A friend and fellow Hay House author Christina Rasmussen reached out to me this weekend because her book Second Firsts: Live, Laugh & Love Again about finding joy after loss launches today. Christina was about to hop on a plane to travel to New York for her book launch when she reached out and asked me if I had any advice for her, and here’s what I wrote.
Good luck dear! Here’s my advice. Please hear me on this.
You have already arrived.
You have nothing to prove.
You are already enough.
Your inherent value has nothing to do with the success of this book.
If the book is destined to succeed, it will, in spite of you. If not, it won’t, and it won’t be your fault. Turn it all over to Divine Order and just trust the journey.
You are already “there” because there is no “there” there. There is only here.
Christina wrote back, “I am crying my eyes out reading this. You just gave me the best gift anyone could give me. I am going to give it over to the Divine right now. I am here and there and everywhere I could be. THANK YOU LISSA. You just freed me.”
You’ve Already Arrived
I was just paying it forward. The night before Mind Over Medicine launched, my friend Kris Carr, who has written two New York Times bestselling books and who wrote the foreword to Mind Over Medicine, called me to say, “Darling, I’m calling to tell you you’ve already arrived.” I too burst into tears.
It’s remarkable how much pressure we burden ourselves with. When What’s Up Down There launched in 2010, I was a nervous wreck. I barely slept the week before my book launch, and I lost about ten pounds that month because I was too nauseous to eat. I felt so much pressure to achieve some poorly defined measure of success that I pushed too hard and had to learn the lesson my mentor Dr. Christiane Northrup taught me about being less sperm, more egg. I wound up several months later with what I described as PPD (Post Publishing Depression, the rare malady nobody warns authors about.)
There’s No “There” There
What I came to realize is that it’s all a vicious ego trap, and that if we’re always striving to get “there” (wherever the hell “there” is,) we’re never actually being HERE.
This realization was a game-changer for me. I decided to voluntarily get off the treadmill, because I finally realized that it’s a vicious game with no winners. Even some of the most wildly successful people I knew weren’t happy because they were still pushing to arrive at some yet-undetermined level of success that would allow them to finally savor the accolades. Yet, the things they were grasping for are forever out of reach. The grasping never ends as long as you’re trying to fill the hungry ghost of worthiness inside of you with external food that doesn’t nourish you.
Savor Where You Are
On New Years Eve, as 2013 dawned, I declared myself “here.” I declared not to keep striving to get “there.” I’ve been a million times happier ever since.
So I ask you this. What goals have you set for yourself? What do you still hope to achieve? What creative risks are you taking? How much are you letting those goals define your sense of worth?
Do you realize that you are valuable not because of some bestselling book or some six-figure job or some hot soulmate or a desk full of trophies, but because you have within you a little spark of divinity, and this makes you inherently worthy?
Do you appreciate that you can only truly enjoy your life when you’re RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, appreciating what you’ve already achieved and savoring, with loads of gratitude, the beautiful being you are in this second, before any of those other things are achieved?
Do you know, in your heart, that you are a worthy, beautiful, valuable, lovable, talented child of God and you have nothing left to prove?
I hope so. Because it’s true, my dear. Feel it in your bones. Know it in your heart. Gobble it up like ice cream, because that’s the only nourishment that will ever feed your soul.
With love and conviction that you really are all that,
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