The Myth of Success

The Myth of Success

We’ve been sold a lie - that life is about getting somewhere.

We grow up with the all-pervasive belief that there’s a place to reach - a version of ourselves waiting at the end of effort, healing, or success.
We’re told that if we work hard enough, evolve fast enough, or heal ourselves, we’ll finally arrive: whole, complete, at peace.

But what if that story isn’t true?
What if there is nowhere to arrive to - no summit to attain, no destination, no moment where it all finally makes sense?

So then, what are we actually doing here?
What is the point of all this striving, all this searching, all this effort to make meaning?

I believe these aren’t questions to be solved by the mind. They are invitations - openings into something deeper, more mysterious, more alive. The moment we stop trying to think our way towards meaning, we begin to feel life moving through us again.

Most of us, at some point, experience a sense of purpose - a subtle magnetic hum beneath the noise of our doing. We can’t explain it, but we know it’s there: that unmistakable current that whispers, There’s something here for you.

It doesn’t come from cognition. It rises from the body - from the same wellspring our breath, our desire, and our aliveness flow from.

The Body as Portal

Our bodies are not barriers to enlightenment - they are the portal.
The body doesn’t lie, doesn’t perform, doesn’t pretend to have arrived.

When we pay attention, we can feel it: that exquisite shimmer beneath the surface, that thrumming aliveness that says, Yes - this. The mind might still be uncertain, but the body already knows.

The experiences that make us feel most alive - expanded, grounded, vibrant - are not accidents. They are messages from our deeper intelligence, the one that speaks in sensation rather than words.

Self-actualisation isn’t something we figure out. It’s something we remember - by listening to the language of the body, to that sacred hum that tells us when we are in alignment with life itself.

The Betrayal We’re Taught

Since the age of Descartes, we’ve been conditioned to revere Reason as the most trustworthy guide - and in doing so, we’ve learned to betray a deeper intelligence.

To override the body’s signals.
To silence our intuition.
To numb what hurts instead of listening to what it’s trying to reveal.

We learn early that the mind is master and the body is unreliable - too emotional, too instinctive, too much. We learn to perform “okayness”, to power through, to separate the spiritual from the physical as though they belong to different worlds.

And this betrayal hurts. It fragments us. It leaves us living from the neck up - disconnected from the ground of our being, from the quiet pulse of something larger moving through us.

This is the pain so many of us carry without language: the ache of having abandoned our own inner compass. The sorrow of feeling cut off from the sacred intelligence that lives inside our cells, our breath, our bones.

The Art of Being

I believe this is the real work: finding our way back to being fully alive.
Not striving toward some imagined destination, but learning how to live life as the ultimate creative act.

And like all art, it is simple - but not easy. Every artist knows that the work is in the showing up. The surrender to presence. The willingness to meet the blank canvas - or the next breath - as if for the first time. To let what wants to move through us find its form, without demanding that it make sense.

To move with awareness rather than control.
To let desire - not duty - be the current that carries us.
To let the body lead us back into connection with all that is.

When we stop chasing wholeness and start practicing it, every breath becomes a reminder that we are exactly - and exquisitely - where we need to be. Every sensation becomes information. Every surrender becomes a doorway.

The point is not to arrive.
The point is to be here - fully, courageously, tenderly - allowing life to move through us, shaping and reshaping us into ever-deeper expressions of what we already are.

How Do We Learn to Live This Way?

I don’t think there’s a single path. Each of us must find our own rhythm - our own way back into relationship with the intelligence that moves us.

In my experience, the learning doesn’t happen in grand revelations. It happens in the tiny, ordinary, choices we make every day. In what we give our attention to. In how we come back to ourselves, again and again.

Whatever we focus on grows.
So we start small - with practices that root us in the body, that awaken our creativity, that deepen self-awareness. With moments that bring us back into connection: with our breath, with our senses, with the people and places that remind us we belong to something larger.

These simple choices - to pause, to listen, to create, to connect - are how we practice the art of being.

And over time, they return us to what we in fact already know: that there was never anywhere to get to, only an eternal unfolding.