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Transcriber: Emilia Soso
Reviewer: eric vautier
You are who you've been looking for,
so stop looking for more
unless you’re looking in the mirror,
because it’s about time
for you to see clearly
that you are who you’ve been looking for.
And that empty feeling you got,
that hole in your chest,
you only got that feeling
because you think you’re not blessed
with everything you need.
You see, we live in a consumerist society,
which means they need you to buy stuff.
And the easiest way to sell it
is to tell you, “You’re not enough”.
“Buy this car, you’ll get girls”.
“Buy this bra, you’ll get guys”.
And we're seeing it so much
that we start believing these lies.
But the truth is:
the makeup they’re selling
to make you feel prettier
is the same makeup you buy to stop
feeling shittier about this lie
they keep telling you
that “you are not enough”.
And what about the movies we watch
or the shows on TV?
The more I watch, the more I see
“I need you to complete me”.
And yes, love is the answer,
love is the key.
But if you can’t love yourself,
how can you ever love me?
And “loving yourself”,
what does that even mean?
Messages and selfies,
and that sort of thing?
Because the more I think about it,
the more it feels weird.
I’ve always thought self-love
was something to be feared.
I’ve been taught that arrogance is bad,
and vanity is not good.
And even my bracelets are telling me
to act how Jesus would.
So, what should I do? How should I act?
I'm supposed to love myself,
but how do I even do that?
Well, I got a trick
that I picked up from a friend
that noticed that
I was quick to defend her
when she’d say something
negative about herself.
She’d say, “I’m so dumb”,
and I’d say, “You’re so brilliant”.
She’d say, “I’m so weak”,
and I’d say, “You’re so resilient”.
And when she said, “I feel ugly”
and I said, “You look beautiful”,
she asked me why I was so dutifully
filling up her cup constantly
and yet treating my own cup
so irresponsibly.
Because when I looked in the mirror,
my voice was quite clear.
You’re ugly, too thin,
your hairline is receding,
and you got a pimple on your chin.
And that was when she gave me
a piece of advice that changed my life.
She gave me a hug, and she said,
“Treat yourself like someone you love”.
Treat yourself like someone you love.
Now, I had been standing,
but I needed to be sitting
because I couldn’t believe that I’d been
letting myself keep forgetting that I was
who I’d been looking for.
And deep in my core, I knew it was time
to stop looking for more
until I could look through all my fear
and look into a mirror
and see clearly that the man
looking back at me is the only one
who can make me happy,
and I am already enough.
And I’m not any more special
or unique than you.
That’s why I’m here to speak to you.
You are already enough.
And when you start to see that,
you will start to be that.
Your world will get brighter;
your load will get lighter.
And you can see that with life
you can be a lover, not a fighter.
And that life, you deserve it,
because you are worth it.
And there’s no point in letting
yourself keep forgetting
because no matter what you
say or do, you are perfect.
And so today, I hope I leave you
with a direction correction
away from the flaws you see
in your reflection.
They aren't flaws to me.
They are simply protection against all
the doubts you have of your perfection.
So, start today.
Take a good, long look in the mirror
and say, “I am who I’ve been looking for”.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
That poem is one
of the most viral in history.
It has been viewed over 250 million times.
When it was first posted in 2018,
it spread like wildfire,
and overnight, I saw an explosion
in my social media following,
I got invitations to speak
all around the world,
and I dropped into
a deep suicidal depression.
I was in Bali when it happened
because that’s where you go when you’re a
hippie and you’re healing from a breakup.
Tropical weather,
great food, beautiful sunsets.
And one morning I turn on my phone
and I immediately notice
that something’s different.
I have thousands upon thousands
of new followers.
My poem hadn’t gone viral,
it had gone mega viral.
It got 40 million views
in the first 48 hours.
In fact, it would continue to get
more than a million views a day
for the next several months.
But with that came the messages.
Hundreds of DMs that flooded my inbox,
most of them being
messages of appreciation.
They said, “I loved the poem. Thank you”.
“I sent this to my mom, my brother,
my girlfriend. Thank you”.
“This poem changed my life. Thank you”.
But for every nine of those,
there was one that was very different.
One that would say something like,
“I don’t know how to love myself.
Can you help me?”
“My husband hits me
and I’m too scared to leave.
Can you help me?”
“I’m thinking of killing myself tomorrow.
Can you help me?”
And I couldn't.
I didn't have an answer.
I had a poem that was getting
millions of views a day,
but I didn’t know how to respond to people
who needed something more than a poem.
And I felt like I was letting them down.
I felt like a fraud.
I felt so much shame and guilt
that my body began to break down,
until eventually I found myself one day
locked away in a dark hotel room,
feverish, shivering, covered in sweat,
unable to open the curtains
because any amount of light
was excruciatingly painful
to my eyes and my head.
And what I didn’t know at the time was
that moment was the beginning
of a long and painful journey.
A multi-year quest deep into depression
so that I could find
the answer that I didn't have.
How do we learn to love ourselves?
What does that actually look like?
Truthfully, I didn’t know where to start.
And I did believe
that self-love was the answer.
I hadn’t faked the poem.
I just didn't know what
it looked like in action.
Treat yourself like someone you love,
but how?
For me, that looked like
doing anything and everything
that I thought would qualify as self-love.
If I didn't know what would work,
I would just do it all.
Meditation, journaling, writing poetry,
playing music, singing, dancing, shaking,
cold plunges, saunas, taking baths,
hiring coaches, doing all the therapies:
CBT, IFS, TRE, NLP, EMDR.
You just say the letters, I did it.
Detoxes, juice cleanses, water fasts.
Psychic readings,
astrology readings, tarot readings.
Plant medicine journeys
deep in the Amazon jungle,
punching pillows, primal screaming,
and naked mirror work.
Yes, I stood naked in front of a mirror,
and I said “I love you” over and over
because that’s what you do
when you’re desperate and a hippie.
And the thing was, at the time,
I was watching a lot of content
about self-love.
But the thing was,
so much of that content spoke
about self-love like it was a switch.
In On or in Off,
you either have it or you don’t.
And because I believed that
I kept doing all of these things,
seeking that moment when
my self-love would click on.
But it never did.
Every day I kept spending hours
showing up for myself,
expecting a big shift that never came.
Instead, I saw a little one.
And then another.
And then another.
And I started to realize that the reason
why I had felt so lost was because
I didn’t understand
the essence of self-love.
It's not a switch,
it's a result.
It is the result of how we show up
for ourselves each and every day.
Self-love is the byproduct
of your relationship with yourself.
And it is a relationship that needs
all the same things as any other,
but because it’s inner,
we often don’t know where to start.
So, I started to use a framework
developed by Dr Gary Chapman
called “The Five Love Languages”.
In it, they give you five categories
that you can focus on
if you want to deepen the connection
you feel in a relationship.
Acts of service, quality time,
physical touch, gifts,
and words of affirmation.
Now these are normally used
in context of your relationship to others,
but they can be used with ourselves.
Let's take quality time as an example.
How much connection is actually happening
when two people are sitting together,
but they’re both separately
on their phones?
And yet, how often do we do
that exact same thing by ourselves?
We're just ignoring that inner voice
in favor of mindlessly scrolling,
because we’ve confused
the idea of being alone
with spending quality time with ourselves.
And how about words of affirmation?
How would you feel if someone
was constantly telling you were dumb,
that you were not good enough,
that you were never going to succeed?
And yet, how often do we say
those exact words to ourselves?
Sometimes on a daily basis.
The good news is that we can change that
through a combination
of our attention and our intention.
With the five love languages
used as a direction,
we can point our attention there,
and when we do that,
we will start to catch
those little moments
when we’re not so loving to ourselves.
And when you combine that new awareness
with the intention
to love yourself more deeply,
you will start to unlock new choices
that you previously couldn’t see.
Ways that you can actually strengthen
that relationship to yourself
and love yourself more deeply.
And when you start
to make those new choices,
you will unlock the next clues
that the universe is leaving you
on how to achieve your intention.
Yes, even if we don’t like it,
the universe is always
giving us our next step.
Sometimes that next step
can be very, very scary,
like leaving a toxic relationship,
quitting our job,
or starting therapy.
But often it’s a really small next step,
but equally important,
like writing a poem,
or finally watching that TED talk
on self-love your friend sent you.
For me, it was all
of the above and a mirror.
So, for all the people that wrote me
asking for an answer so many years ago,
I’m really sorry that
I didn’t have it back then.
But I want to say thank you
for helping me find it
so that I could give it to all
the people who need it today.
And if you are one of those people,
I want you to know that it is possible.
It is 100% possible
for you to get out of the darkness,
and even if it takes years,
it is so worth it.
I know because I did it.
Day by day, the voices in my head
got a little less mean.
I still get sad sometimes,
but I show up completely
differently for myself when I do,
because I’ve started to relate
completely differently to my own emotions.
I relate differently to other people.
And I relate differently to life itself.
I learned how to love myself.
And just like the poem said would happen,
my world got brighter
and my load got lighter.
And that is something
worth writing poetry about.
And so, I’d like to close today
with one more poem.
It’s a poem that I call Heaven.
Can I have everyone
take a nice deep inhale?
And exhale.
The most impactful thing you can do
for the world is learn how to love life.
All of life.
Show people that being happy
doesn’t mean turning a blind eye
to the pain and the sadness
and the suffering that happens here.
Show them that choosing love
doesn't mean ignoring fear.
It just means being willing to feel.
And those brave souls will always heal
as long as they maintain
the courage to feel.
Because the fear of feeling is really
at the root of every fear,
which creates the fear of living
because feeling is why we’re here.
So, you can fight the fact that
feelings past have felt so freaking hard,
but it’s the very fact you have felt
all that that feels like the part
we should celebrate, investigate,
learn to navigate with ease.
Your emotions are the gift
God gives you every time you breathe.
Energy in motion with the strength
to bring a king down to his knees
and yet contained within the emotion
is the key to set you free.
Yes, contained within the emotion
is the gift of what being human is,
a chance to feel all of life,
from deep sorrow to deep bliss.
And you might wish the two would split,
but the twist is that
they’ll always coexist.
Because even the heartbreak you hate today
had the way paved by a lover’s kiss.
So, you can write your list
of how life’s a bitch,
but don’t forget the asterisk.
Because for all the times you went through
shit, it fertilized a lot of gifts.
But when you only focus on what you lack,
you can't appreciate what you've got.
But with gratitude for what you have,
you can see that it's a lot.
And that is the difference
between abundance and scarcity.
It's not about what you have,
it's about what you see.
So, the next time you forget
how blessed you be,
take a moment and focus
on the next breath you breathe.
The next time you forget
how blessed you be,
take a moment and focus
on the next breath you breathe.
And notice, you’re right here with me.
A miracle, a great mystery.
Out of hundreds of trillions of stars
and hundreds of billions of galaxies,
somehow, some way, you’re here today
with me, and we all breathe
on a spinning sphere of chemicals,
spiraling through the universe.
You were once one of 200 million sperm;
you just happened to get there first.
So, how could you ever say you’re cursed?
You’ve been blessed
since before your birth.
And you might not think you have it best,
but it could definitely be worse.
And if you don't believe that yet,
go tell the deaf what you just heard.
If you don’t like what you see,
go tell the blind how much it hurts.
On your hardest day,
when you really want to walk away,
go tell the paraplegic how it’s unfair.
Share how you want to run
from all your problems,
while he's pushed everywhere in a chair.
And I’m not saying that life
is fair or that it’s easy.
We all go through a lot.
But as you walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,
don't lose gratitude
for the fact that you walk.
Celebrate the fact
that you can dance and sing.
Embrace the abundance
in the very act when you talk.
Because when you can spot abundance
in the simplest things,
that’s when more abundance unlocks.
The simplest things.
Taste and touch and breath and smell.
Did you know there are people
with something called anosmia,
which means their sense
of smell is completely lost?
So, while they literally
can’t smell the roses,
do you want to complain
you don’t have the time to stop?
Because this life is
the only one that you’ve got.
And there are people who would trade
places with you without a second thought.
So, no matter how many tears,
heartbreaks or bad days you pay,
the cemetery is full of souls
that know living is worth the cost.
Don't wait till it's too late
to learn that lesson.
Living is worth the cost.
But make no mistake,
being alive is not
the same thing as living.
Just like throwing something away
is not the same thing as giving.
So, if you haven’t yet found your love
of life, I suggest you keep on digging.
And allow yourself to feel your way
through all the hurt and all the rage.
And as you feel,
allow yourself to finally turn the page.
That’s how we heal.
And it might hurt like hell,
but you’ll have shown us
we’ll be okay to feel it all
and still love life.
That’s heaven.
And you’ll have helped pave the way.
That's heaven.
Can you feel it?
Heaven is here today.
(Applause)
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