Start Here

The core message here is one of authenticity, grounded in a deep and abiding sense of self. One that isn't based upon external forces, be it the market or any other force. This isn't a new message, nor is it particularly novel, but it's consistently resonant. It means something, precisely because it isn't novel. The message is timeless for a reason.

There are a number of components to the message, these are as follows:

1. Healthy body, healthy mind
2. Tuning-in
3. Tuning-out
4. Rebellion, not revolution
5. Quiet
6. Connection and community
7. Pathless path

These are not commandments. This is not a manifesto. They are observations for how a life adhering to principles based upon authenticity may work. There's no authority transmitted here, aside from your own. They're intended to be just simple and helpful pointers. What they are not, is prescriptive. Because the absolute heart of the message here is that personal rebellion, or true rebellion, is something different, it's a way of navigating the world by finding your own direction. Tuning-in to a vibration that resides deeply and is not dependant on someone or something else, and that applies equally to what is being communicated here.

1. Healthy body, healthy mind

The starting point has to be from a point of relative calm and equilibrium. If you are unable to put food in your mouth, or for your body to function, it will be incredibly distracting to contemplate how you navigate your own path. This isn't to say it can't be done, but it makes it that much harder. The core priority is a body that is fed, nourished, rested and a mind that is calm, unagitated, able to focus, able to relax. There is a reason that forms of yoga that have now been widely disseminated in the West, started in the East. Because creating ground that was fertile for contemplation and stable navigation was a pre-cursor. This approach views things like vice or intoxicants not as moral rails that you must adhere to or be damned, but aspects of our lives we all come across, that will make authenticity that much harder. There's no hell here. But simply ground that at times is more fertile than others. Cultivate.

2. Tuning-in

The absolute core of what's being presented here is that there is an inner voice that is loud, often through its silence. What does that mean? It means that often the things we are, want to be, and can be are ever-present, but are drowned out by the loud and multiple external voices that refuse to allow the inner voice to rise. Personal rebellion then means at core a turning-in, a listening to the things inside you that want to be heard, but are often prevented from expressing themselves. You can go a lifetime without really tuning-in. You can sell yourself on authenticity. You can convince yourself that what you want is what you've been told you want. But perhaps there will, as a result, always be a discomfort caused through misalignment. Tuning-in means calibrating for an internal voice.

3. Tuning-out

The inverse here is treating external voices appropriately. There will be voices you trust and those you don't. You treat all voices equally at your peril. A danger in that, particularly in the contemporary, technology driven world we live in, it is easy to be bombarded by messages thousands of times a day. The depleting aspect of that is significant. But in different ways this has always been the case. Whether it's your family, the school, the workplace or the market, systems will seek to influence you for their own needs to survive. Thus, one of the core aspects of personal rebellion is to tune-out and down the voices from the outside, giving your internal voice a chance to be heard.

4. Rebellion, not revolution

Revolution implies changing a system. Rebellion implies adhering to your own values. Sometimes those values will clash with the system around you, at others they will be in harmony. But the imperative is to follow the internal compass, not the external one. Through personal rebellion, you are not seeking to change the world around you, which you accept on an absolute level is beyond your control. But rather you seek to change your relationship to it. Knowing that your place in the world is determined as much by how you see and frame it, as it is by how it reacts to you. An act of rebellion, is always, deeply personal.

5. Quiet

There is no proclamation. No evangelical spilling of excitement. The aim here is authenticity through contemplation. Thus, no plaudits, no prizes. Nothing and no-one to convert. It is quiet. And therefore a quiet rebellion. To the rest of the world nothing may have changed about you. But for you, everything has changed. You have fundamentally become someone different through your relational experience with the world. But you have done so quietly. Which makes it significantly more powerful.

6. Connection and community

None of this, however, is solitary. None of it implies that you are alone. Far from it, what it suggests is that we are all experiencing from different perspectives, some version of this. We are alone, but not lonely. This is a path many others are walking, in their own capacity and in their own way. By acknowledging that arises a deep sense of humility and compassion, that pain and struggle are universal, but so is calm and interiority. The vastness of the interior space is sacred for everyone, and by giving your own that sense of dignity you dignify it in others.

7. The pathless path

So, as a result. You discover, that the path to walk is pathless. There's no guidebook. There may be nudges, suggestions, helpful observations, but liberating in the extreme is that ultimately it is you who chooses how to walk and where to walk. The freedom comes in the walking. The liberation from goal, meaning and purpose. What personal rebellion suggests is that this absence of explicit meaning and purpose, is infused with the largest meaning and purpose there could be. A truly quiet rebellion.