I must say I have read something really fresh, rejuvenating, soft, simple, inspiring, and authentic after a long time in the genre of self-help. And this has been truly a lovely reading.
“The Magic of Creative Living” touched me in ways not many self-help books could before. The honesty, simplicity, and authenticity of the author make it an absolute gem.
Thankfully, someone writing a self-help kind of book talked about the myths and shit we feel trapped in so openly and loudly.
I loved this book. Loved each page, each chapter, and each paragraph a hundred percent.
Renuka has shared her life experiences, her problems, her struggles to live a life that finally feels a lot softer, meaningful, simple, yet successful, with all the fulfillment our soul craves silently. She nudges readers to sit, to question, to journal, and to basically pause and check if they are living the version of their lives they are really proud of from the bottom of their heart, or is there something missing? And if something is missing, then how to actively start participating in our lives instead of running away from it and scrolling for hours.
She has nudged throughout the book. It is a non-preachy read. You will feel the honesty. You will surely relate to the reality she is talking about between the pages.
For me, it has been one of the best, most refreshing, and simplest possible books in the self-help genre. I liked the writing style and the content of the book as well.
If you are fed up with to-do lists, how-to guides, early morning alarms, scrolling endlessly, mediocre performances, and a sense of fear and loss in life, then go read this book. It can be your saviour. I mean it. If you are ready to change, the author has your back.
I remember, back in the school days, when I was in an all-girls residential campus, shaam ka naashta, I mean our evening snack was the more or less regular thing just like our breakfast. It didn’t matter what the snack was, be it a fruit, nuts, rusk, packet bhujiya, or sometimes noodles, dhokla with our sometimes not-so-good tea.
It was a thing back then. When I shifted to Delhi for my college studies and started living with my parents, mealtime just got too erratic. Of course, college timings and late classes were the obvious reasons. Some days, I used to have my breakfast after 11 am and my lunch after 5 pm. It was bad. But that was it. My college years were far from perfect in any sense. Those years were haphazard throughout.
So yeah, evening snacking wasn’t a specific thing for me then. And after that, I spent many years at my home doing self-study and exam preparations, coaching, etc., and breakfast, lunch, and dinner were the norm. Evening snack became occasional. And it is still now.
For the last few days, I was asking Abhi(my partner and hubby) to make a chiwra snack for me. In bihar we call it choora ka bhujja. It is the regionally grown flatrice which is then shallow fried in much less oil until it becomes crispy, and then we add finely chopped onions, chilies, and during winters, also fried peas and groundnuts. It can be made in different variations according to taste and the way you want to relish it. We had everything at home that we needed. Abhi knows very well how to prepare it. But. But but but but but, for this particular thing we had to have a day when we both would be free in the evening, and we will have enough time in our hands. In short, you need evenings for an evening snack.
Thankfully, today was that day. Abhi came home a bit early, and on my request, we managed to finally have our choora ka bhujja with fried peas, finely chopped onions, chillies, groundnut, and a bit of salt for flavour in our shaam ka naashta. Finally!
I hope that this occasional snacking or shaam ka naashta remains in our lives. I don’t know why. I just want it to be. Maybe because it still reminds me of my childhood, my hostel days, when I used to look forward to it alongwith my friends. Maybe. I don’t know.
Well, our naashta was really good. I liked the taste. It could have been crunchier, but it’s so sweet of Abhi to just make it for me within minutes. And I loved it that way.
You know, for the past year, and a bit more, my internal health, my hormonal balance, my weight fluctuations, my skin problems, and my surprising physical ailments and doctor visits have really made me feel very bad about myself. Very bad!
I can’t tell you how hopeless, bad, and weak I have felt inside. And when you go through multiple physical problems one after another – in my case, they were unexpected weight gain, constant stress, possibility of thyroid, initial stages of PCOD with a lot of added stress and mood swings, restlessness, the constant fatigue and tiredness – I was tired of feeling tired every day!
The overwhelm and heaviness inside, which only you feel very often. The surprising neck and nerve pain you never even imagined you can have, medications, and the internal battle between the one who wants to sort everything – get fitter, eat better, want to wake up early, do meditation and exercises, have breakfast on time, and the one who is tired, lost, and somewhere deep in grief, because each and every seemingly small thing, including just getting up from the bed and living normally suddenly felt so impossible.
And just imagine all these changes with the fact that everything is happening to you while you are a newlywed. You go to a new place, a new city, you live with your in-laws, and now your body feels like it’s operating in a survival mode every day.
You are unable to understand your body, you are unable to process the change in the surroundings and culture around you, and your already weak immunity makes you go through one of the longest cold and sneezing phases, added with the allergy which just got triggered due to the environment and changes around you.
It was the really bad, shitty experience I had with my physical, mental, and emotional well-being – all at once! And my mind wasn’t able to cope with any of these for the months ahead.
Only god knows how many times I have cried alone, silently, in closed rooms, in the bathroom, because of many, many things happening one after another constantly, and no matter what I was doing, I was literally failing.
I was failing at waking up early. I was failing at sleeping early. I was failing at cooking two meals a day for myself. I was failing at keeping up with my creativity and discipline.
I was failing at showing up for my work, even for an hour every day. And when you have to show up, you want to show up, but the negativity in your mind and weakness in your bones takes you over; your reality confirms that you are a procrastinator. I don’t know how I survived facing myself in the mirror each day. I don’t know!
No one talks about the feeling that comes with a series of repeated failures, a series of very bad and low days in your personal life. You know, I can’t remember the number of times I had questioned even my existence.
Today I feel very bad for feeling that way, but it’s true. I had started questioning my existence, my presence, and just being alive some days.
No one can make you feel loved, cared for, respected, valued, and desired when you start developing a relationship with yourself, where you have started to deeply hate the parts of you that need your acceptance, your love, your care, your affection, and your trust the most. You can’t abandon your vulnerable parts and move on. You have to care for your deeply seated fears, tension, stress, and insecurities.
And if you are unable to, then it’s ok. Things will get better. Don’t hate yourself for not being your best. Please don’t. Healing takes time. Honour the process. And please love yourself. Please! I wish someone had made me understand all of this then. I really wish!
I don’t know when it happened. But it happened for sure. I forgot something. I forgot that the irritating, sad, bad, ugly, frustrating, emotionally low, mentally weak, physically inefficient – each and every one of this were also me, and I am everything.
Yes, I am good, and yes, I am bad as well. Yes, I may appear pretty and good-looking some days, and some days I don’t bother to even comb my hair. And that doesn’t mean that I should start hating myself for not living my life according to my high expectations every single day.
Making room for my mistakes is also my duty. I have to give myself that room – not out of shame for not being the type A every day, but for not forgetting that I am a human and I am becoming.
When it comes to love, especially self-love, I have realised one thing – Acceptance is the first and foremost step. I can’t love myself without accepting myself completely.
Yes, I have the potential to become what I want to become for sure. Yes, I have faith in my vision. But, I can’t make that come true if I am hating myself every day for my shortcomings and for the numerous things, people, and experiences that are not in my control. And they simply are not!
For me, this acceptance wasn’t easy. Not at all. The days when I failed, I stayed in bed, I didn’t do anything productive, I felt tired, unmotivated, and fatigued, were the days when I tried to hold myself from the outside, but inside I was crumbling, cribbing, hating, complaining, and constantly talking negatively in my mind about myself – about how unhealthy I am, about how much incompetent I am, about how I will, may never be able to do anything in life I truly want.
Every day, I cribbed, hated myself, cried silently, felt bad for the people around me, and felt bad for my existence on most days.
I wish I had then understood that I needed to accept myself completely – with each and everything unfolding in that chaos every time. The two sides of me where I was saying to myself that everything will be ok, it will get better, and in my head there was a loop of “I am such a failure that my parents will always be ashamed of me, my teachers will be ashamed of me”…..kind of thoughts were going on day in and day out.
I never experienced the emotional and mental weakness I experienced in that phase. It was terrible enough to shake me from the inside.
Today, when I think about this very recent phase of my life, I realise that if I am alive today, and I look forward to life with all the hope I have in me, it is only because of two things.
These two things happened to me. I didn’t choose them. They chose me.
And when I say I didn’t choose them, they chose me, I mean it one hundred percent. This was the blessing I needed the most at that time. I will talk about walking in another post. Today, I will focus on the faith part of my healing journey. By the way, this journey is still continuing.
I don’t know how, but somewhere I started to see, feel, and accept the fact slowly that my friends, teachers, mentors, inspirational and motivational stories, good times, happiness-filled moments, and professional mental health services and counselling – which I tried in my mid to late twenties – all of this, despite their best intentions, had their own limitations.
And I had to accept that these limitations from their side are a part of their existence and their role in my life. But I used to feel so broken and shattered inside that it took me a long time to acknowledge this fact, this truth of life.
I saw that there is literally no one who can hold you, protect you, listen to you, understand you, take a very good care of you, guide you, motivate you, make you shine, make you smile, and make you fall in love with this life again and again everyday, except the only one who is the supreme divine itself. The one who is present in each and everything visible and invisible to you, the sunshine, the moonlight, the snow, the rain, the clouds, the rivers, the earth, the galaxies, the universe, the cosmos – everything is almighty. Everything is energy. And you are the manifestation of that energy.
Faith. Faith in life. Faith in goodness. Faith in the universe, faith in almighty, faith in myself has helped me keep going as an emotional force like nothing I have ever experienced till now.
Faith came to me. Faith chose me. I didn’t need to follow anything religious or spiritual at any time. I just needed to believe that whoever is taking care of this grand cosmos beautifully every day is surely capable enough to take care of me and is definitely taking care of me. I just needed to believe that the universe is here to help me. I just need to ask for help with complete, pure belief.
The belief in the universe, the belief in the goodness, in the greatness, in the almighty, with a pure heart and pure intentions, gave me something I can’t even describe in words.
The least I can say is that I started to believe in life, in my existence, in this world again. And slowly, it started to change the narrative in my mind. And that was enough to shift the reality within. Somehow, my mind started to accept that I am a part of a very big cosmic reality of which I am unaware, and things will get better, more beautiful, relaxed, and happier with each day.
It’s true. Belief changes you. Belief changes your reality. It did change mine. My inner thoughts, words, conversations, and feelings have started to change in my favour. And that’s itself a very big, very important change.
Yes, I continue to have my phases of not-so-good days and not-so-good feelings, and I choose faith in life on those days as well. That is the least we can do for ourselves, I feel.
Faith chose me when I needed it most. And it held me every time I needed someone to hold me from falling again and again. It certainly has impacted my emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being in ways I didn’t know earlier.
Faith can really move mountains. It’s true. I can say it with confidence today.
Faith helped me in accepting myself wholeheartedly – with all the failures, all the rejections, all the setbacks, all the past baggage, with all the physical, personal, and professional insecurities I had developed unconsciously.
It finally helped me in happily accepting myself with everything within me – with all the mess and grace!
This ongoing process of connection with the supreme divine, the divine god, the divine goddess, or whoever you say, has made me come to terms with myself.
It made me acknowledge my current reality. It made me accept the decades of chapters of my past without the long-held guilt, shame, and unworthiness I had for so long. It made me let go of many things, people, and experiences I needed to let go of peacefully.
It finally made me see the present in front of my eyes with a lot of appreciation, it truly deserves. It made me learn that life is all of this – the good, the bad, the success, the failure, the love, the hatred, the drama, the peace, the highs, the lows – life is all of this.
We are merely a peck of dust here. We can’t afford to take the lows so seriously that we start to question our presence. Our presence, too, is a part of the plan. All we need is to trust the plan.
Yes, we need to. Nobody can trust us on our behalf. We have to, so that miracles can happen abundantly.
So yeah, this was the role of faith. Faith in the universe, the faith in life, and the faith in the cosmos, that helped me in seeing myself as a beautiful, worthy, protected, blessed, and one of the luckiest parts of this miraculous thing called life.
The sense of alignment you get to experience for the very first time in your life, that feeling changes the energy you choose to operate from on an everyday basis.
The process hasn’t been linear, and maybe it won’t be. But it will make many things clear to you one after another. And you will choose to fall in love with life again and again every day, despite everything going around you. And trust me, this is one of the most beautiful parts of this process. I have felt it. I can say it.
Have faith. The universe is working in your favour. Always!
Srishti Kumari 