To view this newsletter in the browser, click here                 Issue #99       A newsletter from Creativegarh to help you live a life of passion, purpose and meaning.         Not everything can be changed or has to change.                     You wake up one morning inspired to change your life in one sweeping motion. You evict all the demons out of your home, you shove everything and everyone who doesn't serve you anymore out of the door and then you cleanse your home and your heart with sage and make place for a brand new life. You invite new friends to your tea party and you bring out your best chinaware. You change your wardrobe, your family portraits, your upholstery, your cleaning lady, your lamp shades, your friends list and eventually who you are.           The next morning, as you clean the dirty dishes of your new life, you feel a sense of desolation and malaise, a heaviness of life’s wrong decisions sits in the pit of your stomach, your heart beats faster than the speed at which you had made a to-list to bring in a new life.           You sit on your new upholstered chair sipping from a glass of gloom. Something just doesn't sit right in this new life. While everything seems new and inviting, it misses the familiarity - the everyday conflict at home, the chaos of words, emotions and pent-up frustration all spilling over a worn-out carpet and then being shoved under it by the busyness of life.           Familiarity is our safe space. It's the known demon. It's the only way we know, and it is the only way we feel safe. It's the place where everything and everyone is surviving, and any hushed whisper of thriving is nipped in the bud.           But an awareness of familiarity followed by conscious decisions can change everything.           As you make repeated attempts to change your life, you will realise that some things just don't change or even have to. Some family members will stay bitter and with malice, some beliefs you just can't switch, and some fears are just unexplainable yet so very real that you can only accept them.           And the things that you can't change despite your efforts are sometimes meant to stay in your life and you need to embrace them as gifts. When you wake up tomorrow morning, tell yourself that you cannot control the world on the outside, but you can, on the inside.           You cannot control the people and the situations, but you can control your response to them. You can't control what's in their heart but you can control what you allow into yours - it could be the aggressive rebuke of a mother that triggers you or could be a projection of someone who feels unloved by herself and allows you to show up with compassion and thus discover this gift within you. Is the family conditioning of a patriarchal home a generational trauma or something that gives someone an identity which you do not have to take away from them? Sometimes, fear is the only tool someone uses to find their own power. Allow them their power and reason to live as you find your power by being in a state of calm while winning big battles and losing some small ones.           Not everything has to be changed. Sometimes a perspective is everything that needs to change. And that changes everything within you and in the world outside of you.                 There's always a bitter way. Or there's always a better way.                     When life deals you a pack of cards and not three of a kind or the ones you had expected, you always have two choices. One, to be bitter that you are not the universe's favourite child anymore and life is always unfair to you. You can either tear the cards and the life that has been dealt and get up from the table grudgingly or you can choose to sit and play with what you've got. This one choice does not belong to fate. It belongs to you.           That is with most choices. Look at faith and fear itself. Both faith and fear ask you to believe in something that you cannot see. What do you do when both faith and fear act like sea sirens? You get to make the choice and this choice again belongs only to you. When you do not make the choice, you choose fate to decide for you. And that is not what surrender is but cowardness.           No one is coming to save you. You need to sit on the keyboard of your life and press Ctrl S yourself. And it's not that others can’t save you. They can, but they are too busy saving themselves as they rake the snow from their own driveway and clear their own path that they are called to walk on.           So, what if today you wake up and feel you really have no choice.           Well, you do. Choose hope.           When you choose hope, hope on its own will handhold you and guide you to faith, making fear more seductive but less significant. And not that the path that hope will make you walk on will be strewn with roses. It’ll have its thorns, its critters, its demons hiding in the foliage, but also an occasional rose in which you can faintly smell a better life.           There's chaos in everything. Choose your chaos. Many times, we are not willing to let go of the hate, and we cling to it stubbornly because if we let the grudge go, we may have to face our pain. And just because dealing with our pain makes us bitter on the inside, we'd rather show the bitterness on the outside because that makes us feel better. Suffering makes you feel safe because you know suffering inside out. But healing, that's the unknown chaos, the skeleton in the closet that you better not even get to see.           Choose the better life. The bitter one will just make you better at being more bitter.             Our upcoming retreats                         Jodhpur Sold Out 11th to 17th August     In a place of princely palaces and forts, travel back in time as we seek to relook into your life. Rediscover yourself amidst the undiscovered side of Thar at this retreat.   More details         Athoor Last Seats Left 22nd to 28th September     Nestled amidst the serene Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu, the picturesque village of Athoor will make for the perfect setting for relaxation, introspection and exploration.   More details     Reignite conversation     Mandi Last 3 Seats Left 7th to 13th December     Mandi’s tranquil environment serves as the perfect backdrop for personal metamorphosis, ensuring you return home with a revitalized spirit and fresh perspective of life!   More details     Reignite conversation           This week, let's revisit     Kasauli April 2023                         Experience a life full of purpose                     My life’s purpose is to bring access to clean water, air, and nutrition to everyone on this planet with the use of sustainable technologies.   Mihir Soundalgekar Kasauli, July 2023         The purpose of my life is to create soulful art that sparks conversations with people!   Srikanth Pemmaraju Tirthan Valley, December 2022               For a daily dose of Creativegarh and our retreats, follow us here:                                 Watch All Episodes Here                 From Our Community                           creativegarh.com             You are receiving this newsletter because either you have subscribed to it through our website, interacted with us by filling an invite form or because you have asked us to put you on the database. If you would not like to receive any more newsletters from us, please click here to unsubscribe.