“So this is who I am,
And this is all I know,
And I must choose to live,
For all that I can give,
The spark that makes the power grow”

Immortality – written by The Gibb brothers

If you have been following all my stories in “It is What it Is” you will have a very good idea of the road I have travelled, who I was, what I experienced, what I gained, what I lost, and now it’s time for me to announce, so this is who I am.

The last four years having been the most extreme of my life, have carried the greatest learnings. What made them so extreme though, was because I didn’t learn the lessons from my past experiences and so it was as if deep down I’d decided that it was time, it was time remember who I am and not who others had programmed me to be. Some of these experiences were too much for me to bear back then and maybe my subconscious mind buried them deeply until I was strong enough to open the, reconsider them, process them and conquer them. Other experiences were simply ones that I hadn’t learned from and so I was just repeating the same old destructive behaviours, over and over again.

I have had a strange relationship with religion and God most of my life. Born in to the neutral world of Anglicanism through rote rather than dedication, church was considered for what we used to say “Hatches, matches and despatches”, that being births, deaths and funerals. My experience with the fundamental Christian company that I shared in Be a Great Employee I worked at for two years certainly didn’t help my thinking around religion either.

I read a quotation recently that provided me with absolute clarity around my personal feelings and relationship with Spirit, God, Universe, or whatever you would like to call it.

“Religion is for those who are afraid to go to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been there.”

I have been to hell and come back, more than once, and I have learned great lessons along this journey. I am smarter and I am wiser and I am much stronger than I was before. I have changed in so many wonderful ways, and yet in many ways I am still exactly the same.

I am sure that you have heard the saying “Nice guys finish last”? I do not believe this to be true. What is true though is that nice guys, who don’t learn from their experiences, finish stone last because unless you’re learning and growing you’re dying and there’s no nice way to soft-soap this message. I was blessed with incredible gifts, I was blessed with the innate ability to be empathetic, calm and warm, humour filled, kind, and I am most definitely love. I have the ability to love without condition. But, understand this, in order to love without condition and not been taken advantage of, to not be bullied and emotionally destroyed, you must first learn to love yourself unconditionally. You must be able to make every decision based on the highest love of all, the self-centred love for yourself, because when you love yourself this way, you (Self) are perfectly centred. The longer this takes, the harder the lessons become, until you do so.

My life lessons have been ones associated with matters of the heart

Even though my toughest lesson appeared to be delivered to me by way of financial devastation, nearly every huge life lesson I have experienced and learned, was delivered through personal pain. The financial money lesson was there merely for me to learn how to properly use the abundant riches which will flood back to me now that I am ready to receive them again because I am worthy and deserving of them. As I said, making money was never a challenge, keeping it was. But not now, not anymore. My biggest lessons were around love, love for everyone else, but not for myself. Losing those I loved carried great pain and confusion at the time, and ultimately great understanding. For this, I am eternally grateful.

My greatest lesson of love was delivered by the one person whom I could never have believed would cause me such pain, my daughter.

I will tell her full story in my next book, it will weave my learnings from the heart through every experience you can imagine. But for this part of my story, I share with you the impact of our combined actions, hers and mine that took me to the brink of emotional devastation and then to the discovery of inner self.

My daughter is a beautiful young woman who has had her fair share of life experiences and they form part of her journey and therefore I honour and respect them within that context. Although she had to shoulder her own burdens through living through my experiences too, she never went without. When things got unbearable for Chris and me, she gave us a great deal of support in whichever way she could, until she could no more – and for this we will always be extremely grateful. When we had to move in with Chris’s cousin my daughter went to live with a friend of hers and was dating a man much older than her. It was then that a distance was put between us, physically and emotionally, and with the attempted suicide of Douglas on Christmas Eve, something snapped. At that moment for reasons that are still not known to me, she chose to completely cut me out of her life. Try as I might I could not understand her actions as I’d never raised her that way – I’d always believed we were close enough to always talk things through, not to just sever ties between us with complete finality and offer no understanding around why this was to be so.

Christmas Day 2013 dawned and for the first time in 20 years I would not be spending Christmas Day with my little girl. I didn’t hear from her for New Year either and the most difficult time of all for me was to not celebrate her 21^st birthday with her. It is what it is, but the pain I experienced around not celebrating this milestone with her was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

There were many nights in 2014 when Chris had to listen to my “not-so-silent” sobs at night, and do the very best he could to allow me to grow and to heal, and to provide me with comfort too. He had been very close to my daughter – in his words, she had filled a void in his life as he was estranged from his two daughters who now live in New Zealand. What Chris learned from all this, was that it is pointless when people ask you for advice, to offer it. It doesn’t matter how close the people might be either, colleagues, friends, family and especially your children. When he looks at my daughter, a young woman he loves and accepts as his own daughter, he realised this, because even when she politely asked for advice, it was pointless to offer it constructively to her in any shape or form, as she is a very headstrong young woman and so irrespective of what you say, like all children, she’ll do things her way.

This is when we realised that this is true with everyone who asks for advice, and we have earned to listen to what they are saying, with the purpose of understanding them. Then we ask them what they think they should do. They always know what it is they want to do, and we ask them if they have considered all the consequences of doing this?

Today, when I think about all that went down between her and me, I can remember the hurt. It’s okay for me to admit this, because I’ve had enough of all this mumbo-jumbo around not honouring your emotions, around just shrugging it off and getting on with it, stiff-upper lip and all – very British you know! Yes I can remember the hurt, but it is not raw nor is it hurtful anymore and that’s a good thing, because it means that I am healed.

That said, even today, I still do not know what happened, I’ve had to do what’s best for me, I’ve had to make the highest decision grounded in love for myself, and so I’ve chosen to release the pain and the hurt, therefore I am free, and I have chosen to forgive myself for whatever it was that I had done to her, therefore, I am forgiven. If I hadn’t chosen these to three outcomes for me, to heal me, to free me and to forgive me, just think how badly all this would have festered and so not only would my relationship with her be a complete disaster, all that septic energy would have leaked in to my other relationships too, damaging them and damaging me even more in the process. I really do understand why Eleanor Roosevelt said that “What others think of me is really none of my business” because had it not been for that realisation I would not be where I am right now which is that moment in time when I am receiving my gigantic breakthrough!

2015 has been a year of healing for me, and for Chris too.

Moving to a farm in the countryside, being in nature and at one with the Universe has brought peace and perspective for me. My daughter and I have reconciled. Our relationship will never be the same and our journey has far to go – a new and different relationship will have to be created and I’m perfectly fine with this.

Losing the friends I had, did have a devastating effect on me. I have told you how difficult it was for me to make friends as a child, and throughout my life this trend continued. Outwardly many people thought me to be an extrovert, but in all truth, I am an introvert at heart. I find it particularly difficult to make friends with girls, and women. I was never part of the in crowd, never quite enough to be included in the cliques and circles, if I was included in something it was mostly as an afterthought. Over the years I have had more male than female acquaintances, and a few good men friends. Those I lost were those closest to me in my everyday life, I felt the loss quite intensely, and it was a high price I paid.

Given this, you can only imagine that I was very surprised late last year to feel a calling to provide coaching, mentoring and training to women. This came as a huge surprise to me, but I acknowledged and respected the call. I put together some fabulous material targeting women, but the response wasn’t what I expected. Chris, was supportive of my doing this but he was surprised that I had felt this calling given that I didn’t really resonate well with women, nor them with me.

During this time of healing this year, I have gleaned more clarity around the calling of working with women. The more time I spent on reflection and introspection, the more I realised what type of women I wanted to work with. I want to work with women who had had experiences like mine, who had had similar family backgrounds, and who wanted more out of life, and who wanted success for them and their families. For women who wanted to discover and harness their Queen Particle.

So this is who I am and this is what I now choose to experience

I CHOOSE to experience:

I shared this list with you, because every day, 3x a day, I review this checklist and ask myself how I am doing against what’s listed on it. As a result I find myself doing fabulous things for others and receiving many blessings in return. And yes, I AM A GIFT TO THIS WORLD.

As I conclude this article, I am now very aware of the:

1. Associations I keep
2. Thoughts I think
3. Words I use
   
4. Feelings I embrace
5. Behaviours I display
6. Actions I generate
7. Importance of loving myself first

My life is so much richer now. I love myself and I AM ONE with The Universe, Source Energy, Spirit, God – whatever name you might want to call it and I thoroughly enjoy this connectedness.

To your Success with love

Suzanne Styles