Honoring Yourself, Embracing the Power of Small & Creating New Stories

Plus, we now have a subscriber chat—a private space for us to converse and connect.

How are you? I hope this week’s newsletter finds you well!

Today’s article contains an announcement, a message for you, a (hopefully) positive rant about why it’s helpful to think small, and a heads-up for an upcoming article.

Phew.

Is it just me or is change happening more and more quickly? As seems to be the case for me these days, I’m having a transformative week where I’m adjusting to a lot of changes.

All of these are good changes towards more happiness and wellness. And yet, all this movement has me feeling a little bit tender. So, I’m honoring my tenderness today.

Which brings me to my next point:

Subscriber Chat

We now have a subscriber chat for our publication!

This chat is a conversation space that’s just for us — kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Our first prompt was:

“Here's a question I was guided to ask: How are you honoring yourself today?”

To join our subscriber chat, here’s the link. You can access it in your browser or download the Substack app. Please let me know if you have any questions.

I’m really excited to connect more with you in this way. While this is still a small community and publication, the people who are connecting to it (= you) are absolutely delightful!

There’s so much thoughtfulness and positive intent here, and I appreciate us connecting in this way. Which brings me to the next point:

A message for you

When tuning into the higher realms, I got a message today that I’d like to pass on.

The message is simply this: You are really important.

When we talk about the importance of someone, this is mostly done from the ego-level. It often refers to someone’s position or status, etc., and it’s frankly kinda annoying. :)

What we mean here is that you are important at a soul level, at the level of your being. We could say that you are a VIS—a very important soul.

Of course, everyone is ultimately important at a soul level. So, this is more acknowledging that the insight, awareness, and positive intention you bring to the table are really needed at this moment.

Size doesn’t (really) matter

If you think your contribution doesn’t matter that much, I invite you to check out a manifesto I wrote a while back. It explains how small changes can have a massive impact.

In it, I also share how a “throwaway comment I had made during something that I thought was a waste of my time had created international ripple effects” that I only accidentally found out about.

Basically, the apparent size of your contribution doesn’t matter because we don’t even have a good way to track and measure impact…

… unless, of course, the impact happens to be very obvious and very public. So, let’s share an example that fits the bill. Why did the Berlin Wall (!) come down when it did? Because of a seemingly small blunder at a press conference.

And yet, in our culture, we’re trained to neglect the power of the seemingly small. See also:

You're (Probably) Not Thinking Small Enough

If you’d like to discuss this idea, you’re welcome to comment below or start a thread in chat.

The importance of creating a new story

Here’s one of the ways you might be making an important contribution: by crafting a different story through your actions, words, or simply the way you live your life.

Our stories shape the way we see the world.

They are shedding new light on old ideas and concepts (such as business, or music, or law).

Basically, this entails changing the existing story to a better story, one where business and mysticism can co-exist, where the queer perspective in the world of rock gets acknowledged or where lawyers can be healers.

All of these are creations of better stories. Which, not-so-coincidentally, is also what I’m trying to do here: creating a new story where life is much more about joy than about suffering.

This brings me to the next point:

Upcoming article

I have created an article for you that I’m really excited about and that I’ll share next week. It’s about an idea that often gets mentioned in New Age and similar circles—”New Earth.” I was going to send my article out this week, and then realized it’s the type of topic that could use more context, introduction, and preparation.

Basically, we could see this as the shift from a suffering-based story (“Old Earth”) to one that is much more positive (“New Earth”).

I’ve been toying around with my own variation of this idea for a while. For instance, last year, I realized that I reeeeally wanted to move on to a “post-struggle life.” What I meant by that is that I wanted to stop growing through struggle (which I experienced plenty of at that time), and instead grow through joy.

Over the last 1.5 years, I feel like I moved more into what some call New Earth (and what I like to call the Joyful Growth Path)—and it’s definitely a nicer experience. While I still experience challenges, they now feel more like productive challenges (most some most of the time, anyway!).

More on that in my upcoming post! :)