Happy New Year everybody!

May 2016 be the year you experience your richest and most wonderful life so far.

One of my biggest insights in the last year or so is that you and I don’t have to leave that to the whim of chance, external events or circumstance.

A whole new experience of life is always on offer, once we see the true nature of who and what we are, and realise that life is experienced inside-out.

That, fundamentally, Life is a magnificent illusion, as the philosopher Alan Watts used to say.

It’s commonly known that most of the cells in our body are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones.  (Hey, you’re always younger than you think!)

And we are, literally, made of stars.

That’s not romanticism or hippy drivel – it’s actually fact.

Check out this short video by the Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU

When I saw this truth about the human experience – that we live in the feeling of our thinking, not the feeling of the world, or our external circumstances – everything changed for me.

It’s fantastically liberating.

So, it’s all Thought.

And, so many people have ‘thought up’ a story that looks, and sounds, and feels completely ‘true’ about themselves.

Because that’s the way the system works – you will experience whatever the play-doh of thought is creating, moment to moment.

• “I’m not good enough” (young enough, old enough, good-looking enough, rich enough, thin enough, etc. etc.)
• “I had a really lousy childhood, so I’ll always be broken”
• “I’ve been hurt before, so I can’t ever really trust anybody”
• “I’m just not the sort of person who could……”

But it’s still only a story.  And it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been telling yourself a particular story either.

I’m not saying the external events didn’t happen – I’m saying that the only thing can possibly affect your experience in this moment, is thought in this moment.

I’ve seen and worked with so many people who have been through the most distressing and traumatic experiences transform their lives, once they truly see that the events are not happening NOW.

This is very different from most psychological models, especially the more psycho-analytic strands, including Freud and his merry followers.

If you asked 100 people at random on the street, you’d find that the common ‘myth’ is that stuff happens to us – good and bad – and gets ‘stored’ somehow in our brains and bodies, and this shapes our personalities, and what’s even possible for us today and in the future.

You can’t escape the past.

Best we can do is make the most of the hand we’ve been dealt, right?

Wrong!

You can drop the story.

You can create a new story.  You can choose to do that every single morning when you wake up, if you like.

You can also realise that – whatever story you’ve been telling yourself and believing – you are SO MUCH MORE than that.

You don’t have to change it, fix it, control it – you can just let it go…

And it doesn’t even matter whether the story is empowering or limiting, positive or negative, inspiring or depressing.

Once you see for yourself that you are not the story – you are the storyteller.

You are not the piece of clay, you are the sculptor.

You are not the painting, you are the artist.

You are pure awareness.  Pure consciousness.

You are infinite potential in human form.

You are made of stars.

I promise you that if you can live your life from this place, it really will be a Happy New Year!