to me not getting so caught up in school life and in many ways compared to my peers, breezing through my exams. If I did get anxious, it was my choice to feel the pressure. And now, having let school I can only attest to what my mum told me – my exams ave had little to no impact on where I am going and what I am doing and I have found that where I may not have excelled at exams, I excel at life.
Thank you Adele for your honest sharing. For me it was interesting to get a sense of how the education system is felt in your country. With your open words I could feel how you were trapped – this following sentence said it all for me: “I would start my day exhausted and eat fast foods or instant noodles during the day so that I could have the most time to study.” How wonderful and inspirational is it that you had the commitment to change this way of living into a way of living were self love and self care is the leading impulse.