You Were Never Meant To Live a Small Life

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The Lie You've Been Feeding

Welcome to Nayla’s Lab – a place where you can be completely free without the need to filter yourself for the sake of others!

Hey you. I wanted to write this letter to offer you the kind of wisdom I wish I’d had growing up. Not because I think you need it — not yet, at least — but because one day you might find yourself questioning everything and not have the answers you need to move forward. That’s the thing about life. It never gives us the answers we’re looking for until the very last second — usually after we’ve nearly given up. And the thing about despair is that it has such a strong hold on you. Like being swept up in a hurricane where all you can do is survive, and all you can’t do is see the calm that exists just outside of it.

So that’s where I want to start — making sense of your emotions. Or more specifically, what to do when you’re feeling despair.

Here’s what I want you to do. No matter what’s caused it — the end of a relationship, a friendship falling apart, some kind of failure, money stress, whatever it is — the first thing you must do is stop the negative loop.

What's actually happening to you

The loop is a spiral. One negative thought fuels the next, fuels the next, fuels the next, and on and on it goes. It is a one-way ticket to hell — and I don’t say that lightly. It will suck you in and tell you how useless you are, not based on any truth, but based on nothing more than a bad feeling. It tricks you into believing that if you stay in it long enough, something good will come out of it.

It will not.

What it will do is tear down everything good that you are. Every bit of self-worth, every ounce of wellbeing that’s been nurtured and cultivated in you — it dissolves it all into fog, and then into darkness, until there’s nothing left to believe in anymore. And the cruelest part? It tells you that staying there makes sense.

It doesn’t. Because it’s a lie. A big fat lie. A lie you’ve been feeding. And a lie you have the power to stop.

And I want to tell you how good you are. You are a special human being. So loved. So wanted. Even if that feels completely false right now. Even if someone has made you feel like that’s not true. I promise you it is — because deep down inside, like deep deep down, you already know this to be true. It’s just buried. And it’s time to get back to it.

How to get out

Here’s the thing — you cannot think your way out of this. The spiral has too much power over your thoughts for that to work. You need to feel your way out. And I promise you, once you do, even just one session will shift something in you.

I know this because I have been inches away from taking my own life, with not a single soul in the world knowing about it. I sat with that. Completely alone with it. And in a single meditation session, I dissolved that spiral into the nothingness it came from.

Let me show you how.

The only way to interrupt the loop is to start feeling good — not tomorrow, not once the situation resolves itself. Now. And the fastest, most direct way to do that is through meditation. Not the kind where you try to empty your mind or stop your thoughts. A meditation focused entirely on generating a feeling of goodness in your body. That’s your first stop.

I want you to close your eyes, put on an eye mask, and put on headphones. Make sure you’re completely alone and won’t be disturbed. Then put on a meditation track — a chakra balancing one works well, or Dr Joe Dispenza’s Blessing of the Energy Centres. It’s guided, so he walks you through it, but I want you to add something. I’ll drop the links below — I don’t want to lose momentum here.

Once your eyes are closed, set aside your negative thoughts for this session. They’ll keep popping up — they will, that’s just what they do — but tell yourself that for these 20 minutes, you’re not letting them take the wheel. The meditation will direct you to the first energy centre at the base of your spine, but I want you to start at your forehead instead. That’s where the thoughts are surfacing. That’s where we disrupt the pattern first.

Imagine a warm energy on your forehead, penetrating your brain. Stay there for a few minutes until you can actually feel it. The goal is for that warmth to feel good — the way it feels to sit in the sun on the beach, when everything goes quiet and you just feel held. Once you have that feeling, intensify it. Let it expand. And as you do, I want your brain to feel good. Genuinely, physically good. Warm. Settled. Safe.

Think about what your heart feels like when it’s happy. What your face feels like when you’re somewhere you love. I want your brain to feel that way.

Memories will come up. Thoughts will come up. Not to sabotage you — though it can feel that way — but because your system is releasing what it’s been holding onto. Don’t push it away, don’t judge it, don’t follow it. Just come back. Come back to your brain feeling good. That’s it. That is the whole work.

From there, follow the meditation through the rest of your body. One thing I’ve learned over the years is to feel energy entering through your back — start at the base of your spine and slowly work your way up until you feel that warm, loving energy moving inside you. Try to finish in your head and face. You want to leave feeling good from the neck up.

You don’t need to do this for hours. I started with 15 to 20 minutes.

Now here’s what I want you to pay attention to afterwards. When I did this for the first time, I noticed I didn’t have automatic negative thoughts anymore. Before, I’d wake up feeling bad. Eat and feel bad. Work and feel bad. It was constant. But after that first session, I felt nothing. Not bad nothing — neutral nothing. The suffering had just gone. Like it had quietly packed up and left.

So I did another session. The next day was the same — no spiral, no suffering. My husband and daughter were having a rough day and it didn’t even touch me. I was the calm one. Patient. Steady in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. And I haven’t stopped since. I keep going, and I keep feeling better, and my life has genuinely been transformed.

I want that for you. I want you to see how easy it can be to change — even when your brain is telling you it’s impossible. I want you to see how amazing you are. I want you to have a life that actually feels like yours. You are so much more than you think you are right now. So special. So wanted here.

Give yourself the best chance. Do this for yourself.

Nayla

Founder of Nayla’s Lab – A Space for Women Rising