Feeling empty on the inside? Here’s why

Around 9 years ago I felt empty inside myself and right now I’m noticing a lot of people feel empty, listless, and like something is missing from their lives. Not only did I heal out those feelings so that I can show others how to do the same, I found an indescribable wholeness that allowed me to rise from the ashes of a very painful time in my life. I became aware of a fullness and wholeness and discovered that the place I once felt was “wrong” turned out to be the beginning of a very important pathway that I am still walking, to this day. Each day reaching new heights. Like anyone, life can certainly throw me a curve ball and that’s perfectly ok, if I look back to where I was and where I am, the transformation is enormous. If you’d like to go through what I shifted in case it supports you, I’m happy to share the formula with you. I started out asking myself these questions so come along and take the journey with me:

Ask yourself these questions:

• what do I lack?
• where is my gaping hole?
• what’s missing for me?

Also ask yourself:

• what am I trying to get
• what do I need to feel full
• what do I need to feel whole and complete

The above questions are going to help you to see the bigger picture of where you are.

Ultimately it does not matter what the “thing” is that you’re trying to fulfil yourself with.

What matters is that there is a sense of:

• I don’t have something
• I’m missing something
• I need something

That’s very important to acknowledge. Go ahead and acknowledge it now, so that you can see where you are spending your energy and where your focus is truly landing. Then notice how often you are reinforcing the discomfort of the lack. In my case it was something I used to focus on every day, throughout the day – it even filled up my dream space!
Take this in …

You feel like something is missing because there is. But it’s not what you think.

The thing that’s missing is not what you identified in the above exercise. The above exercise was to show you exactly where you are directing your creative energy, and because your creative energy is directed at those exact points, you are contributing to and amplifying those things. We do this unwittingly. It doesn’t make you bad, it makes you human. But because you can see this, you have the power to change things in your life in a very powerful way.

The thing that’s missing is gratitude but it can’t be forced, so we need a way to find your gratitude in a way that is 100% authentic. I’ve seen people create laborious gratitude lists and I even tried it once and felt even more empty because I was just saying words that I knew were the right words, but they weren’t landing and I couldn’t truly resonate with them even if they were true. I realized enough to know that gratitude cannot be faked so I had to find out how to access true gratitude.

There’s a way to access true gratitude: it is something so simple, so immediate, that it almost feels like magic. It costs nothing, it takes no training, and you can begin in this very moment. A single shift that has the power to recreate your entire reality.

STOP FOCUSING ON WHAT YOU DON’T HAVE.
START FOCUSING ON WHAT YOU DO HAVE.

When we are going through hardship, it is effortless to feel the gnawing pain. It requires no skill, no effort. It is simply there, demanding our undivided attention. We lament, we cry, we rage, we blame, and in doing so, we keep ourselves locked into the ache.

Here’s my story:

That was me. Oh boy, did I focus on my pain.

But then I began to turn my gaze toward what I did have. That was the earliest flicker of gratitude. And I was stunned by how much beauty I had overlooked. That which you overlook may as well not exist, for the moment you fail to see it, you strip it of its value. This was a massive shift for me.

Of course, the “yes but” bug rose up immediately. It whispered: yes but, you still have all this hardship. Yes but, what about the pain. Yes but, how will this solve anything. Yes but, what about the injustice. This voice always comes when we first start to practice true gratitude. It tries to pull us back into the familiar groove of lack. But I kept gently redirecting myself because I just knew that I had hit onto something that had the power to reshape my destiny, and it did.

I pulled my awareness toward the sunset and let awe wash through me. I marvelled at the miracle of sight itself, even if all I saw was a rubbish heap, the fact remained: I could see.

I began to name what I did have. I did have wisdom. I did have love. I did have laughter. I did have toes that could squiggle in the grass and a nose that could smell sweet flowers. I had more than I could possibly imagine, and that was the birthplace of true gratitude.

And as the gratitude deepened, it brought me to tears. It lodged like a lump in my throat, so thick I could barely swallow, and in that choking-with-emotion moment I knew I had become sincere. Gratitude was no longer a practice. It was a presence. I wasn’t trying to be grateful. I was in show-stopping awe at the magnificence that infused my everyday reality which I had simply paid no attention to. No wonder I felt empty. My attention was full of lack, and so my life became empty of beauty. I had placed 24/7 focus on suffering, and in so doing I made the gaping hole bigger every day. I longed to fill the emptiness. I spoke good intentions. But the feelings underneath it all were confirming what my mind knew, I was in dire straits. Poverty had me in a stranglehold and I had no way out. The lack became my daily devotion and I had no idea that I was its architect.

One day, I got grateful for my husband whose love knows no bounds. He was standing in front of me, loving me, and I wasn’t letting it in because I was too busy focusing on what we needed. I felt that love and beauty were luxuries I didn’t have time for, little did I know that I had all the time in the world for these things and needed them more than ever before. I saw the sweet smiles of my children eating sandwiches at the kitchen table, their little crumb infused faces, and when I let myself see them, I was cleansed I didn’t realize that until then I couldn’t even see the beauty of my children or the world around me because the lens I was looking through was trained to spot danger, waiting for the next thing to go wrong, standing with a metaphorical sword to fight off the next wave of debt collectors or the next person trying to take advantage of our terrible situation. But oh, when I just saw the smiles, and let myself see them … the tears came.

I was starting to see what I did have, and it extended to everything. I got grateful for the way sunlight catches the leaves and turns them into luminous green. Yes, I feared that this gratitude, as elevating as it was, might drop my guard and leave us more vulnerable. But I also knew enough to recognize that was not truth speaking. It was fear. And I had a choice to listen to it or to love.

I had unknowingly and unwittingly been so tuned out of love because I was so tuned in to desperation that gratitude, when I finally found it, felt like a thirst that had been neglected for eons, finally being quenched. I got grateful for the feel of grass beneath my feet and the endless bounty of nature. The way a rock feels when I touch it; ancient, cool, enduring. The list is endless. And life became more beautiful, not because I had enough, but because my focus was turned from lack to plenty. I got humble. I started seeing all the things that I had not acknowledged before but that were indescribable in their magnificence. To this day, a flower on the side of the road can bring me to tears because I finally allowed myself to see what around me all along. God was in everything and everywhere. My life was overflowing. It wasn’t long after that my creativity came back, and my teachings came online again.

When you step into sincere gratitude and you begin to see what you have, you begin to soften. You stop complaining and start celebrating the bounty you were blind to before. Victimhood goes out the window and without you even realizing it, you become powerful again. You start to see just how much goodness has been sitting quietly in the background of your life, waiting for you to notice.

You discover that the emptiness was never truly empty at all. The thing that was missing was never a “thing.”

So how about a new exercise now, one that allows you to turn your gaze, even just for a moment, from lack to fullness?

Ask yourself these 3 questions:

• What beauty have I not paid attention to today?
• What is right in front of me that I forgot to see?
• What else is there, waiting for me to celebrate?

What matters is:

• you’re not relying on what you don’t have to define your reality anymore
• you’re starting to lean into what you do have and therefore create more of that
• you’re focusing less on lack and more on abundance

Remember that it was only the story that called your attention to lack, and your attention was held there until you consciously moved it. There always comes a time when you are ready to replace fear with truth. And the time has come.

Deeper truths for you to ponder:

• you are where you’re meant to be … take a breath and let that in
• that means you’re not in the wrong place … even if you’re in difficulty, it remains the right place where transcendence can happen
• if you find yourself in an imperfect state, this is the right place for you to elevate from
• when you stop fighting where you are, you realize that acceptance doesn’t mean defeat, it means that you’re finally free to move forward

One of the fundamentals that you will hear often in the Plasma Light Tribe is that you cannot move on from where you are until you are where you are. This is an exercise in acceptance, alchemy, and transcendence. These are fundamentals that my teachings overflow with.

Of course, if you love where you are, be in it more fully so that you can move into it more freely and amplify it, because just when things are good, you need to ask yourself: how good can this get?

If your life holds no hardship, the path looks different. Not better, not worse, simply another way of travelling to the same destination. For you, the challenge is to focus on what else is present that you have not yet seen, and to open even more deeply to it. Because if you think this is as good as it gets, think again. You have not yet glimpsed even a fraction of the miracles you came here to witness and embody.

So let us elevate, my loves. It is time to lead the way in love and truth, which means leading from abundance, happiness, and a fullness that words can only ever hint at.

Gratitude does not erase pain. It transforms it. It does not fill the hole with distractions, it turns the hole into the whole. And in that fullness, you finally remember that you were never truly empty at all.

With so much love…
From my heart to yours…

 
 

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