What are you willing to give up to receive the life you desire?

Your time? Your security? Your comfort?

Those are all great answers, and in all likelihood you will lose a little of each at one time or another. But the real answer goes even deeper than that.

In order to move into your best life, you have to be willing to give up your life as you know it.

Any change that you want to make, signals the death of your old life. EVERY time you decide to change your life, life as you know it now has to ceases to exist. That is what makes change feel so “hard” for most people. When you choose to step into you power and reach for the next level of you, the lower level has to fall away by default. In reaching for what comes next, you must release what has come before. Clinging to it will only hold you down and back, like a snagged balloon trapped in mid-ascent.

The gurus and masters of our various religious faiths never clung to this earthly existence, for this very reason. Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhārtha Gautama, Muhammad, the shammans, medicine people, and priestesses, they all knew that in order to attain that highest enlightened existence we must be willing to move in the world without clinging to the idea that we are of the world.

Christ and his apostles sold all that they owned. Muhammad left his home and family in favor of a desert cave. Buddha, likewise, left his palace and embraced a life of worshipful asceticism. Each of these men, while sharing our earthly existence, realized that in order to change the world, we must release our attachment to it; that in order to live in full divine potential, we must be willing to die to the person society believes and expects us to be.

It is not that we must sacrifice all that we own. It is not that we must live a life of poverty in sacrifice to the divine. It is not that we must give up everything that we are and have and want. The abandonment of our safety, our families, and our deepest yearnings is not the demand that the divine makes of us. Ever. The desires of your heart were placed there by the divine. They were given to you with love and purpose. You were never meant to give them up. And yet so many people do, believing that by doing so they are fulfilling some misguided obligation to god and family. That is not what the divine created you to for! You were created to be a light in this world, to spread and to be the joy and love of god incarnate. Living authentically is the single most precious and meaningful offering that you could possibly give to the gods or to the world.

But in order to do that, you must be willing to abandon every preconceived notion you have about who god is and what he expects of you. And you must be willing to rip from the pages of your life every lie you’ve ever been told about what your purpose and duty is. You must be willing to lose the life you have and trust that the life that comes after is more beautiful and fulfilling than you ever could have imagined, because it was hand designed for you by the most loving architect you can conceive. It is not the sacrifice itself that matters. It is the willingness – it is the FAITH – that turns the heart of the divine. Only through the willingness to sacrifice what we think we have already gained, can we gain all that we truly deserve. Only through the willingness to lose what we believe we are can we become what we were meant to be. Knowing this, what are you willing to give up to receive the life you truly desire?