Panache Desai - Discovering Your Soul Signature: A 33-Day Path to Purpose, Passion & Joy

To the indispensable JC Carpenter and everyone at Panache Desai, LLC for their tireless dedication and support.

To my wonderful agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and the entire team at William Morris Endeavor.

To the outrageously talented Julie Grau and the entire Penguin Random House family for their dedication, support, and commitment.

To the sweet soul and my dear friend Dani Shapiro.

To the personification of Soul Signature that is Oprah Winfrey for her inspiration, generosity, and graciousness.

And finally, to you, the reader. Thank you for allowing me the honor of a lifetime, of guiding you back to your true self. May the end of this book mark the beginning of a life greater than you have ever known.

P ANACHE D ESAI is a contemporary thought leader whose message of love and self-acceptance has drawn thousands of people from around the world to his seminars and workshops. He is on the faculty of the Omega Institute and the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health. This is his first book.

There is a reason why we begin with fear. So often we allow fear to run our lives. Think about it. Nothingabsolutely nothingis wrong, but something sets you off, and you start being fearful of something that hasnt happened and likely wont. Seemingly out of the clear blue sky, you start worrying about the bills. You start obsessing about your job. Maybe your boss doesnt really like you. Or maybe your coworker is sabotaging you. Your mind runs with this for a while. Possibly your fear takes the form of worry about your children. Johnnys B minus on a math test might be setting him up for a life of underachievement. Sophies been dealing with some middle school girl problems, and you worry that her self-esteem will be permanently damaged. Then, of course, theres always your health. You wake up in the morning with a headache, are sure its a tumor. Before you know it, youve become a sick, unemployed, poor parent, all in your mind. Whatever your particular fears are, they serve to constrict you and make your whole field of energy narrow.

Fear begets fear. Call to mind the image of a garden. What happens if we dont weed a garden? If we dont tend to it, our entire gardenall of those carefully cultivated rosebushes and peonies and dayliliesbecomes overgrown. Roots become strangled, cut off from the source. Before you know it, all that beauty vanishes. Fear is an energy. It is an experience. But holding on to fear is unique to our human nature. Consider this: Every living being feels its fear and shakes it off. Cows, deer, fox, even bearsthey all feel fear and move on. But we human beings dont. We accumulate fear. We hoard and store it in our bodies. We go out of our way to prove to ourselves that the world is not a safe place. Of course, there is an evolutionary place for fearafter all, it allows us to survivebut we let it run amok. And then it keeps us locked into place. Perhaps we stay in unsatisfying jobs or in bad relationships out of fear that something greater is not on its way. All the time were doing that, were invalidating the universal principle of more. The grass continues to grow. Rivers continue to flow into the sea. Galaxies are born. Life seemingly has a way of continuing to evolve into more. Everything in nature validates this principle.

We need to find our courage, which, of course, is not the absence of fear but rather the willingness to feel the fear and move forward anyway. Fear isnt going to kill us. Its an energy that we can allow to move through us.

Tend to the garden of your unconscious mind. Imagine yourself in a house surrounded by an absolutely beautiful garden. The only problem is that the garden has been overtaken by fear. Fearof financial loss, of being alone, of illness, you name ithas taken the form of weeds. Go out of the house and tend to that garden. Visualize yourself on your knees, putting on your gardening gloves, pulling out your fear by its roots. What do we have here? Abandonment? Betrayal? Rejection? Death? Its all about the energy. This is a radical idea, I knowbut your fears cannot hurt you. Pull out your first weed. The weeds are your vibrational density. Think of them as a mass of tangles. Dirty, all knotted up. What happens next? Here, your story doesnt matter. The specifics of who, what, where, when, and why are beside the point. Youre pulling out the energy of fear. Just the energythats all. When that mass of tangles is uprooted, suddenly theres space. It wont necessarily feel comfortable. But stop for a minute. What does it feel like? Maybe theres a little more room now. Perhaps theres the beginning of new opportunity. In time, we will know. In giving fear our attention, it loses its power over us. The weeds arent wrong or bad. Theyre just taking up space.

Perhaps you read the Morning passage while sitting at your kitchen table, grabbing a quick breakfast, a cup of coffee. Or maybe you were already on the train. Or in your car, driving to work as you listened to these words on an audiobook. Wherever you found yourself, I now want you to train your heart and mindyour awarenesson the energy of fear as it appears throughout your day. Each time today that fear arises within youand make no mistake, it will arisemake note of it. Fear is your ground zero.

Typically, we manage our daily fears in one of three ways:

We run.

We stand our ground and fight.

Or we freeze.

You might be anticipating the homework assignment that requires you to read two hundred pages by tomorrow. Or the results of a pathology report. Or the business project that requires you to leave your wife and babies and travel halfway around the world to secure a contract. The first day of a new job. A first date. Opening a bill, terrified that you dont have the money to cover it. Life and life situations will call us out on our fear, every single time. And when this happens, the most primitive part of the brain takes over. The part of us that fights, flees, or freezes comes from our base animalistic response to the energy of fear. Everything in the natural world does this in the presence of fear. (Unless of course youre a possum, in which case you play dead.) This happens whether or not there is a legitimate threat. Our muscles contract. Our breathing becomes shallow. Our palms dampen. Our pupils enlarge. Our blood leaves our extremities and pools in the center.

So what do you do? You learn to allow. You have a familiar place you retreat to as a result of your fear. Get to know the place. Perhaps its a set behavior, a pattern that you use to compensate for the presence of this uncomfortable energy. Maybe for you its denial. Or egoic compensation. Arrogance. Distraction. Withdrawal. Introversion. The fridge. The bar.

We all have our survival mechanisms. For me, I go to that puffed-up place: Youre not going to mess with me. I once again become that kid in London who had to develop bravado in order to survive. I can be in a business meeting, surrounded by people who know a lot more than I do about the subject at hand, but if I dont like the way things are going, I tend to fall back on false strength. I feel as if I need to be larger than life. This is an old way of adapting, of trying to survive. I have to learn, again and again, to catch myself in that behavior and stop. Trust. Notice. And allow the fear to run through me like a river out to sea.

So just for today, notice the special place you go when you start to experience fear. Does your ego begin to assert itself? Or do you want to hide? Do you reach for something to distract you? Do you become oblivious and shut down? Or do you try to numb it out? Do you reach for a cigarette, or your phone, or check your email for the five hundredth time? Or perhaps youll choose not to engage. Youll pull the rug over your head and hope the moment passes.