This week, I’m pushing myself. Over extending beyond my comfort zone. I’m sticking my neck out further and am nervous and extremely excited! It got me thinking though. How many times in life do we do that? Step out of the carefully positioned and cultivated boundaries that we’ve erected around ourselves in order to identify who we are and what we do. Unfortunately, not very often.
I’ve spent 15 years of my life building ‘brand Lara’. I’m clear of who I am in the professional field and what my expertise is. I’ve made a name for myself first as a model and now as an actress. This is how the outside world identifies with me. It’s taken me a few good years of hard work to build this. Am I ready then to shake this up a bit? Get people to extend their vision and view me as something else? Something more?
We love labels, all of us. Not the kind that hang in the back of clothes or on the inner soles of shoes (we love those too!) but the ones we carefully apply to every single person we encounter through life, even ourselves. I am ‘a doting mom, a good sister, and a terrific cook’, or I am ‘a classical dancer and philanthropist’. We package ourselves in pretty boxes and find that THAT helps us find our way through life.
We love labels, all of us. Not the kind that hang in the back of clothes or on the inner soles of shoes (we love those too!) but the ones we carefully apply to every single person we encounter through life, even ourselves. I am ‘a doting mom, a good sister, and a terrific cook’, or I am ‘a classical dancer and philanthropist’. We package ourselves in pretty boxes and find that THAT helps us find our way through life.
If you were asked, just for a lark, to approach a car, waiting at a signal, and ask for a few rupees to buy yourself a meal, would you be able to do it? Think about it. You don’t need the money, it isn’t a lesson in humiliation, and it isn’t a dare, just to earnestly swap places with someone for a few seconds, to step outside of yourselves. What comes up in your mind? Embarrassment? The fear of being judged? Wondering what people might say or think? Why? Because only a beggar would do that? What stops us from being free? Ego?
A few years ago, I felt something very deeply in my psyche. I needed to lose myself in order to find myself. I constantly correct myself when I find that I’m restricting my actions to what I think is expected and acceptable of someone of ‘my stature’. That doesn’t mean that you have to be obnoxious or rude or silly in order to find your true self but sometimes it helps to take a leap of faith. I’m constantly changing and evolving and I like who I am NOW. Right now! I’m not who is was last year or even last month and every day I discover something new about myself, something I never knew I had in me.
The possibilities are endless and I’m not going to let a limiting thought stop me from having the greatest journey I’ll ever have!