ARE YOU STRUGGLING TO LOSE WEIGHT?
FEELING UNINSPIRED?
WANT TEN PRINCIPLES TO LIVE YOUR GREATEST LIFE?
ARE YOU A MANIFESTING TITAN?
CRAVE ROMANTIC MAGIC IN YOUR LIFE?
WANNA KNOW EVERYTHING NO ONE EVER TOLD YOU?
Self-help is a 10 billion dollar per year enterprise. I’m gonna go bold— if any of it truly worked, there’d be no self-help industry. If everything marketed to us as “self-help” was eviscerated from the planet tomorrow, we’d all be better off.
I studied Advertising at university and a key component to the most successful ad campaigns was the technique of convincing you to buy something, by directly or subtly stirring up discontent with how things are. And when advertising does its job seamlessly, we forget its advertising. The only reason any of us wear deodorant today is because advertisers convinced us in the early 1900s that we smelled bad. My grandmother never wore deodorant her entire life and she smelled lovely— like an iris sprinkled with cinnamon. She found the whole cooked up thing a hoax and didn’t believe in rolling chemicals over her sweat glands.
These same advertising techniques are employed by the self-help industry and its self-appointed ‘experts,’ leaving us culturally in a place of misperceived brokenness and distraction— and someone or something out there has THE answer.
I’ll confess, I used to be a self-help junkie, until it dawned on me— the constant influx of improvement and aspirational material reinforced the beast of not enoughness— a snake eating its own tail.
Is it wrong to want to be happier? To desire to live longer, live better? Sign me up! But are we looking repetitively in all the wrong places? All. The. Time.
I pinky promise you, the self-help industry is not empowering you, though it has appropriated the word as it’s biggest slug line. Empower comes from the Old French prefix ‘en’ meaning ‘in or into’ and the root word ‘power’ comes from the 1300s meaning, ‘strength, vigor, might.’ So the origin meaning of the word is— in strength, in vigor, in might. It’s an internal blaze, authored by you.
The illusion of self-help is equivalent to an advertised hunt for a golden egg, looking everywhere— for weeks to decades, when you’ve been holding it all along, in your own two hands cradled to your chest.
Can we also acknowledge we’ve forgotten the ‘self’ part of ‘self-help’? The process of overcoming and growing, through one’s own efforts. Not because ‘help’ isn’t valuable, in say changing a tire, but nearly always— we overlook what already exists within the ‘self.’
So stop. Cease the relentless habit of going outside yourself for answers.
No one else can give you dominion over your own interior. Not religion, not a book, not a seminar, not social media, not a coach, not cake. Those exchanges may open your perspective fractionally, but more than not, you’re recycling dissatisfaction for someone else to recontour.
We’ll know we’ve collectively evolved when every bookstore has empty book shelves in their Self-Help section with a clapper board that says— Turn around, go home, and look in the mirror at the ‘Self’ staring back at you. The bad news— no one is coming to rescue you. The good news— no one is coming to rescue you.
To help yourself, you have to know your Self.
How?
By getting present to what is— reality, in this moment. You don’t have to have a spirit animal and seven crystals with an emu feather. (I do have one of those, though, from a beautiful emu in upstate New York, named Elizabeth, who enjoys playing peek-a-boo when I visit. Her sliver plumage is voluptuous and she’s the sweetest running bird I’ve ever met).
The undeniable sense of how to enjoy life must come first. The joie de vivre. If you miss the joy in a small act of getting groceries or sitting in traffic, how will you enjoy your wildest dreams coming true or that exotic vacation? The foil: you won’t. I’ve conquered a lot of what the external world says equals “the good life.” But an undercurrent of unhappiness and grumpiness still ran (okay, sometimes still runs) through it. And the dirty secret is: it does for most, contrary to what we present publicly and to close friends.
As Meryl Streep has been quoted as saying— “Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple: love, sex and food!”
(I’ll also add nature, Mrs Streep)
Slightly shocked she didn’t say a particular golden statuette, or in her case, statuettes? Moreover, I’ve been to shockingly impoverished places, and witnessed a foot-stomping level of happiness, contagious to everyone in its orbit. Proof that happiness reverberates for happiness sake.
(d r o p p i n g
in
d e e p e r…)
There is a field of awareness within each of us. To experience it is to experience your Self— the inner one, not the roles you play in earth school— mom, writer, dentist, bird watcher, sommelier. But the aliveness— living and breathing you. Right here, right now.
it’s found in—
daily silences
sunlight on your face
a walk
(wait, stay with me)
cooking a meal— tasting what you’re actually eating
art— no really stop, look at it— it’ll wash the dust off your soul
fiction and poetry— not how-to, self-improvement, or parenting books
vibrations of music
touching your body with tenderness
playing with an animal or child
partnering with what you love to do
it’s in washing the dishes
(what a wondrous reality to be standing, breathing, washing bowls)
watering plants
bad public dancing, who cares who’s watching— gyrate away
meditating
flirting
running
and it’s there when you scream at injustices
when the driver in front cuts you off
it holds you in chapters of grief
and uncomfortable feelings that curl you up like a cocktail shrimp
it’s beneath your endless thoughts
and the cutting contrast of life
it’s the steady aliveness
between all you’ve been
and all you’ll be
it speaks in the present moment
with a language that is only felt
it dances with inspiration
and intuition
it’s there when you’re born
and when you die
a bliss chemistry
a deep okay-ness
there always
with you
it is you
The more centered in this Self— this field of awareness, the more— solutions surface, inspiration threads, glimmer rises from grief, the grind grinds less, feelings flow without getting jammed, problems aren’t milked to dramas, you shed who you were supposed to be, magical ideas come knocking, the future feels less fidgety, surrender turns to superpower, negative thoughts lose steam, authenticity unfurls (and you actually know what that means), lightness of spirit bounces, FUN— is no longer occasional.
No one has anything figured out better than this Self. No one else contains the blueprint to you. To remember this, to tend to this, to trust this is the highest form of Self-help.
So the next time anyone or a book claims to change your life, you can kindly say, “please don’t”— because you’ll know who your Self is, what your Self is capable of and how to stand in your Self.
With or without deodorant.
Disclaimer: Delete this email, you don’t need it. And go live today from your Self.
(This has been part of a We’re All Doing Better Than We Think recording).
*This audio essay first appeared on my website, witherwrites.com