2019: Be Courageous

Another year is about to end in the continuum of our lives and for many of us this means reflections and good intentions. This is quite natural. Even if the “end of the year” is just a shared "convention", it marks a passage and a stage at which we become more introspective.

In exorcising our fear of the unknown, this new time that will come, we have learned to wish each other many positive things: health, prosperity, peace, happiness, love. But this year I want to wish you one thing in particular: the courage to love yourself deeply and completely.

Why? Because I have understood that this courage changes your life completely and allows you to finally have all the other positive things you are longing for. 

But first I want to explain what it means to "love yourself deeply and completely", because I have found so much confusion and so many preconceptions about this. Loving yourself does not mean becoming selfish and focused on the needs of your ego in spite of everyone else. It means choosing to know and to understand yourself, to become clear regarding your aspirations and your vulnerabilities, abandoning your defensive reactions, understanding why you act as you do and why you give certain people or certain situations the power to bring out the worst in you, as well as the reverse. It means recognising your strength and your beauty, your talent and your preferences, it means highlighting and accepting your passions.

Loving you deeply and completely means understanding who you are and refusing to compromise, and for that you need a lot of courage.

Because you have become accustomed over the years to meeting the expectations and needs of your life and your circumstances, a part of you has stopped breathing and growing, has stopped dreaming and creating. This is the part of you that is suffering from a lack of oxygen and space, that has created tension, anxiety, sadness inside of you. This is the part of you that is creating fears and physical pain, the part that, in being compressed, feeds your pathologies and your illnesses.

It takes courage to love yourself, because it means stopping pretending or inventing excuses and justifications, stopping saying “it's all right” when you know that it's not. And it means stopping postponing certain decisions and certain choices in the name of being "patient and consistent” while, in reality, you are only fearful.

It takes courage to love yourself, because when you do that, nothing remains the same, you start to question all the old structures and relationships based on a limited vision of yourself. But the reward for this is priceless.

When you really have the courage to love yourself you stop settling for things and you start to design and create a life that completely reflects you. You develop pleasure in communicating honestly and frankly, declaring your feelings with sincerity and becoming authentic in your way of being and relating to others. All your fears are dissolved because inside you there is such a balance that it makes you feel invincible. You simply stop needing to control everything, to worry about what others think and how they will judge you. You earn peace and wholeness, the sense of being the protagonist of your life and not just a cameo in the lives of everyone else.

And when you finally develop the courage to love yourself, you also allow others to do the same, because you free them from the obligation to meet your expectations. When you love others, they love you more and they love each other better, in a virtuous process that finally creates harmony instead of tension and conflict.

So, this year, have the courage to stop making lists of good intentions and goals and simply choose to finally and completely understand who you are and to love 100% what you discover.

This is the way to true fulfilment and joy.