You cannot move forward to a brighter future unless you examine the not so nice things about your past.
I know you want to push them under your mattress, alongside with those bills you’re too afraid to face. But you and I both know those bills ain’t going anywhere and neither is the pain for your mistakes and failures unless you learn the lesson, accept, atone, forgive and move on.
If you don’t understand where you went wrong, you’ll never know how you can go right!
In my last post, I shared with you how I created a life of endless travel for 10 years, on little money, but lots of hard work, action and scrimping. We had a couple of good investment properties that brought us in about $20 a month – not much, but it was our secure future.
The sour turn
Then things turned sour and the next period of my life in my early thirties was dark and shameful.
It’s shameful to me because I made a lot of stupid mistakes, killed our investments and blew a lot of money. It’s most shameful because they’re years I can’t ever get back and, as someone who believes in embracing every moment as if it is your last, this is devastating.
We returned home from our travels in 2007 (10 years after I first started) and, not understanding reverse culture shock, fell into somewhat of a depression. I was desperate to find the money so we could continue our life of travel.
My focus changed.
Whereas before I focused on living the life my soul yearned for and what nourished it, I was now focused on bringing in the money to keep my travels alive.
I didn’t stop to think that for the previous eight years my travel dreams had been kept alive simply because I allowed them and took action for them.
I lived the dream and the money came. Now I couldn’t do a thing right and the money flew out of my hand faster than a magician could make a rabbit disappear.
We chased get-rich schemes, invested in the wrong things, and bought the wrong property.
This time my gut screamed HELL NO.
But I ignored it as I saw FREEDOM in the potential income we could earn and the power status that would come with it.
To tell you the shortened version of the story—Cripps and Blood gangs, drug raids and police stake-outs later—we lost our good investment properties and had to give the bad one back to the bank. All up we lost nearly half a million dollars in assets and ended up with $30,000 in credit card debt.
Each new hole we dug we flung more money at it to dig ourselves out but we only sunk deeper. The bills kept piling up and the bad luck just kept coming. I felt so powerless around money and my choices.
I was deeply insecure, afraid, angry, depressed, bitter and so ungrateful.
When I had lived my travel life, every day was a joy and wonder to me. My eyes were open in amazement to all the miracles in life and I thirsted for more so I could evolve and grow.
Now I had shrunk. I didn’t understand the purpose of life anymore and I couldn’t be thankful for anything.
Another important part to this phase of my life was that I no longer worked hard for the money. I chased it with stupid schemes, but I didn’t step out and act like I did in the first phase.
This reason for this was twofold—I was tired of working jobs that did not fulfil me. Teaching sucked the life out of me and I just had no strength left in me to do it anymore.
There was nothing that fueled my passion, so I became quite unmotivated and took little action. I did spend time trying to find the “right” thing, totally ignoring my soul that told me to start a travel blog. My insecurities told me it was stupid and so I looked to ridiculous schemes instead that didn’t involve much of me.
It was at this stage that I learned about the Law of Attraction, and seeing how it had worked in my life during the intense travel phase without me consciously applying it, I figured I could easily do it now to create the money to help me to continue to travel.
But, I relied too heavily on the part of the Law of Attraction that said you could just THINK into being what you wanted.
No matter how hard I envisioned a suitcase of money and repeated my “I am so wealthy” affirmations, it never arrived!! Instead it went out in suitcase loads.
What was I doing wrong?
This destructive lifestyle became too much for me to bear and, one afternoon when I opened the kitchen cupboard and a group of baby cockroaches scurried off for their lives in the corner, I fell in a heap on the floor of my closet begging for it to end.
“There has to be more than this. Surely after all my years of travel and everything I learned I can contribute more to life than this.”
I promised I’d do whatever it took to change and to make my life good again. I wanted the joy and wonder back and I wanted to make a difference.
You might be gaining some insights into how we create – good or bad! One is conscious, the other is not.
Stay with me, in my next post, I’ll share with you what happened next and how I changed things around.
Are you connecting a few dots between this story and my last post? Can you relate to any of this? You are not alone
