BE the real F**king thing
Caution: there will be expletives to follow.
By Zara Thame - Owner of The Wellness Project and Yoga Teacher
I have just finished watching Tony Robbins – I Am Not Your Guru. If you haven’t watched it yet- best add it to your Netflix ‘must watch’ list. It points out that expletives are the only way to stop your stream of consciousness and bring you into reality. From someone that doesn’t speak with profanities, this makes complete and utter sense to me- they shock me to attention. To say I am not a sceptic of anything related to ‘self-help’ and ‘mass motivation’ would be a complete lie. So why did this bullsh** resonate with me?
Tony Robbins is real, he is not proclaiming to be anything but that which he truly is. And all he asks of his participants is the same. It seems simple but the reality of our current world is we are so caught up with everything that is unreal we have forgotten how to feel, how to honestly and wholeheartedly be in our lives and deal with what is real.
Society has dictated the trends which we all subscribe to. Our validation and sense of self-worth has become defined by our associations through social media and our popularity by the number of likes we get on Instagram (I have to admit I don’t even know who rad_life08 is but they sure like me a lot, so my life must be going OK). Our friendships are easy to ‘maintain’ with quick snap chats but when was the last time we actually hosted a dinner party? We are slowly losing touch with what is real, what is here now all around us. Without real human connections, we feel our worth diminish. Our lives slowly losing meaning because we are in a virtual reality instead of a tangible reality. We are disconnected from ourselves and connected to who we think we need to be.
Tony Robbins asks the audience “Who here is really fu**ed up?” So many hands lift and wave around. And he rebuts “right, so it’s not you guys, you just want attention”. So he dives deeper “who is suicidal” a few people stand. What unfolds next is quite remarkable. A young woman retells a story of childhood abuse that for most of us is unfathomable. Robbins has a gift, somehow relating every story, every
person’s aching situation to the wider audience. “We are all fu**ed up.” The weirdest thing is we all want the same stuff, love and happiness, and we are all swimming around in a sea of pain thinking we are the only ones broken. So we cover it up, we pretend we are fine, we smooth over what is real to create a guise. That guise is picture perfect and Instagram ready on the outside yet crying out for fulfilment on the inside. Why? Because we thought we were the only one. We thought our pain was insurmountable, our depression so deep that no-one could help, our heart so broken it was no longer worthy of love. Tony renounces “Bullshit”. We have to show up and be real, stop pretending all is OK and open the doors of honesty.
We aren’t perfect and for as many times as you see perfect on the outside there is a struggle on the inside. No-one is living a life free of pain, this being human business is bloody hard. We are all a bit broken and some of us a lot broken. Shake me up on any given day and there will be a whole lot of rattling. But we have to be raw and real and stop pretending. Be who you are, not who you think you need to be. The biggest mistake of any lifetime is to live a life that was never yours to live. A life that goes against the grain of your fibres. We were born into this time and place for a precise reason and you are here to tell this story. Without the good, the bad, the ugly your story wouldn’t be yours, it would be someone else’s. When we find the strength to be real we re-affirm the ‘human-ness’ in humanity.
We have all done bad stuff; we have all had bad stuff done to us. So be fu**ing real about it. Stop pretending to be ‘that person’ and start being your person. Your person has a story to be created, a tale no-one has ever heard before and an authentic voice through which it can be told. Don’t trade that for a life that has been lived by someone else.
Real is the new generic, so brave the f**k up and be yourself. The self that is unabridged, unashamed and unable to be quietened.