Physician Healer

Issue 101: Transformation, Inspiration, Purpose, and Personal Growth -- Discovering the Connection.

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Transformation, Inspiration, Purpose, and Personal Growth — Discovering the Connection.

For some time now, this vague sense of restlessness has been stalking me once more, leaving me feeling disturbed, an unpleasantness that a lack of direction leaves us. It is an unsettling silence expressed by an incessant urging from within, that persistent tug, a constant pull on the psyche to look, that there was more of something significant trying to come through; but that I wasn’t listening intently enough. For a while now, there has been a calling to stop the distractions and the busy-ness and just listen; be still and just keep listening. It’s a situation that makes me utter, “Ugh.”

It felt familiar like I had been there before — been-there-done-that sort of thing and indeed, I had, and not so long ago. It took the form of a monumental relocation from one side of the coast to the other. I say monumental because it was — a big deal; at the time, I had no access to role models or mentors in my circle who had done the same. After all, up until the “big move” I had been living in the west coast since I was born, with the exception of the years I spent completing my graduate and medical training in Philadelphia. I had no examples to draw from, examples of people close to me who had participated in such a drastic change. In fact, most seemed bewildered and dissuaded me from making that leap. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind that I was a weirdo. I recalled Steve Jobs saying,

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

“Hmmm,” I thought. That really resonated with me.

I looked around. Everyone just seemed to be content staying in their comfort zones, doing the same thing every day, doing the same thing on different days, week after week, month after month, year after year — not judging, just observing. Strangely, I should’ve been scared, but I wasn’t. It was actually worse feeling that ickiness of stuckness than anticipating what was to come from the vast unknown. For lack of a more tangible explanation, it was as if I grew to accept and trust the belief that we were all guided by some invisible force, which some call intuition or universal download. I have always believed that every next step in my life journey would most likely be the most illogical option. I remembered a quote by Steve Jobs,

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Perhaps I wasn’t a weirdo. Perhaps I just chose to be still more, to listen more, than others did, to that inner voice, my intuition.

Plus, I’ve decided it’s ok to be a weirdo. I’ve never much preferred to follow the crowd of sameness and complacency, yet I’ve never actively sought out adventure spontaneously. Any change I’ve ever initiated has always been prompted by a heavy sense of discomfort in the comfort zone, an overwhelming feeling of antsiness with no logical or rational explanation. Because I could find no one who felt the same way, I decided to try finding my way on my own and to see if I could discover answers from personal growth programs in order to develop clarity. Anyway, it was a start.

Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I would immerse myself in all sorts of personal development material and workshops. Many of them equipped me with tools to release what no longer served me, including different types of meditative and relaxation techniques, movement exercises, breathing methods, mindset strategies and visualization protocols. I found these tools to be invaluable, because I knew I had to start somewhere; and over time, as I started to find more clarity in the purpose of my existence and increase my level of awareness, I was able to spend more time “being” rather than “doing.”

I would simply sit, sometimes with my eyes closed, sometimes with my eyes open, and just let the images come, the emotions come, memories come, thoughts about the future come, anything at all. During these times, I held back opinions, criticisms and even praise — no labels at all. If I received a thought that did not make me feel particularly good, I would just address it, make a note to myself about how I was feeling and then I would briefly remark that it was curious or interesting. In other words, I responded instead of reacting. To respond is a choice and I remain in control. To react is to lose control to the external environment.

Then, in the last 6 months, I finally made the decision to follow my own advice. For some time now, my head felt heavy with a plethora of ideas to navigate a new direction for my life journey, suggestions I had, with ease, given countless times to my clients. And so, I made a committed decision to embark yet on another personal adventure, this time, exploring new possibilities away from the healthcare scene, that not so long ago, I would have never contemplated or entertained. I always played it safe, stayed within my known strengths.

Advice to self: Life is short. Learn new things. Consider new career paths. I can do anything I want to do. Keep remembering that the external world is first created in my mind. Everything begins in the mind as an idea or thought. I have more control over my life than I was fooled to believe. Whatever I think about, I’ll end up getting in real life so I’d better think about outcomes I prefer. If I don’t take the initiative to make a change, nothing changes. If I wait for my present circumstances to change first before I change, nothing will ever happen because I control the change. Opportunities do not just spontaneously open up and create themselves for us to step in. We have to originate them in our mind first as a possibility, then a desire, and then they are manifested in physical reality. It is the energy I put out that is sensed by the world around me. In return, the laws of vibration and attraction are always at play, bringing me everything that matches the energetic signature I generate.

“Our current circumstances are a product of all the thoughts and decisions we made in the past. If we continue to give attention to and acknowledge these circumstances, they will inevitably perpetuate. When we make new decisions and take new actions, these changes alter energetic patterns and a new future is created. Plant and water the new tree and it thrives. Neglect the old tree and it perishes. Understanding this concept is crucial to navigating life successfully. We become the creative designer of our life instead of the victim of our circumstances.”

And still, every day, I see people waiting and waiting and waiting.

“I’ll do it as soon as…as soon as…as soon as…as soon as…as soon as…”

The door labeled, “As Soon As” does not open on its own. You have to open it.

The door labeled, “When that happens” does not open on its own. You have to open it.

Am I ever certain that my next steps are the correct ones? No. But, I try to remember that each step is about a lesson that needs to be learned. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, but I’ve learned that nothing worth accomplishing is ever easy. And, our entire life is really about lessons. Whenever I can, I try to remember that nothing is bad, nothing is good. Things just are. Things are only bad because we perceive and then label them as such. The same goes for things we feel are good. It has been written repeatedly in literature that happiness is quite subjective and depends on a perceived outcome. Consequently, happiness and sadness are both choices.

Regarding the next path on the life journey, it is one thing to talk about a grand relocation, but quite another when referring to a change in occupation. So much of our identity is intimately connected to what we do. Our personality and behavior are largely controlled by the image we hold of ourselves. We are who we think we are, and we are who we think we are not. We become what we think about most. We show up in the world dressed up in what our parents and other adults chose for us long ago. And then during our lifetime, this costume gets modified over and over again as we perpetuate the false layering of materials that don’t really mirror the true essence of who we really are at our core.

I have come to the realization that we are all in this specific and predictable pattern of reality of our own unconscious choice and while only a small percentage of us are aware of this, it doesn’t make it less true. But, it is not our job to change others. Our role is to bring awareness through living by example and then let everyone unfold and live out their life journey as it was intended, long ago. I find this quite the challenge at times when I see certain things so clearly and yet, frustratingly, I fail to convey the significance of my finding to the other who neither understands nor believes in its truth.

Recently, I participated in a transformational workshop that was centered around experiential revelation of our blindspots, the things we don’t know that we don’t know. There are things we know that we know and things we know that we don’t know. However, it is the things we don’t know that we don’t know that keep us from showing up for ourselves and for others authentically, and discovering what’s really possible for us (which is anything), and from those discoveries, to live successfully in abundance and freedom. This is defined as living authentically in its truest sense.

Our identity is tied to the image we have of ourselves. Who we are up until we become fully consciously aware is a compilation of stories all pieced together — stories we’ve told ourselves, on top of those that others have told. Every moment is an opportunity to expand our awareness, to see beyond what our eyes deceive, to listen beyond what our ears can mislead.

In every moment we have a chance to elevate our clarity, to edge closer and closer to unleashing who we were meant to become and how we were meant to show up in this world. It has been my experience that what we usually find illogical always resonates with the truth of what we are and what we find “normal” or rational aligns with the illusory egoic paradigms programmed in our mind from the time we were born or even earlier. It seems as if every day, our true nature is desperately trying to break through, from the inside out. When we suppress this, we are dragged into a downward spiral.

“Our natural state is that of peace, joy and love. We’ve just forgotten.”

Eventually, I got to thinking that perhaps every action I’ve ever labeled as monumental and scary was not that at all and that they only seemed monumental and scary because the stories were hiding the real me, the truth of who I really am. Instead, the authentic me would have found all those actions quite normal.

At first, I found this discovery to be exceedingly disturbing. To say that who I’ve been all these years is not who I was supposed to be is unsettling. Whose life have I been living, then? It is the life generated by the stories from my parents and the stories from their parents and so on in an infinite, generational manner.

I have come to realize that living authentically isn’t really about change. Authenticity isn’t even about growth. Personal growth is an illusion. Showing up authentically for ourselves and others every day is about transformation, which is an unfolding, releasing layer after layer of stories that do not belong to us. It is about discovery and uncovering the true core of who we are. It is about remembering who we really are inside, beneath the countless pages of stories that have been told to us, about us, by others, as well as by ourselves.

It is about an understanding that everything we know about ourselves, our personality, our behavior, even our likes and dislikes are all facades of an illusory self whose conception began at that one event in our early life in which we felt the situation was not quite right or that we were out of place in the situation, and we were convinced that we had to adapt ourselves to become this character in order to fit in and continue on from that time forward; we then act out this character throughout our adult life until we discover that everything still feels wrong. Unknowingly, we fail to realize that whatever we perpetuated as an adaptation to that past event is actually a constant reminder of that event.

“Whoever and whatever we are today, whether we find it repulsive or virtuous, is a product of some turning point event that occurred in the past, which represented everything we were not. The event made us uncomfortable. So, we became the character we needed to be in order to fit in. However, this character has only served to unconsciously remind us of that uncomfortable moment on a daily basis. Of this, most of us are unaware. This is what we call a blindspot.”

And as soon as we begin to feel that something is not quite right, we immerse ourselves in workshops and programs of personal growth thinking we have to put stuff to cover ourselves, make ourselves different, acquire tools to make ourselves better when we are already perfect but not knowing this. I freely admit that I have been a champion of this.

What is the connection, then, that links the heart of transformation, inspiration, personal growth and purpose? Everyone will likely answer differently. For me, transformation is about the peeling away of all the false layers that form our identity, revealing our true essence which is without identity. From there, we can show up, serve others in a way that is authentic. This is the intrinsic nature of the “shift.”

“Whatever we decide requires no explanation that we need to share with others. There is never any obligation to justify our decisions by providing a reason.”

What inspires us comes from the deep reserves of the heart and calls to us from within and without. This is not always received without fear. The fear comes from the egoic mind that likes to operate in the certainty of sameness. The ego also harbors fear of dissolution of its own existence every time we explore the unknown. When we allow ourselves to listen in stillness, we allow inspiration to be a part of our transformation. From living authentically our purpose becomes a knowing. The perpetual life we chase comes to an end. We are home.

At last, we remember. We have always been home.

Until next time,

I send you all much love and gratitude ❤️🙌

Dr. Celeste Amaya

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About the Author

Dr. Celeste Amaya has been an integrative physician for the past 22 years, specializing in merging Eastern healing with Western medicine. She is currently a coach in mindful entrepreneurship in the financial industry and helps her clients transition into new and different career paths through one-on-one coaching. She continues to incorporate Meridian Meditation and mindset focus techniques in her training program. If you are interested in discovering what’s possible for you or if mindful entrepreneurship in the financial industry resonates with you, email us at alkemywealth@gmail.com for more information.