It Is What It Is

Nadia Werkowska

The road to self-discovery is one with a lot of sharp stones and barking dogs. My book "It Is What It Is" is your sisterly guide and friend to keep you company on that journey, a journey we all need to take alone. The audiobook offers you a universal process for knowing ourselves better from a woman who has, after a great deal of therapy, managed to awaken her own inner guru and build incredible happiness on her own terms. The book was written in 2021 and published in by Znak Księgarnia in 2022. Translation from the Polish into English by Agata Sochalska. Read by Steve W.

Episodes

  1. 03/07/2023

    The Problems That Self-Knowledge Solves​​

    An audiobook version of my memoir/self-help book: It Is What It Is. "We equate happiness with high-intensity emotions—excitement, anticipation, ecstasy, orgasm. This may be collectively our biggest problem with feeling happier—that we conflate it with pleasure. But pleasure is not happiness, and high-intensity emotions burn us all out. Ideally what we want is to inhabit what motivational speaker Tony Robbins calls ‘a beautiful state.’ I’m paraphrasing, but a beautiful state, says Robbins, is when you feel love, joy, gratitude, awe, playfulness, ease, creativity, drive, caring, growth, curiosity and appreciation. This, he says, is how a person looks when they are ‘in harmony with essence’ (essence being your true nature). Contrast this with being in a suffering state: stressed out (the overachiever’s version of fear), worried, frustrated, angry, depressed, irritable, overwhelmed, resentful and fearful. Self-knowledge fosters this cooler, but ultimately more sustainable happiness. Even before we have lined life up perfectly, we enjoy the sense that we are making progress. And that feels incredibly satisfying." From: It Is What It Is MANTRAS: I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I; If by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped. -Fritz Perls, "The Gestalt Prayer" If I just do my thing and you do yours, We stand in danger of losing each other And ourselves. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations; But I am in this world to confirm you As a unique human being, And to be confirmed by you. We are fully ourselves only in relation to each other; The I detached from a You Disintegrates. I do not find you by chance; I find You by an active life Of reaching out. Rather than passively letting things happen to me, I can act intentionally to make them happen. I must begin with myself, true; But I must not end with myself: The truth begins with two. -Walter Tubbs, "Beyond Perls"

About

The road to self-discovery is one with a lot of sharp stones and barking dogs. My book "It Is What It Is" is your sisterly guide and friend to keep you company on that journey, a journey we all need to take alone. The audiobook offers you a universal process for knowing ourselves better from a woman who has, after a great deal of therapy, managed to awaken her own inner guru and build incredible happiness on her own terms. The book was written in 2021 and published in by Znak Księgarnia in 2022. Translation from the Polish into English by Agata Sochalska. Read by Steve W.