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People ask me all the time why I work as hard as I do. Why do I do so many things? Why do I always seem to be going, going, going?

Truth is, I’ve always been this way. I’ve always had a ton of energy, drive and an intense passion for all kinds of things in life. I’m curious, I’m adventurous and I enjoy learning so I can GROW.

But I also have a side to me that slows down, relaxes, meditates and enjoys just BEING. Although many people don’t often see that side of me, it is something I’ve learned to incorporate into my life on a regular basis.

After all, life is all about balancing the doing with the being. If all you do is DO, then eventually you’re going to burn yourself out (been there, done that.)

Regardless, I’m still very driven, and here’s why…

Everything I Do is For My Own Freedom

Freedom isn’t free, you DO have to work for it (although it is possible to do a bunch of work up front and then sit back and just enjoy the fruits of your labor later… I’ll get to that a little later in this post.)

Since I don’t want to be controlled nor do I want to manipulate others into giving me stuff for free – because I want to support abundance – I will do whatever it takes to achieve my own independence, knowledge and freedom.

I can’t have freedom if I’m dating a man who is trying to control me, sabotage my every move, and intentionally hurt me just because he absolutely hates seeing me happy.

I also can’t have freedom if I live a life of denial and lie to myself about what I really want, what I really think or who I really am.

And I can’t have freedom if I choose to continue to hang out with “friends” who just want me around so they can leech off of all that I know and all that I do so they don’t have to put in the time and effort to learn all that I have learned. I consider these kinds of people “energy vampires,” as they tend to take more than they give.

Let me touch on this subject for a minute… because it’s become one of my biggest learned lessons in life.

The Energy Vampire

If I’m always the one filling someone else up, yet they aren’t reciprocating in a way that feels balanced to me, then over time I’m going to realize that they are a drain to my energy and giving them any of my time, attention, and energy is really, in reality, only slowing me down. This means they are toxic* to me, my drive and my personal growth.

*Please note, this does not mean certain people ARE TOXIC, I’m just saying they are toxic to me, which means if I care about myself and how I feel then I can’t continue to enable that kind of behavior. I have to distance myself from them or let go of them completely to support my own wellbeing… and to also, hopefully, help them learn why some people leave, block or disappear on them.

I believe time is the most valuable currency because once it’s gone, we can’t get it back. I can’t get the time back that I’ve spent hanging out with people who only wanted me to lower my vibration just so they could feel more comfortable around me, but I CAN choose to take it as a lesson learned and just distance myself from those kinds of people going forward. Plus I can continue to love them from a distance for the meantime until they learn their own lessons and do the work to raise their vibration enough to meet me where I’m at… and if if they never do, that’s okay, too. We all have free will and have the freedom to choose how we each want to experience our individual lives.

Might I add… choosing to live at a “higher” vibration isn’t necessarily a reflection of arrogance, although from one perspective, often at a “lower” vibration, it may be perceived as such because that person is subconsciously believing the other person is “better” than them, when in reality, no one is better than anyone. This is just a limited belief rooted in lack that they accepted as the truth about themself at some point in their life.

If living in fear, lack, scarcity and manipulation is how someone chooses to continue living their life, they have every right to, but that is just NOT how I choose to live my life. I want to live a life that is full of love, abundance, freedom, happiness and peace, so I am paying attention to how I feel in every single situation, looking for the lessons, letting go of what drains me, and doing the inner healing work on myself every day so that I can ultimately create all that I desire in life.

I can’t change anyone else, especially if they don’t want to/aren’t ready to change, but I can change myself and am only responsible for me and me alone.

How I’ve Been Creating More Happiness + Freedom in My Life

To be truly independent and have the ultimate confidence in myself, I have really had no other choice but to find the courage within to let go of anyone and anything that was bringing me down, draining me and/or making me feel like shit. This wasn’t always a case of wanting to, but more of a case of having to.

For example, I didn’t want to let go of some friends (as well as clients, contractors I hired, boyfriends, etc.) because I LOVED them, but I had experienced enough contrast that I could FEEL that my relationship with them was imbalanced and draining.

For example:

I was giving/doing a lot more for them than they were giving/doing for me
I was respecting them when they were disrespecting me
I was showing up for them when they weren’t showing up for me
I was taking responsibility – for more than my fair share – while they were giving me excuses and playing victim
I was talking highly about them to others while they were talking shit about me behind my back

I tried the angle of explaining my side to a few of them, but discovered pretty quickly that most of them couldn’t see or hear what I was trying to communicate to them.

This dumbfounded me for a while… like, “What aren’t they understanding about this?! Is it how I’m explaining it? Maybe if I just explain it in a different way…”

Diving in deeper and learning more about Law of Attraction and the power of living more a more aligned life helped me understand this whole dynamic better. I learned that they couldn’t actually hear me because I was now tuned in to a different frequency than them… one that was “higher” up on the vibrational scale (again, this does not make me “better” than them.) Trying to communicate with them was like trying to tune to any other radio station than the one they were actually speaking on. We just won’t connect.

That being said, I realized that trying to explain something to someone who is on a different frequency than me will not be able to hear me, no matter how I say it. In addition, if I continue to try to explain my side to someone who just cannot hear me, then I’m not only wasting my time and energy, but I’m also perpetuating my own energy drain, which I obviously don’t want to do. My goal is to feel good more often and to keep my energy high!

So I really had no other choice but to start making some new choices… choices that were more aligned with what I really wanted.

I realized I just had to let them go and try my best to love them from a distance. Loving them from a distance meant I didn’t think poorly of them or talk shit about them. I could have compassion for them knowing they just hadn’t experienced enough contrast/gone through enough pain to learn some of the lessons yet.

Pain is an excellent teacher. It’s when you’ve finally reached a place in your life where you’ve truly HAD ENOUGH of the pain, sadness, depression, fear, BULLSHIT that you decide to do whatever it takes to make a change.

The Benefits of Letting Go

Since I had been deeply programmed over this lifetime, as well as past lifetimes, I had a lot of blocks/negative thoughts, beliefs and emotions taking up too much space in my subconscious, which was projecting out in the physical as my reality (as within, so without.) The things I wanted couldn’t flow freely to me because I needed to let go and heal a lot of these things first.

If I was choosing to allow certain “negative” things to exist in my life, then I was sending out a signal to the universe that I was okay with living a “less-than” and “limited” life… and, because of the Law of Attraction, I was continuing to attract more of that negative stuff into my life.

Not only that, but complaining about the negative stuff I was attracting in was ME CONTINUING TO BE NEGATIVE, which only enhanced the negativity and ultimately created MORE of it!

This is what we like to call “That Asshole Moment,” when you realize what you have been complaining about was literally created by you. 😉

Isn’t that ironic?

In becoming more mindful of this and consciously letting go, I have, in turn, created more space in my life to allow more of what I actually want to flow in, and with less effort. This is how I signal out to the universe what I don’t want and will not accept in my reality, and over time, the universe has to comply (as I am are creator of my own reality).

Turning the Negatives into Positives

I have had to work very hard at changing my mindset, healing my limiting beliefs, and raising my vibration so that I could turn the momentum around and start attracting more of what I want. My goal is to continue working on transmuting my darkness into light and turn as many of my negatives into positives as I can.

Throughout my journey, I’ve experienced some excruciatingly low points, but I have also experienced some of the most amazing high points! The highs naturally feel better than the lows, so I try to put most of my focus on building momentum on whatever FEELS good to me.

The Law of Polarity shows us what is possible. If we’ve experienced a deep contrast of what we don’t want, we can know without a doubt that it’s possible to experience the polar opposite of that, which is what we do want. Understanding this has been another game changer in my life! And it all comes down to our choices.

For example, if we experience really negative stuff, like massive financial debt, then that means we can also experience it’s polar opposite of massive financial abundance. This is done by letting go of negativity and following the feeling of what feels good, then continuing to do that in every now moment until the scale is tipped. Once the scale is tipped to just to 51%, financial abundance will start flow to you with a hell of a lot less resistance.

Anyways, all this supports my whole point of why freedom isn’t free and why you do have to work for it (work = INNER WORK).

The Benefits of Inner Work + Tapping into Intuition

I have spent many years alone with my soul doing this inner work, getting to know myself better, and finding peace and clarity from within. When I am alone, I am better able to quiet my mind and tap into the wisdom of my intuition.

My intuition has helped me in so many ways, from learning discernment and setting proper boundaries, to making more aligned choices, to building 4 successful niche blogs/online businesses* within 4 years of quitting my 9-5 job to become an entrepreneur.

*I have recently closed down all my other businesses – it was all becoming too much to juggle – and plan on moving forward with just 1 blog/business… this one. Now I can pour my all into one thing without spreading my energy too thin across multiple things! I feel so much happier and free!

Dealing with Judgmental + Emotionally Abusive People

During this healing, spiritual and entrepreneurial journey of mine, I have often felt judged and misunderstood by others, especially those closest to me. I believe this is because they knew me to be a certain way and wanted me to stay that way.

But because I was constantly working on myself and diving head first into all kinds of new things, I was growing and evolving incredibly fast, so, over time, my growth became a catalyst for a lot of friction in my relationships with others. I believe this was because of what I’ve said above about no longer being on the same frequency, but also because they subconsciously didn’t want me to grow without their help.

This took me some time process because I felt like the people who loved me should be happy to see me succeed! I felt happy seeing my friends killing it and doing more of what they loved, so I felt hurt when I experienced more judgment from them than support in return.

Over time I realized that they most likely saw themselves as “better” than me and felt like they knew the “right” way to live life and were therefore the ones who were supposed to be guiding me. This is how they essentially gained their sense of worth – by helping me grow and having a huge impact on my life (again, no one is “better” than anyone else and there is no “right” way to live.)

Watching me grow in massive ways, on my own and without their help, caused an uncomfortable feeling within them that they eventually had to face. They had to come to terms with the fact that they didn’t actually have everything figured out as much as they thought they did, which can be a very humiliating and humbling experience in itself (I’ve personally been there numerous times throughout my own journey!)

This shook up their world and made them feel stuff they didn’t really want to feel… uncomfortable feelings.

These uncomfortable feelings may have come in the form of jealousy, fear of me outgrowing them and ultimately losing me (codependency and fear of abandonment), feeling “less than” me, or just feeling pressure to change their own life when they weren’t ready/didn’t want to put in the work.

Instead of dealing with their own subconscious issues, they projected their judgements and limiting beliefs out and onto me. In subtle, covert ways, they would try to make me feel bad for my ambitious nature as a way to deter me from going after anything they couldn’t seem to figure out for themselves (which mostly revolved around making money and having your own successful business.)

Now looking back, I would say their behavior identifies as emotional abuse, which can be an incredibly painful experience and the trauma resulting from it can last a long time (I’m clearly still dealing with this today since I’m writing about it here in this blog post, but writing helps me heal, soooo….)

In their defense, they probably just didn’t realize how hurtful they were being, and I can have compassion for them because of that. They were just doing their best with where they were at that moment in time. They are still learning and just have some more growing to do.

There’s a quote that says “A strong person doesn’t try to bring others down, they aim to lift others up.” I can see that they were trying to lift me up by trying to help me, but I can also see that they were coming from a place rooted in limitations, scarcity, judgments, ego and arrogance.

We are all on our own paths, studying contrast in our own way and figuring out what we individually want and don’t want in life.

Because of our free will, no one has the right to tell us how to live our life, what we “should” do, or what would be “better” for us to do. Furthermore, when someone intrudes in our space with unsolicited advice, it can feel like they are are looking down on us and are essentially telling us that we are not “fit” to make their own choices in life. This can make us feel like we aren’t enough, like we can’t do it or figure it out on their own without the support of them.

This is a great way for that person to lower our self esteem so they can gain power and control over us. At the same time, this inflates their ego and actually reveals their arrogance. They aren’t actually helping us, they are hurting us. And letting it continue to happen does not heal anything, it only perpetuates more feelings of lack and limitation for both parties.

This is also what causes control and dependence instead of supporting freedom and independence. Since I’m all about more freedom and not being controlled, I have decided check myself to make sure I’m not doing this to others and to set boundaries on those who try to do this to me.

So with the “friends” who did this [for] me, I eventually came to the conclusion that their subconscious issues were really none of my business, nor were they mine to deal with. I ended up having to cut ties with a lot of people I thought were my friends simply because I cared about how I felt and didn’t need or want people in my life who didn’t fully support me.

Instead of lowering my vibration and dimming my light so others can feel more comfortable, I choose to SHINE MY LIGHT and show others what’s possible simply by being true to myself and doing more of what feels good to me.

I’m also never going to apologize for being who I am, which is someone who is ambitious, intelligent, curious and strong-willed. I believe we are all more magical and powerful than we may currently believe and we just need to let go of the bullshit and anything or anyone who tries to keep us down.

My Experience with Breakthroughs

Through this journey, I’ve also gradually let go of the drinking and partying scene and started putting more of my focus on learning new things, especially things related to personal development, healing, and entrepreneurship. Now to be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything “wrong” with drinking and partying but I just found myself always felt worse after drinking, so I ultimately had to get really honest with myself about what I truly wanted, and I discovered that all I wanted was to simply feel good more often.

Again, I would often feel judged and misunderstood by certain people when I’d tell them I couldn’t come out because “I have to work.” They saw something “wrong” with me working all the time and would hint at me that life is not all about work and making as much money as possible, it’s about living life to the fullest.

And I wouldn’t argue that.

The thing was their version of “work” wasn’t the same thing as my version of “work.” Their version was doing something you don’t really like to do in exchange for money, while mine was educating myself, learning, creating, and doing more of whatever I felt like doing, more of what I loved, more of what I felt inspired to do.

To be fair, there was a point in my journey where all I cared about was making more money… and that was simply because I didn’t have any and was deep in financial debt. I had spent my first year as an entrepreneur really embracing the freedom lifestyle and totally “living my life to the fullest” by going on constant vacations, partying, going out to eat, shopping, etc. But all these things ended up becoming the things that put me in financial debt in the first place, so at some point, I kind of had no other choice than to do whatever it took to change my situation. And I really didn’t want to ever have to go back to a 9-5 job if that was possible.

So I ended up cutting back on a lot of things and stopped going out with friends to drink and party so much… because that only made my situation worse, in both the financial department as well as the wellness department.

Once I started putting more focus on solutions to my problems rather than escapisms from my problems, things really started to turn around for me. I ended up cracking the abundance code, tipped the scales in my favor, started attracting large amounts of passive income (3-4 times what I made from a “job,”), and paid off the 40k in debt I had accrued over my first 2 years of entrepreneurship.

I did this by using the knowledge and newly found free time I had to create a few more niche blogs/online businesses. These mostly ran on automations and created multiple streams of passive income for myself, which meant I finally created more space in my life to actually live my life to the fullest.

During this part of my journey, I realized that breakthroughs started coming to me faster whenever I’d spend more time alone, without all the noise of the external world. Intentionally putting myself in a space of peace and calmness, I found myself doing a lot of journaling and blogging, which helped me organize my thoughts and feelings and helped me “get it all out.”

Getting more in touch with my inner being helped me begin to heal those limiting beliefs in my subconscious, and once I started recognizing and shifting them, I noticed I also starting receiving more intuitive insights on how to create more abundance in my life. It was like I had opened doors to new pathways in my brain. The information that came through not only let me know what to do next but also showed me how to do it (I later learned I had been tapping into my psychic gift of claircognizance and was receiving light codes filled with knowledge and wisdom.)

Looking back at my 7 year journey, I can see that spending most of my time working on myself was my secret to success in business. And doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. 😉

Through this, I’ve also learned that I judge others as well as myself, BIG TIME, which was why it was showing up in my reality (our outer world reflects our inner world). So I’ve been working on not doing that so much and try to have more compassion for myself and everyone around me… we are all doing the best we can with what we have in this moment in time.

All that being said, we really gotta be careful when it comes to judging others: we don’t know the whole story, we only know our side of the story (or the side of the story someone else tells us if they are talking about someone else… which is another thing we could many of us could get better at). One side of the story is only one perspective and is creating separation. If you’re judging and thinking negatively about someone, you really aren’t loving them or having compassion for them.

We are all on our own journeys, learning in different ways and at different speeds. One path is not better than the other… the path you choose is the right path for you because it’s going to teach you all the things you need to learn that are UNIQUE to you and what you’re wanting to create in life.

Furthermore, judging someone doesn’t define who they are, it defines who you are. If you don’t want people to judge you, you can start by not judging yourself. And if you feel judged by others, you can learn to not give a fuck about what they think, because you understand that they are just coming from a lower vibration and there’s no need for you to lower your vibration to meet them where they are at because then you won’t feel as good! 😉

When you learn to love yourself, when you know who you really are and when you continue to follow what feels good to you, why would you care what someone coming at you from a lower vibration thinks about you anyways? It’s just a judgement and judgements are not rooted in love.

Love them anyway (possibly from a distance) and keep following your bliss.

In Conclusion

From my personal experience, I have found that the secret to happiness is freedom and the secret to freedom is in finding the courage to let go of what no longer serves us (which can be a mental mindfuck of a process.) Regardless, this helps us stay in alignment with who we really are and allows us to continue following our souls, which is simply following whatever feels good to us.

I believe tapping into our intuition more and following the nudges we receive is what will ultimately lead each of us to our purpose and what we are truly meant to be doing in this life. I know I have so much more in me and that I’m meant to do something really BIG with my life… something I can’t even comprehend at this moment in time.

To get there, I plan to continue healing, doing my inner work, and trusting my intuition more. The ONLY person I can trust is myself.

I’d also like to say, I am not here to tell others how to live their life or to do the inner work for them (that’s something that’s definitely not even possible,) but I do hope through my passion for writing and leading by example I can continue spreading messages like this… to share some new perspectives, to make some waves, and to inspire others to rise up by showing them what’s possible.

Why not live in the moment and enjoy the journey a little more? After all, if we already knew everything about everything, life would be pretty boring, wouldn’t it? 😉

I hope you never stop exploring, learning, creating, loving and evolving!