How do we make paradigm-altering changes in our lives?

How do we make paradigm-altering changes in our lives that are sustainable and do not compromise what is important to you and who you are?

Yes, the journey of discovery and exploration and the euphoria of lightbulbs and epiphanies can be magical. We hear of so many of these stories and they are gloriously inspiring. They get us pumped up, excited and ready to sprint to the finish line. What we seldom hear about is the boredom of practicality, the tediousness of having to be patient, the unattractiveness of taking detours and the reality that happiness is much more of a marathon than a sprint.

Actually, it is less like a marathon and more like the cross country run that Forrest Gump embarks on in the movie by the same name. He just runs because he’s working through stuff and he runs for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days and 6 hours.

I have started an exercise between a few close friends where we interview each other 3 or 4 times a year to try to capture the intimate details of our experiences. And yet, even in those interviews, I find it impossible to capture the magnitude of the effort it takes. All I can say is that it takes making choices every moment of the day on where I’m going to spend my energy, having a plan so I can change it, staying connected to what my soul is telling me, working on myself, being gentle with myself, reframing every experience into a learning one, nurturing relationships, taking care of my body, heart, mind and spirit … and mostly, staying open to the possibility of joy every single day. That means saying yes when I’m terrified and trusting that I will learn something.

People have asked me what the magic formula is, and there are days I wish there was a magic formula. But there isn’t. All I know is that I have to just keep making the choice to take the next step forward with my eyes and heart open. That’s sort of what Forrest Gump did. He didn’t really start running with an end in mind. He just wanted to run. I started with one goal and I embarked on that journey so that I could see the next goal, and then the next. Somewhere along the way, I realized that it was the journey that I enjoyed more than the goal; the goal was the means to an end, and the end was the journey - the opportunity to learn, to look deeper into my soul and to just be one with myself.

And deep in each of our souls, there resides the will, the means and all the courage you need to continue to make those paradigm-altering changes to your life.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you!

Who do you listen to?

The world is a noisy place. Let me make a list of the obvious and not-so-obvious voices who exert influence on me:

1) Where I went to school, which class I was in, which subjects I majored in, where I have worked and how quickly I have achieved “success”, my financial status

2) Where I was born and raised, my family culture and familial expectations as the oldest grandson of my generation, my marital status, my sexual orientation

5) (Past, present and future) Bosses, colleagues, classmates, neighbours, friends, acquaintences, lovers, competitors

6) My ethnicity, my age, my height, my weight, my diet, my health, my clothes, my social media presence

There is nothing in my life that is not subject to scrutiny. Whether verbalized or not, these voices seep into every thought and conversation I have, every image I see and everything I do. At the start, I went along because I didn’t know any better. But as I grew older, the voice of disconnect grew louder. What’s important for me to distinguish is that it was a voice of disconnect, not discord. There was an inexplicable congruence in the work I was engaged in. Where the disconnect lay was in my understanding of why there was congruence.

Society had clearly steered me onto a path that would bring success. But year after year, the path felt increasingly not my own. It was society’s path, not mine.

So I started looking for ways to listen to my OWN voice. It has been a conscious journey of more than 15 years - getting to know a strangely familiar yet unknown voice; and not just getting to know … but to begin to pit this voice against the vastly more experienced and louder voice of society.

The one thing I have learned in the last 15 years has been that this inner voice of mine has never, ever steered me wrong. Not once. There have also been many instances where my inner voice and the voice of society have said the same thing. And I guess I’ve never been the sort of person to rebel without a cause. I’d rather be a rebel making conscious choices that come from a place of inner knowing. Because then I can base my decisions on “the choosing of” rather than “the opposition of”. It’s a far more serene path to take.

So for me, the work isn’t about going against society or asserting myself against anyone or anything. The journey is actually about sitting further back into my own voice.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you!

If you have nothing to prove, no one to be and nothing to fix, what would you spend your life’s energies on?

For as long as I can remember, I was always reaching for a standard that was far beyond my reach - whether that was in school, in work, in relationships, in happiness. Deep down, I knew something wasn’t right; something didn’t sit well with me. But I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t know how to look at it, understand it … and so for the longest time, I kept moving - pushed down this path by some unknown yet undeniable force towards some indistinct future that was not my own.

But there was also a part of me that kept searching for answers - relentlessly probing and exploring any way to gain a foothold, an entry point, every rabbit hole until one stuck - a program I took on self-discovery recommended by a trusted friend.

I remember one “lightbulb” moment right after that program when I glimpsed for the first time beyond the shackles of my past and asked myself: “If I’m not that, then who am I?”

It was genuinely terrifying. Suddenly, I no longer knew who I was - even if it was cyclical and destructive. Yes, it was toxic but it was safe. Yes, it was holding me back but it was safe. Yes, I was trapped but I was safe.

At the same time, I saw - for the first time - a direct link between the conditioning of my past with my reaction to circumstance and its direct impact on the future - and I did not like what I saw.

But what scared me the most in that moment was the question: “Does this mean that the good I believe is in me is a lie as well? Does this mean that all the good i believe I want to do comes from a selfish, broken place?”

I was happy to be able to see a path through the cyclical self-destructive behaviour, but was I prepared to let go of all the good I thought I had in me as well?

When I asked my mentor these questions, he asked me one simple question: “If you have nothing to prove, no one to be and nothing to fix, what would you spend your life’s energies on?”

That stopped me in my tracks, and I have spent the better part of the last 8 years pondering this question:

a) NOTHING TO PROVE: we spend so much of our lives trying to move to the world (ourselves, our family, our colleagues, our rivals, God) that we’re good enough. Modern society is driven by competition and success, and in most competitions, there can only be ONE winner. And then what? We worry about losing that spot. The truth is - there are no winners in this game, only losers - at least not in the way I define winning

b) NO ONE TO BE: Humans are social creatures. In many ways, the world defines us by our upbringing, our social status, the roles we play, who we hang out with, how many followers we have, etc … and we rarely ever consider what it would be like to just live for ourselves. So the question is if you had no role to play to anyone else but yourself, who would you be?

c) NOTHING TO FIX: most of us grow up believing that we have things about ourselves that we need to fix. At least I did. I thought that I was broken. And that fundamentally changes the way we view our life. Everytime I failed, it just reinforced the notion that I was broken and that I would never be whole

I am now achieving goals my past would have never considered possible, and the journey to know myself will never end. But at least now I’m doing it from a place of conscious choice.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you!

Running towards something. Running away from something.

These two statements … they imply the same physical motion. Seems simple enough. But in much of the choices I make daily, I find myself constantly having to make the distinction between the two.

When you ask someone where they want to go or what they want to eat, how many times have you heard “I’m good with going anywhere, but I don’t want to go to (insert name of place)” or “I’ll eat anything but I don’t want to eat (insert cuisine of choice)”.

We seem to be really good at knowing what we don’t want.

Yes, running AWAY from something is as important as running TOWARDS something. But I’ve noticed just how disempowering running away from something is. It implies a force is pushing you; it implies you’re looking behind your shoulder. And if something is pushing you and you’re always looking backwards, you can’t see or control where you’re going.

When I decided to pursue the performing arts, it came out of a choice to pursue it. It didn’t come out of wanting to run away away from my corporate career. You can’t earn a living “NOT” doing something. Eventually, you have to choose something. Otherwise you end up conditioning yourself to see every opportunity through the lense of “I don’t want” instead of “I want”.

I have seen this happen for decades with friends I met early in my career - friends who are defined mostly by the negative experiences they have at work. So they change jobs frequently, hoping to find a positive experience but not realizing that they don’t know what they are looking for. What they are looking for is “not a negative experience” instead of looking for a “positive experience”. And because most of their careers have been negative, I don’t know if they’d recognize a positive one even if they had it. They’ve spent most of their careers running away FROM something, as opposed to running TOWARDS something.

That’s a huge difference.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you!