It´s a state of mind, not what you achieve in life.
By: Paco Chávez
Tags: Happiness, Self Improvement, Habits, Self-awareness, Consciousness

“You´ll find happiness when you stop trying to prove yourself”.

No sentence ever resonated as much with me as this one did at this point in my life. As the year ends, I look back on the person I´ve been. All my actions, my habits, and my decisions from the moment I wake up, going to work, social gatherings, time spent alone, and going back to bed. I constantly challenge myself to grow however this current challenge is one hard to swallow and face. Like many teenagers, I struggled with unconsciously building up insecure thoughts, emotions, and patterns that determined the way I looked at myself and others. It crippled me for many years without even knowing it and prevented me from truly searching for a path in life that would bring me joy, peace, and happiness. I´ve always had a deep curiosity for practices like meditation, visualization, and self-reflection so I slowly started incorporating them into my alone time. Being far from an expert, I started to look even closer at the things I posted on social media, the way I acted, and even the things I said throughout the day and noticed I was deeply unsatisfied with the person I was growing up to be. I didn´t even recognize myself. I started to ask myself questions I had been avoiding my whole life. ¿What are you passionate about? ¿What does your life goal look like? ¿Do you even have one? ¿Are you aware you have been coasting through life all this time? Like a feather being blown by the wind in all directions, powerless. As I contemplated these questions my mind and body started to feel tense, I began to worry. So what did I do?

Ignore these sensations.

“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.”

I was afraid to accept my true path and afraid to dream. I was comfortable with the way life was going even though I could not experience true joy and happiness because my body and my sensations told me otherwise. I was anxious all the time, worrying about what other people thought about me, depressed and victimized every time life didn´t turn out the way it was supposed to. Of course, it wasn´t! A ship with no captain will only travel where the tides of the ocean and the wind takes it, it needs someone to steer and command. And so the years went on and my presence on social media kept growing as a lie, projections of my insecurities to prove to the world I was someone with a happy life, who was going somewhere. When in reality I had very little purpose, very little success when it came to financial security, and a feeling of truly loving what I did. Luckily I realized I could heal myself. After years of struggling with hate, resentment, and anger towards many people of the past, family traumas, and rejection of love towards myself and others I sought to look for help and guidance. I went to therapy to hear myself express all these emotions and thoughts that I wanted to eradicate from my life, not have them haunt me every day, and determine what the course of my life was going to look like. I wanted to find out who I truly was, what I liked about myself, and what other talents I had hidden inside of my being that would be exploited to create a life of true purpose and joy. I realized I had been living life through a projection of my ego, believing I was the center of attention and that everyone was constantly on the lookout about what I said and did. This cloud of egocentrism kept me in a state of constant judgment towards myself and acting in accordance to fill that void of judgment, it was exhausting.

“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”

The more I meditated and spent time by myself, the more I was honest with my emotions. I was physically and mentally exhausted, so I promised myself I would start a new book with new chapters in my life. I yanked myself out of the miserable little bubble of the society I grew up in, threw away all expectations of myself and others, and looked for a new tribe. I took a different perspective towards the relationship I was in and realized I was not with the correct person, so I mustered all my courage and even though I deeply cared for this person, I parted ways. I wanted to be around people who enjoyed every day, who made living in the now simple, beautiful, and possible. I started journaling every day and writing all my negative and positive thoughts on paper to cast them away from my psyche and into the material world. I learned to practice gratitude and acceptance. Compassion and the gift of giving. I looked inside myself and saw the enormous potential that was hidden all this time, the light that was waiting to be shared with others. But how? I just needed to bring it into consciousness and accept that music was going to be my gift to the world. I became an athlete from the moment I was 10 years old, practiced multiple disciplines like karate, gymnastics, football, swimming, running, tennis, you name it. Ultimately the athlete I was became just a shell of insecurities that was trying to prove to the world all my physical achievements. Like many young men, I started going to the gym to “fix” all my flaws, I began to see how people´s perception of me changed as my body did too. All of this terribly fed my ego without me even realizing it. I convinced myself that my journey in this life was to just keep training and show the world how my “hard work” and “discipline” was going to help them become better. In reality, all my time spent exercising was just an escape. I wasn´t going to create a career out of it because I never felt a true passion inside me. Don´t get me wrong, I still care about my health, my body, and my personal training time, however, once it is done, I switch into another version of who I want to be. I now focus on my mind and mental health more than my physical appearance. I have learned that my mind and beliefs had me, not the other way around. It brings me tremendous joy and peace to be able to write this down and finally see a clear path regarding what actions and goals I have to take in order for the future to manifest into the life I want to be actually living. I have made peace and accepted who I was in the past, in order to bring every new day a version I want to embody, so tomorrow will receive the best version of me. This could not be possible without the help of many souls that have miraculously crossed paths with me, although I slowly realize that more than a miracle, the energy one starts to put out into the world is the energy he shall receive back manifested as people and events. I´m grateful for the opportunity to see myself as an artist, a creator, and the captain of my own life. I´m grateful I have the opportunity to start from literally 0, that I have no anchors holding me down to any circumstance and can freely decide who I want to manifest into this world as. I am grateful I am young, full of energy and vitality, healthy, and determined to pursue the things that make me feel good.

And so, let´s begin a new chapter in our lives, starting today!