Me and my mind have been at odds recently; I’ve been feeling that I fall short of who, where and what I want to be. I have started to feel overwhelmed again with despair and I’ve felt that old and familiar cape of depression settling over me again.

It took me a while to realise what was happening and even longer to believe that it was. With all my training, my healthy daily regime, my meditation practice the years of work I put in to fixing my mental state of mind, how could this be happening again?

So I upped my game, I enforced a stricter and longer meditation practice, I got out all my natural pills and potions, I tapped (EFT) until I’d almost ran out of things to tap for, but nothing seemed to help.
I was starting to feel really lost, really out of sorts, how could I fix this when I didn’t know where it had come from, so out of the blue, when everything appeared to be going so well and actually how I had wanted it to?
Then I found the reason; the curve ball that had started it all up again. My book was ready for the masses, soon to be published, but I was far from ready. I was scared, I feared, I compared, I rejected, I worried, I lost confidence and lost my love for myself. All the things I taught, all the things I had learned – gone so quickly because I felt that I wasn’t ‘one of them’. I wasn’t that beauty, I wasn’t that empowering person, I couldn’t stand up and sell myself and my work, I didn’t feel authentic, I wasn’t that author, that speaker, that inspiring person I’d hoped to be.

Initially I fought it; I attacked my mind and my body with the same might that I felt it was attacking me with. It didn’t work. So I wallowed for a while, which didn’t work either. I gave myself more of a hard time, for I should have known better, but I hadn’t seen it coming, it had well and truly sideswiped me.

Was I really that afraid to be seen, was I really doing this to myself all over again, after so many years being cape-free? When I was doing my normal thing, seeing clients, doing small demos, talks and workshops, I was happy, confident and real. But now that things were changing and the steaks where getting higher, I’d compared myself to others and in place of my authenticity a doubting, fearful, trying too hard to be like others Faith had appeared again.

I was fearful of failure, of criticism and being seen, so my mind was trying to protect me in the same way it had tried to time and time again in the past. I accepted and thanked it for its assistance. I also accepted things had changed to teach me something I needed to be taught. I allowed myself to be open to whatever this was, I allowed myself to accept not everyone will like what I have to teach and that’s ok as they are on a different path to the one I have trodden. I’d felt stuck, not knowing where to turn or what to do, so I accepted this also (and my frozen/stuck neck I’d also been suffering from also went away).

Someone recently said to me that discomfort comes from being at odds with your soul purpose. I was certainly at odds with mine, I wanted it in one hand and was fighting it with the other!

Who’d have thought that the publishing of the book would as much of a lesson to me as the reasons for writing the book in the first place. I’m sure there will be many more lessons this book will teach me, but learning to accept myself, my truth, who I am, my purpose for being, just simply me is a pretty awesome pre-publishing parting gift!