How To Create The Life Of Your Dreams

Six years ago I was suicidal. I ran with gangsters on the streets of London, and I was ready to kill people who had wronged me. Life meant nothing to me, mine included, and the law meant even less. The self-loathing went deep enough that I could hardly meet my own eyes in a mirror. I couldn't build loving relationships with my family, so I went looking for affection and approval in places that only made things worse, and I put myself in situations I shouldn't have. Everyone around me assumed I'd land in jail before I left my teens. Part of me wanted that. Jail meant no decisions, no wrestling with the world.

These days I live in the Caribbean and set my own hours, working from home. Some mornings I work on the beach. Other days I work looking out at the sea, which my living room happens to overlook. My husband adores me, the money is steady, and I'm hunting for a large piece of land to build an organic botanical property for tropical farming and eco-tourism. The bigger change is internal: peace, and a sense that I am where I'm meant to be. My old self couldn't have imagined any of it. What follows are the things I believe mattered most in getting from there to here, in case any of it is useful to someone else.

1. Get to know a Higher Power. I'd tried to turn my life around plenty of times before and mostly failed. Self-esteem exercises, positive thinking, every self-help practice I could find. Each one nudged things a little, but nothing held. I'd feel better for a stretch, then slide back. The real shift only came once I got acquainted with a Higher Power. I was raised Christian but didn't believe much of it as a kid, and believed none of it later. The idea of God put me off. Still, I kept noticing some force in life that pulled at me. I couldn't explain it, but I felt it in moments of real happiness, around children, watching a film that moved me. Whatever that was, I wanted in. I called it God for the sake of a word, though I never pictured a man in the clouds. I'd always kept a diary, and now I wrote it as letters to God, dumping everything I felt and lived through onto the page.

2. Trust that power to carry you. Good things started showing up. Tiny ones, mostly, but I caught them. That built a bit of faith that I was headed the right way, and a little hope started growing where there'd only been the certainty that my life would always be a wreck. As the faith grew, I felt I owed it a commitment, so I handed my whole life over to this Higher Power. Like most people, I used to ride high when things went well and sink when they went badly. I decided that had to go. I started practicing gratitude for all of it, the good and the bad alike. If my life was under this power's care, then I could trust that whatever happened was ultimately for my good, no matter how it looked at first. Believing that was hard at times, but it kept proving itself. When something bad hit and I held my faith, something good tended to follow fast. Before long the good was outpacing the bad and everything was picking up speed.

3. Wage war on your negativity. My negativity, about myself and about everyone else, was a wall. There was a running commentary in my head, tearing into me and my abilities and passing hard judgment on other people. It was wrecking my self-esteem and my relationships. With the faith I'd found, I set out to tear those patterns down and replace them with thoughts that matched the life I was trying to build.

4. Become an instrument of the divine. One of the biggest moves I made was setting my own hopes, dreams, and goals off to one side so I could work out what God wanted for my life. It seemed to me the Higher Power had a plan to tip the world toward something better, and I wanted in on it. I had plenty of ideas and no clear sense of which to chase. I tried a lot of things. Some worked. Some blew up in spectacular fashion. The wins and the failures both laid the road to where I am now, and I took each one as the will of the Higher Power steering me. The more I dug into myself, the clearer it got: lifting other people up and inspiring them was what actually satisfied me and let me live my purpose. The positive charge I drew from this power could pass to others through what I said and did, and that became the thing I cared about most.

5. Keep your pride in check. The glory all goes to the Higher Power, and the blame all stays with me. Sounds like a raw deal, doesn't it. But I owe the credit for my successes to the Higher Power, because nothing in my life began to turn until I put it in God's hands. I still have to keep working on my own growth, staying lined up with that power so it can move through my life and out into the world.

Iman Mohiki