Written by Greg Paul
YOU… are a fucking rock-star, and you deserve some serious respect and appreciation.
If you don’t feel that right now – like a living sense of ‘hell-yeah’ – stay with me… because I’m making it my personal mission to change that by the end of this article!
How many times have you almost given up? How many times has life gotten so tough that you almost turned your back on your awakening journey? Or how tough have things gotten and still you never even came close to giving up or turning your back on anything?
And yet YOU… are still here.
How much did you endure as a child that was beyond your control? … feel that for a moment, without spinning yourself the ludicrous I-chose-this-soul-contract yarn.
How many people have abused you throughout your life? … feel that for a moment, without plumping for the I-attracted-this-because-it-is-what-I-am bullshit.
And yet YOU… still get up every day; still do the VERY best you can to love your partner, your friends, your children, your whoever; you still read articles like this, never losing faith in your ability to become more; to grow; to become the highest version of yourself.
How many partners have you been through in pursuit of love? Or how singularly bereft of loving intimacy has your life been?
And yet YOU… have somehow, remarkably, not lost faith in Love. Or have somehow, even more remarkably, found the courage to continue showing up for life even though your faith has been lost…
How brave have you had to be to look into the truths of yourself? To accept the truths of the world?
YOU are the stuff legends are made of. You have more courage than ANYONE I have ever met.
Just take a moment right now to appreciate your gob-smacking-kick-ass-legend-of-a-human-ness…
No, really… take a moment…
Please, one more moment…
As I look out on the world all I see is 7 billion heroes. Scrap all that noise in the media – I don’t see that. Rapists, racists, murderers and genocidal lunatics do not adorn my daily adventures. All I seem to see are normal people – human beings going about their business. And, when you’re not watching the TV, or scouring Facebook, I bet that’s all you see really too (even the vegan vs carnivore/gov’t vs people/man vs feminism and every other dualistic for-the-sake-of-it story that you only see when you indulge the social media machine doesn’t really exist in the ‘real-world’ either) … All I see are remarkable creations of god who, despite being born into a mad group of people who never really knew what love was; despite being shamed and suppressed throughout their formative years; despite being educated like a soldier in military bootcamp; despite being unwittingly enslaved to a thousand different co-dependent addictions colouring every relationship they have; despite never having been able to adequately deal with the insane trauma that this weird concoction created for them, still turn up every day and do more than anyone could ever expect of them; still spend the majority of their time committed to being loving (regardless of what twisted definition of love they may have grown up with); still keep pushing on through one damn thing after another… they are ALL rock-stars; they are magnificent; WE are magnificent – our resilience is astonishing. Broken, yes… wounded, certainly… afraid of our magnificence, without a doubt… but this just adds to how unbelievably remarkable it is that we manage to keep on rocking-the-hell out of life… day after day after day after day.
So if you’ve been on an awakening journey for aeons and have taken the notion of self-responsibility as the justification for self-hate that it was NOT intended for, it’s about time that you started appreciating your awesomeness.
If you’re just waking up to the craziness of the world around you, and getting seriously angry, it’s about time you started appreciating your awesomeness (and blessing the shit out of the madness!)
If you’ve been hiding behind you ‘light-work’ and ignoring your own shadow, it’s time to start appreciating your true awesomeness (wherein lies the strength to move on)
If you’ve spent too long swimming in your own shadow and have inadvertently set up camp in a self-generated hell, it’s about time that you started appreciating your awesomeness.
Heck, if you’ve been a narcissistic bastard (not that you would have ANY idea of this), it’s about time you also started appreciating your GENUINE awesomeness – it will surely distract you from normal activities!
Just to be clear – we’re talking about appreciation here, not gratitude. Appreciation is Love… this has nothing to do with ‘being grateful’. If you’re gonna be honest, life has been a bitch so, if I’m gonna be honest, I’d say you needed your head examining if you tried to tell me you were grateful for that. If you’re gonna be honest… you’re not!
Gratitude is one of those words that has been banded around the spiritual community since time immemorial, and were all trying to pretend to be grateful that “so and so is abusing me” because “they’re showing me what I need to heal in myself”, or grateful that “I am stuck without a, b, or c” because “my impoverishment and ignominy is teaching me humility”, or whatever malady we may concoct to explain todays insanity.
I am not grateful for this… fuck gratitude!
Here’s what no one ever tells you – NO ONE knows how to do gratitude because it’s not a thing, it’s a state of being… you can’t ‘do’ gratitude. And who would want to ‘do’ gratitude anyway? Just listen to the word – g-r-a-t-i-t-u-d-e – if you hadn’t been told it means what we have come to use it for, it would probably conjure the image of a sweaty fat aunt who hasn’t had a wash in 6 months because she’s too obese to fit through the shower door, or the present that a gluttonous butcher would leave you in the toilet after a heavy night of curry and beer with the lads. No…
There is another way…
It’s appreciation that is the REAL name of the game. Appreciation is the state of being that those of us who have been trying to be grateful have actually been searching for – you can feel that right? A-p-p-r-e-c-i-a-t-i-o-n – it feels real, if feels good, it feels genuine.
And no wonder, just look at what it means. Aside from being a recognition of inherent value, it also means to increase in value over time – we might say that the house has appreciated in value by 20% in the last year, or that wine appreciates as it ages – appreciation means to both recognize value AND enhance it!
What greater gift could you ever receive than to be appreciated? What greater gift could you ever GIVE than to appreciate another?
THIS is how we do it; THIS is how we grow; THIS is how we evolve; THIS how we ‘appreciate’ – we recognize our awesomeness now and we grow in awesomeness over time. We recognize the awesomeness in others so that they too may be blessed with the insight of their own awesomeness, and as we ‘appreciate’ the world around us, so too do we ‘appreciate’ ourselves… in every sense of the word.
So why did I call this article ‘My Greatest Hero – The Path of Mastery?’ Because that is precisely what you are (your greatest hero) and precisely where radical self-appreciation will take you (self-mastery) – you will be too busy being the love that you are to do any of the things that prevent you from seeing the master that you already are!
Now you can take this self-appreciation gig as permission to self-aggrandise if you like – to ‘love-up’ your façade – I’m not gonna stop you, but you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you do. I’m not talking to your façade today, I’m talking to the one who is pure of heart and only cares for beauty and truth; the one who endured their childhood and emerged the other side; the one who just needs a little lovin’ to stop driving the emotional rollercoaster that keeps that façade rolling in the first place – to this ‘you’ shall all things be added through appreciation, and as they are added shall you no longer need to self-aggrandise or battle with others for energy – the game will be up; you will have switched to a new timeline…
If you can really feel the truth of this; the truth of you; your essence; if you can really use self-appreciation to get in touch with your inner true self, it will lead to a dissolving of your façade, not strengthening. And you can tell pretty easily – if you’re really riding the appreciation train, you’ll be too busy appreciating everyone and everything else around you to have any time, or need, to empower your own illusions. You will be too busy appreciating yourself to need to spend an ounce of energy doing all the things you now do to pretend to yourself that you feel worthy – your cup will already be full; and you will be too busy appreciating others to engage, or take personally, their own wounded cries for help and emotional attacks toward you.
My life is an epic – I have endured situations I wouldn’t dream of imposing upon you by sharing. I have taken one courageous leap into the abyss after another. I have faced every fear I could find and stood on the precipice of life every day never stopping to look for the next evolution of me. I am truly my greatest hero. And you should be yours too. No one is more worthy of your appreciation.
And when you have owned your own heroism and taken yourself as your own greatest hero, you WILL see the hero in everyone else; you WILL have discovered your own mastery; you WILL have transcended your façade; you WILL have become love.
And so it is in appreciation of you that I write this article. And it is in appreciation of everyone else that I urge you to share it – Who do you think would appreciate this message right now? Who do you know that turns up for life every day and would appreciate hearing this? Who is so mean to you that you KNOW they need these words the most? Whose life could YOU bring a little light to by sharing them?
And if you still don’t feel like a fucking rock-star after reading this; if you’ve still not been comprehensively devoured by the self-appreciation bug, then it’s time to roll up them sleeves and get down and dirty – get your sorry ass up and out to a major population centre and appreciate the shit out of everyone you meet! I promise, it will be the best thing you ever did.
Go, NOW… hop to it!
You are a true hero… may you be blessed with the eyes to see it.
