Introduction.

Over the years, I have been overwhelmed with how many emotions I have felt and how many questions I've found myself asking and the fiery passion by which these questions were fuelled.

I've seen these questions cover the whole spectrum throughout my life - everything from "Who is God and where do I go when I die" .. to "Why am I here" to "Why do I feel so horrible about myself" to "Why wars" and millions of others in between [far too many to list].

I felt many resistances brewing within me toward the answers I am being given in school and from those I was encouraged to look upto. There were many answers that heartened and resonated. There were also answers with the nessage being one of choicelessness, of patriarchy, of there being one singular goal in life toward which our whole lives were to be focused if we wanted to be successful [and answers about what successful itself meant].

There were messages of intolerance and judgement, of exclusion and competition. All of these messages [and many more] were at odds with what I felt somewhere within me. They seemed confusing and misleading, inconsistent. And yet these views were at centre of what I was being taight. I was being sent the message of our being separate, of our being better, or worse than each other, of there not being enough of anything to the point that we had to fight to get what we could, that I was bad if I wanted something that differed from what was percieved as right by my teachers, my community or society as a whole.

These and many other messages were absorbed by me - not without confusion, and certainly not without resistance, but I tried them on for size in moments just the same. Some I tried on for a millisecond and discarded, some I tried on for years, to be discarded later. Some are still being mulled over today.

At that time, I also chose not to revisit the religion I had left behind from the time I was 12 years old for what I perceived to be its hypocritical messages and its rigidity and its exclusivity.

The most difficult part of my leaving it behind was the fact that I had been left with the challenge of establishing an entirely new relationship with God. With my religionlessness, I found myself not knowing where to begin. And while I believed in God, it would be years from the time I said goodbye to the religion before i connected again with my newly defined God in a way that I felt clear and good about.

One day, I sat alone on my terrace, a place I often sit in moments of deep reflection. An inner conflict had arisen out of my feeling both grateful beyond description for my being able to experience all that I had and feeling uncomfortable with, and disillusioned by how isolating and distancing [among many other things] these same experiences were.

I wanted some distance from the pressure I felt to continue performing at breakneck speed. I wanted to reflect and gain as much objectivity on my life as I could.

So I went within myself. While I was not completely unfamiliar with going within, I had never gone quite as deeply as this.

Propelled by a desire to feel a kind of peace I have not yet experienced, I feel a great willingness to truly let go. Of everything. I am willing to let go of every material possession I have, every symbol of status. I feel ready to do anything that I feel is needed to do to break through all the illusion and to find this peace. I am even willing to let go of any desire to express through writing, which is a form of expression in which I have found such comfort from the time I was very young.

All this is to say, I am ruthlessly ready to do what it takes to be peaceful - and I am not sure what it is,

A lot of what I have been doing is not working and I am not feeling the joy that I feel is my birthright [as it turns out, losing everyting is not what is needed to find peace and clarity, but it is the willingness to do what it takes and the openness to grow into very unfamiliar territories that I think plays the biggest role in my eventually experiencing it.]

I feel prepared to let go of any expectations that I or anyone else have of me. Wanting to see who my true friends are, I re-evaluated every friendship. At one point, I remember asking a friend that I wondered whether at this particular time it was time for me to die, because it felt like such a death of sorts. i investigated the voices in my head that played messages of anything other than love and affection.

I want to get clear about what I feel my true purpose in life is: to evolve, to express, to define, accept and love myself and to honour and encourage this in others as best as I can. I bring many of the things I have been taught into the light to see whether they helped serve this purpose. It's a beautiful and terrifying time. I am happy now to feel that level of rebirth when I wake up in the mornings - not all the time - but a lot.

My life didn't change much, ouwardly, as I was fully prepared for it to, but the shifts inside changed my relationships to many things.