“The Taliban is watching your camp.” I’m in the mountains of Pakistan when I hear this news. My response is fear, but am quickly assured it’s a good thing the Taliban are here. They are happy I’m in the village. They’re going to watch the medical supplies so we no longer have to do night watch & can have the first full nights sleep in over a week.

I’m in Kashmir with five other backpackers, pulling together a grassroots project to support the locals whose homes have been destroyed in the 2005 earthquake. Nothing can be done about the 87,000 dead, but there’s 3.5 million who are homeless & GOT style ‘winter is coming’.

After quitting my successful career in advertising, I thought I’d contribute to the world by working for an NGO (overseas charity) & offering aid to people who really need it.

I’d travelled through Pakistan earlier that year & fallen in love with the locals. After feeling the earthquake sitting with my Grandma in Delhi (it's another story), I feel a strong call to go to Pakistan and try to help.

I spend months in the mountains, travelling through villages in army jeeps with machine guns, visiting UN field camps, blowing up balloon animals with village kids who’re dealing with the deaths of loved ones & parents who are sheltering their freezing families under tarpaulin, debating whether to lose their dignity, work & health by going to refugee camps in the city infected with disease.

A long story short (there’s a whole chapter on this in my book) we provide materials for new homes for hundreds of people. Yet I leave the disaster zone with utter despair & a record low of hopelessness.

It’s clear to me the NGOs aren’t making things better. Not even out grassroots one. This isn’t how I’ll have the impact on the world which I’m longing for.

Village kids by their school destroyed in the earthquake

I’ve seen the shadow side of these charities. A pile of syringes half burnt into a grotesque plastic hedgehog with needle spikes, at the corner of a school after a well known children’s charity offered free vaccines. A whole block of showers for a single female UN employee. Organisations trying to find uses for helicopters to maintain budgets.

What’s even worse than their shady operations, is the CHRONIC APATHY created in the locals.

Instead of rebuilding their homes, villagers wait for an NGO to roll into town & give them valuable supplies. Their logic is valid: if their house is rebuilt when a charity arrives, they’re not going to receive any money or materials if (& it’s a gamble of an ‘if’) the well-meaning foreigners ever arrive.

I saw how my presence in Pakistan, and desire to rescue, exacerbated the problem & froze people in the victim state.

 I spiral into a deep depression in the months after the disaster zone. On a beach in India with three of the other volunteers trying to decompress & relax after the experience. We’re each haunted with the sense that we didn’t do enough.

The guilt eats at me each day. Surrounded by palm trees and idyllic beaches while inside I’m attacked by the sense I’d made things worse for the locals by trying to help them.

I spiral further and further into depression. Howling & sobbing in the middle of the night until the guest house owner checks if i’m okay.

I’m trapped. I can’t return to Pakistan because it won’t help. Even though I've never heard the expression, I’m completely burnt out. I can’t forget the trauma & pain I’ve seen there. I can’t return to my career in advertising because it perpetuates a different kind of misery. The dream I grew up with of rescuing the poor people of the world, has been annihilated.

I don’t fit in anywhere in the world. I’m lost and alone. Crushed to the point that I no longer want to live.

The pain is so overwhelming, I’m forced to look at it. Even though I tell myself that my pain is *nothing* compared to what people in Pakistan (& so many other parts of the world) are going through.

I hear of an ashram where you scream for 10 minutes during a meditation. I reckon I need to scream for at least 10 years to release the torture of my mind. But at least it’s a start.

In a giant pyramid, surrounded by a hundred maroon robed mediators, I scream & scream. The trauma & pain inside of me finally finding release. I don’t feel entitled to any of the pain inside of me because others have it so much worse. I scream anyway.

The screaming creates a space inside of me. A minuscule oasis of stillness. It lasts only for a moment, but it’s enough of a glimpse that maybe someday I could finally break free from all the pain inside.

There’s a profound longing in me to bring love & healing to the world. I just have no idea HOW.

I study T’ai Chi on the beach and the teacher talks of a concept revolutionary to my 26 year old ears.

What the world needs is for each person to connect to the Love inside themselves.

I realise I'm utterly disconnected from my heart & the love within me. Thinking I had to rescue others because my pain wasn’t valid in comparison to theirs (classic Christian mentality & first world guilt).

In the years that follow, I learn how to accept, love & release the pain inside myself. I'm able to show up for the world in a whole new way. Existing in my natural state of joy, love & peace is all that's ever needed.

Once each human truly loves themselves, their natural potential & genius is realised. War, famine, economic sanctions… all become impossible when each of us are anchored in that Love.

Now my gift to the world is to guide people to remove the blocks preventing them from feeling the love inside which is ALWAYS THERE. When we access this love, the depth of gratitude & reverence we have for this life, for our world, for each other is so profound, that it naturally guides us to take the actions necessary to create paradise here on Earth.   

It’s no longer about saving the world but rather an invitation to celebrate life.

I’ve learned to build my life from the inside out. The love I feel for myself, IS the love which I feel for LIFE & this ripples out into everything I do. It doesn’t matter whether I’m a healer, working for an NGO or a waitress. When I’m so deeply anchored in this love, I move through the world from this place & it impacts everything I do.

If you’re working to release past pain & connect to the love within, please know that you ARE contributing to the world. The world needs more people living free from their past & embodying their heart’s wisdom. You’re doing it right! Keep going!  

🌍 How To ACTUALLY Save The World 🌍

How To Survive Burn Out

Increasing the 'Pleasure Threshold'