FINAL NOTE

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

—RUMI

It was a beautiful sunny day. My father noticed the curious desire in my eyes as we walked back home.

“You’d like an ice cream, wouldn’t you?” my father asked a much younger me back then, with a rare smile on his face.

“Give this little kid an ice cream,” he told the ice-cream lady. “This little girl deserves one.”

That is the only pleasant vivid memory I have of him, the only time I clearly witnessed him allowing his inner light to shine. And that is what’s both strange and beautiful about our human nature.

Even though all throughout my childhood years I got ridiculed, labeled, judged and laughed at constantly, and even though I suffered tremendously because of my father’s lack of love, his abusive and toxic behavior, I managed to find the inner strength, wisdom and courage to carve through the rough walls that had been imprisoning the real me for all of those years and free myself from the dark, cold and fearful world I was living in.

Instead of continuing to cling to all those traumatic and painful memories, taking my sense of worth from all the wrong places, and instead of allowing the darkness of the past to poison my mind, my heart and my life, I decided to give it all up. I decided to give up my attachment to all those toxic thoughts, attitudes, relationships and behaviors that were holding me back. I decided to die to the past so that I could be born again to the present. No longer fighting, rejecting and resisting what was, but rather accepting, releasing, forgiving and making peace with it all.

As I have mentioned throughout this book, deep down inside our true nature is love. But as we grow older, bit by bit, our true nature becomes buried under layers of societal conditioning. As a result, we start experiencing our lives through the filters of the many fearful and limiting beliefs we adopt from those around us.

We perceive ourselves as being small, powerless, alone and insignificant when in fact we are powerful beyond measure.

It’s never too late to start all over. It’s never too late to claim your right to life and to happiness. No matter where you’ve been, no matter how life treated you in the past and no matter how many times you were hurt and injured mentally, emotionally or physically, if you’re still here, you can begin again.

Fill your heart with love. Forgive and let go.

Give up and be happy!