What advice would you give to your teenage self?
I was raised in a family so certain that they were right that it took me a long time to discover just how wrong they were. I had to step out of line so far that I was thrown out of the family by my own parents to get the space I needed to stand back and see. It was the finest thing that ever happened to me.
I had the space to think, and I decided to rebuild myself from the ground up into someone I could respect and like. I chose one guidance word to follow, kindness, because to me it encapsulated everything from honesty and integrity, to allowing myself and others to be human.
Actually it’s a bit deeper than that as I feel that kindness is the strongest guide you can follow as it also means that you must be kind to yourself. In being kind to yourself, taking care of your mind, you actually become a better person for others to be around. It’s worked for me.
You are soul
If you feel heavily influenced by those around you, and especially if you believe everything everyone says about you, wrongly assuming that your parents know best, this might help.
We are all souls. We are all ancient. There are elements of the Big Bang within our DNA, which means that we must all have existed in some energetic form since that event aeons ago. I don’t pretend to know how that works, but I have heard scientists say that the atoms that create us have all existed since the dawn of time, so what animates us is that old.
If you find this to be something that you could believe in, then the obvious next step is that you’ve been around since the dawn of time. You’ve had so many experiences, maybe so many lifetimes (I’ve certainly had experiences that suggest I’ve been around the block a bit), maybe even incarnated in different forms in different places, that you’re not trapped in any one definition of yourself.
Your soul is love, which is of course a huge part of kindness. I chose the word kindness as people trot out the word love a lot and then behave unlovingly. I decided that kindness was more of an action word, more being love. More ‘you know how you should behave now damned well be that person’. A strong and determined and clear guideline.
What this reaching back into who I was did for me was it made me an individual, not child of, wife of, sister of, cousin of. In the earlier part of my life that was how I was known. When one person said to me ‘those are all very nice descriptions but who are you?’ I couldn’t answer the question.
This is what I’d teach my younger self, preferably in the womb so that she came in prepared to define herself. This is what I share with anyone of any age if they’re facing the same loss of self in the face of the unkindness and bullying of others, the perceived effects of being of the older generation, or people feeling lost.
It’s never too late to take time to think about who you want to be, as opposed to who you perceive that you are, and then act on your own internal impetus.
You have that right. Follow your heart. Be kindness. Which takes huge strength. Decide for yourself.
You really are the only person who has to approve of you.
Deb xx
Deb Hawken - Amorah 