This is who I am, this is where I live.

I keep my mornings quiet. I get up early. Drink some tea. Then decide what I feel like next. Sometimes a meditation. Sometimes straight into yoga. Sometimes sitting with a blanket on the couch reading a book until my son wakes up. Whatever feels right. And this morning, it felt right to make my tea, light a candle in the dark, open up the lounge doors and look outside into the quiet, mostly still sleeping world.

There’s a mystical and magical beauty that comes with this time of the day. Through my practice of kundalini meditation I discovered that these hours are known as ‘the ambrosial hours’, you can read more about what that means here, however as it was explained to me, it’s the time of the morning where the veil between the spiritual world and the human world, is at it’s thinnest. Yes, shit’s about to get hippy people. But as I read in Pepe Marais’ book (amazing) Growing Greatness – Hippy shit makes business sense!

I follow Elizabeth Gilbert, author of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ on Instagram, and I recently watched the most beautiful IGTV video of hers, with a concept that I think is so relevant to our times. It was a story relevant to her late wife Rayya, and you can watch the whole video here.

Repeat these words: “This is who I am” (and put your hand on your heart), and now, “This is where I live” (and point to your head with your other hand). This is who I am – heart centre – and this is where I live – the mind.

I have always been fascinated by human behavior, why some people are glass half empty and others are so glass overflowing with rainbows and unicorns. And I think these words describe it so perfectly.

I don’t often struggle to be around people, no matter how negative or pessimistic they are. I feel like I have a gift to transcend those energies and help them raise their own vibrations, but lately that has become more difficult. Maybe it’s because I am not in the same room with the people that are emitting these energies and that we’re communicating through screens, I’m not sure. But I find myself feeling very drained and disheartened after certain conversations with certain people.

For now, my life is quality over quantity in terms of the amounts of daily conversations I allow myself to have, because ‘this is who I am, and this is where I live.’ I am so grateful to Elizabeth for sharing this story with her followers, because it’s put so much into perspective for me and I hope it will for you too.

It reminds me of our security guard Oscar, who lives in a tiny little wendy house in Retreat, just outside our factory, with his wife and 2 young children. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without a smile on his face. He doesn’t live in that wendy house, he lives in his mind and his mind is very clearly a happy, nourished place.

We can all choose to do the same. Your house, your surroundings, your belongings, that is not where you live. This has never made more sense to me than it does today. I have neighbours across the road from me, living in the same complex, with the exact same (if not better) view of the ocean and sunset, who think the world is busy ending and that we’re all going to die. Literally. Where as here I am, feeling hopeful and optimistic (and please… optimistic is very different to being naive and going ‘oh yes the world is a wonderful place’ and not actually feeling that inside yourself, optimistic means you see the light at the end of the tunnel while still acknowledging the shit storm that is currently happening in the world, but still feeling hopeful that we’ll get through this).

So this is why I feel hope and excitement. I feel like we have an incredibly resilient nation of people in this country. The majority of our country live in unthinkable conditions compared to you and I, yet they are often in the taxi’s, singing and laughing on their way to work. I don’t see many people doing that in their cars, sitting in traffic day in and day out.

This is who I am, and this is where I live. I encourage you to sit down on the floor, feel the earth beneath you like a big magnet connecting you to every other human being that is currently alive, put one hand on your heart and the other on the crown of your head and just breathe and repeat these words for 3 minutes. “This is who I am, this is where I live.”

Then go about your day, and remember that. Energy is everything – just as those videos are going around with a child putting soap on their finger and sticking it in a water bowl and the pepper quickly moves away from the soap – the same is relevant for our energetic fields as human beings.

My friend Carmen Murray sent me this quote yesterday and I thought it was relevant to end of this post with it:

Someone once said: “If you look at the people in your circle and don’t get inspired, then you don’t have a circle, you have a cage.”