The most important journey you'll ever have to make is 18 inches long.

That's how my tantra teacher started a five day retreat. There were no hellos, polite introductions, or grounding exercises. He got straight to the heart of his message, as every good leader should.

It worked, too. The room was completely silent. Everyone was curious, hanging onto every slow and deliberate word that was coming out of his mouth.

I spent the next 119 hours and 45 minutes taking that small, but sizeable journey, and it changed everything. It took me from a judgmental and intellectual place to a more accepting and compassionate one. It didn't eradicate the years of anxiety that had been building up, or all the self-loathing, body shame, and low confidence I experienced, but it allowed them to exist and be seen and heard for the first time. And in seeing and hearing them, I could understand them better.

They weren't trying to escape from a buried hole deep inside. There was no need to shout. They had space to share their pain, worries, and fears openly and for as long as they needed. And that's when they slowly started to lose their power over me.

People like Carl Jung knew this better than most; that's why he said things like:

• "The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely." And;
• "To love oneself is the most difficult task."

Learning to love myself was extremely difficult and scary, but the alternative was to continue wearing a mask and suppressing my emotions. And that was way more terrifying in the end. That shit ate me up.

"So the question is: Can you love yourself? That's the test. That's what every guru, master, and wise sage has figured out. That's what we're going to attempt to do here together. Are you ready?"

I had no idea what I was in for. I had no idea that silence could be so loud, speaking my truth could be so hard, and looking into my heart could be so scary, as if I was holding a glowing, red-hot iron that burned and burned and burned until it burned a hole so deep that my heart cracked open, releasing years of tears and tension.

"You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love.

In the long run, it comes back on us." — Carl Jung

The brain thinks, the heart knows

Walking the 18 inches to the heart is not for the faint-hearted. The mind does everything in its power to make it as hard as possible. Not because it wants to sabotage itself, but because it likes familiarity. It's simple psychology.

The mind might not be happy where it is, but it's comfortable, and trading that in for the unknown is something it doesn't want to entertain.

So it takes a lot of determination and grit to overcome the seductive and trickster ways of the mind. And it takes a daily practice (or practices) to sustain it.

Things like meditation, breathwork, and time in nature give me a better chance of having kind thoughts and more loving feelings, and both combine to create more compassion, curiosity, and joy.

That lays the foundation for a better life.

If there's one thing I've learned with age, it's to go from the brain to the heart as many times as possible because as Rumi so brilliantly said, "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."