Wherever You Go, There You Are

Last month I asked what happens if we stop and I sat with the fear that everything falls apart when we do. This month I want to look at something underneath that. Most of us do not stop at all. We run. And the thing about running is that it never really works, because we can never outrun ourselves.

Think about how often we try. You leave a job because you cannot stand the people, then you start a new one and you cannot stand your boss. You end a relationship that was making you unhappy, then a year later you meet someone and slowly realise they are almost the same. You keep yourself busy so you do not have to feel anything, so you clean or you scroll or you have a drink and then the house is tidy or the drink wears off and the feeling is still sitting there, exactly where it was.

Wherever you go, there you are.

The reason this keeps happening is simple: we keep trying to fix on the outside something that is actually on the inside. The restlessness or the sadness or whatever it is we cannot quite name, is not in the job or the person or the mess in the house. It is in us. So we change the thing on the outside and nothing really changes, because that was never where the problem was.

This is the part we do not really want to hear. The one thing that is there in every situation that keeps going wrong is us. Not because there is anything wrong with us but because we are the common thread. We take ourselves everywhere we go and we are the ones deciding, without realising it, how everything feels.

Here is a way to see it. Two people can go through exactly the same thing and come out of it completely differently. Someone makes a sharp comment at work. One person hears it, shrugs and forgets about it by lunchtime. The other hears the same comment and feels it all day, going over it again and again, feeling small. The comment was the same. The difference was not in what was said. It was in what each person was already carrying inside them.

That is what I mean by our inner world. It is all the beliefs and feelings and old hurts we carry, most of them from a long time ago, most of them picked up without us ever choosing them. It works like a pair of glasses we forget we are wearing. Everything that happens to us comes through those glasses before we react to it.

This is why changing your circumstances so often changes nothing. You take the same glasses into the new job and the new relationship and they colour everything the same way they always did. And it is why real change has to start on the inside. When something shifts in there, that same sharp comment does not hurt the way it used to, because the sore spot it used to press on is not so sore anymore. You meet the world a bit more steadily. You react differently, you make different choices and slowly your life on the outside starts to change too. Not because everything around you suddenly got better but because you are not quite the same person meeting it.

I know this can sound like bad news, as if there is no escape. It is actually the opposite. If the answer was out there somewhere, we would spend our whole lives chasing it, always one more change away from being okay. The fact that it is inside us is the good news because it means we can always get to it. It is always right here. We can stop chasing a different life and start looking at the one thing we can actually work with, which is ourselves.

The tricky bit is that you cannot just think your way through it. You can understand every word of this and still feel exactly the same because understanding happens in your head and all this old stuff is held in your body. That is where the breath comes in for me. It reaches underneath all the thinking, to where these things are actually stored. You cannot run away from yourself but you can meet yourself and breathing is how I have learned to do that. It is the one place I can always come back to.

This is what I do for myself and it is what I have helped a lot of people do too. Not run from the feeling and not try to fix everything on the outside but gently turn towards what we are carrying and let it move. That is the real work, underneath all the other work.

So this month, wherever you are and whatever you feel like changing, it might be worth sitting quietly with a few questions. What am I trying to get away from. Where have I changed things on the outside and ended up with the same feeling anyway. What in me is actually asking to be met, instead of escaped.

There is nothing to fix and nowhere you need to get to. What you have been looking for was never in the next job or the next person or the next place. It has been with you the whole time. Wherever you go, there you are. And that is not the trap it sounds like. It is where the freedom actually starts.

With Love and Light,
Stefanie

Founder of The Oya Energy
theoyaenergy.co.uk