Evolving: My Lessons of Self-Discovery

By Denise Svajlenko

Are you searching for a life filled with joy? Have you thought about all the important relationships and events of your life and tried to understand their meanings? Have you been seeking answers to life’s big questions that still haunt you but remain unanswered? After a profound event occurred in the author’s young adult life, Denise Svajlenko began asking the bigger questions that led to the search for who she really is. Evolving is the story of Denise’s spiritual path to finding her real self. She brings readers along her winding journey of exploring, examining, and understanding the significant events and relationships of her life. In doing so, she uncovers a series of universal lessons that each of her unique relationships and life situations has taught her. Inspiring, thought-provoking, and honest, Evolving is a relatable memoir of self-discovery. We all have blissful and harrowing episodes in our lives. Denise reveals to readers that when we learn to live with conscious awareness and pay attention to our universal lessons, then we will become our true selves and be blessed to live a life of joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Denise Svajlenko
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005480431

Denise Svajlenko

Denise Svajlenko is a published non-fiction writer and author. She also writes a Joyful Life weekly Blog: blog:https://denisesvajlenkoauthor.wordpress.com. She lives in Bowmanville, Canada, with her husband.

Book preview

EVOLVING:

My Lessons of Self-Discovery

Copyright © 2021 Denise Svajlenko

Contact the Author at [e-mail]

SMASHWORDS EDITION

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior permission from the publisher, except for quotations embodied in critical

articles or reviews.

Editing, Cover Design & Digital Formatting:

D. Patrick Miller • Fearless Literary Services

www.fearlessbooks.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 • Finding Faith

Chapter 2 • Confronting Fear and Mental Illness

Chapter 3 • Forgiving

Chapter 4 • Accepting and Positive Thinking

Chapter 5 • Mothering and Loving

Chapter 6 • Opening the Heart

Chapter 7 • Practicing Compassion

Chapter 8 • Learning Kindness

Chapter 9 • Embracing Love

Chapter 10 • Discovering Internal Happiness

Chapter 11 • Cultivating Passions and Life Callings

Summary • My Lessons of Self-Discovery

Conclusion • Evolving

Acknowledgements

Dedication

For my sister Bonnie-Sue, with profound gratitude for leading me to my spiritual journey of self-discovery

Introduction

I have a confession to make: I am a late bloomer. It is only now, in my late fifties, that I am finally discovering who I really am. I spent too many years of my life traveling aimlessly down a windy path or on the wrong path entirely, because I did not know my true self.

As human beings, we live in this physical world from the time of our birth until our ultimate passing. We are made up of body, mind, and soul. From my early teens I understood the positive results derived from taking care of my body. Exercising regularly and eating healthier foods led to building stronger bones and muscles, resulting in my physical wellbeing. But my body is not who I really am. I also realized that my mind housed all my thoughts and emotions and is constantly talking to me. My mind is always describing, measuring, and comparing positive and negative experiences. In my later teens, I learned that I have the capability of talking myself into doing or not doing anything, based on how much attention I give to my thoughts. My mind is part of me, like my body, but my thoughts and emotions are not who I really am either. If anyone had asked me to define my younger adult self, I would have done so with names, labels, titles, and personality traits. I may have described myself as being Denise, a wife

and mother to two daughters, who works in Human Resources management. I likely would have also described myself as being personable, realistic, organized, empathetic, and sometimes impatient and stubborn; but that is not who I really am.

Who am I if I am neither my body nor mind, and not my names, labels, titles, and personality traits? My journey to self-discovery has led me to uncover that I am a soul — and my soul is who I really am. During this physical lifetime between birth and death, I am a soul, living in a body, having a human experience.

Most of us spend our whole lives tending to our bodies, listening to our thoughts and emotions, and ignoring our souls, the most important part of our being. When we discover, embrace, and expand our souls and become our true selves, we become whole. Then we can begin to experience real joy in our lives.

The universe has a plan for everyone. Our spiritual journey is the alignment of our personality with our soul, and our spiritual path is the distance between that alignment. We all have negative and positive personality traits. We become more of our real selves when we always consciously choose to respond to our life events with love, empathy, and compassion, and not react with impatience, anger, or fear. Every decision we make requires us to make a choice between responding from love or fear.

We constantly receive positive and negative thoughts from our mind. The path to becoming our real selves requires us to consciously acknowledge our negative thoughts and let them naturally pass. When we try to change our negative thoughts or suppress them, then they will never go away, and will eventually resurface. The path to enlightenment is living in the present and focusing our attention and energy on our positive thoughts, as that will lead to happiness.

My purpose for writing this book is to share my journey to enlightenment with you. I will take you down my path and share with you the 14 lessons that I learned from my childhood, my faith, my career, and my passions, as well as from my relationships with my mother, father, brother, sister, husband, daughters, in-laws, and friends. I hope that the lessons that I have learned will resonate with you, as you review your own unique life experiences and identify the lessons the universe and others have been revealing to you. Our experiences in this physical world are both unique and universal. We all have both good and bad things that happen to us at different times in our life. The journey to becoming our real selves requires us to pay close attention to what the universe and others are continually revealing to us and consciously apply the lessons learned to our own lives.

I am so pleased that you have chosen to come on my journey with me. Whether you have not yet started your journey, or you may have temporarily gone off path, my wish for you is that you will discover your unique and right way. There will be windy detours and bumps along the way but staying on path will ultimately reveal your greatest lessons and rewards, leading you to the recognition of your true self.

My path to self-discovery continues with the end not yet in sight, but I am now much more equipped to understand and apply the many lessons that the universe has been teaching me throughout my life journey. I have become so much better at consciously recognizing my negative thoughts and personality traits, letting them pass naturally without resistance or suppression. When I do this successfully, I can focus my energy on my positive thoughts, emotions, and traits.

The universe always has a plan for everyone. I did not start paying attention to my lessons or even my path until after I discovered my Faith. I will share with you how I discovered my Faith, all the important lessons that I learned from it, and the essential role that my Faith has remained for everything I do in my life.

Chapter 1

Finding Faith

My sister’s passing of terminal cancer at the young age of thirty-six had a profound effect on me. That is when I began asking life’s big questions: why we are born, why we die, what happens when we die, and our purpose is in this physical world. I needed to know why was she taken so young, what happened to her when she passed, was she at peace, would I ever be able to communicate with her again? Those questions put me on the path to seeking Faith in my life.

I have never been a religious person. I attended a Christian United Church for very brief periods in my childhood, and then when I had young children of my own. My purpose for rejoining the church with my family was partly to introduce my daughters to organized religion and ensure that they were baptized, but mostly because of the desire shared by my husband and myself for our family to be part of a community. Churches represent homes for organized Christian religions; as such, they have rules, regulations, and policies. While I held many Christian beliefs, I was not comfortable with some of the expectations of membership in an organized religion. I did not like being guilted into volunteering on committees or teaching Sunday school, because then I would miss the sermon, which is what I looked forward to the most while attending church. To be perfectly honest, I also did not embrace all the references to the Bible during church service. I found our church community was organized in camps, whereby some of the members who had joined years before felt it was their right to hold power over newer members, such as my family. It is always fascinating to me how power struggles seem to weave their way into many organized groups. The older members wanted power so that they could control the business of our church, and I did not like how they treated myself and some other church members. I had witnessed firsthand people who deemed themselves religious but did not always