“Get out of your head and get into your heart. Think less, feel more.” ~Osho
Surprisingly when one gets out of the head and into the heart, the “self” is seen better. Humor and surrounding yourself with the humorous lightens your struggles, provides healing and better health (laughing 30 minutes a day extends your life by 8 years), supporting your breakdown into become a breakthrough.
Most of us want to know who our “self” is and spend time trying to discover self and self purpose.
I had spent 32 years honing my ability to be what I thought others wanted me to be—a “success.” The only problem was that my definition of success was warped.
I thought success and my worthiness was measured by the big job, the fancy house, the material objects. This was, of course, all nonsense that I had created in my head—a story I had bought into, fed by my addiction for perfectionism and a desperate need for security and validation.
I was ready to break out of the box I’d been living in, and this “readiness” came only after I spent some time on introspection, reflection, healing wounds, and forgiving others which was the journey to helping me to see the world, life, and myself in new light.
It seems that when you step up in life to invite change, life has a way of guiding you to exactly where you need to be, with whom you need to be with, and hearing what you need to hear. The secret is that YOU need to invite the change!!
It would turn out to be perfectly synchronistic that my abuser led me to go in search of somewhere peaceful life existance, which in turn took me to this fabulous place of knowing self, where I was very helpfully fed three game changing insights by Yut.
This turn of events would be another building block in one very important and transformative lesson: just be who you really are and that is more than enough.
There was some undoing to be done! In order to be who I really was, I first had to know who I really was…
- Meditation is one tool to know yourself.
“Meditation is a way to know your true self. All you need to know is within yourself, seeking it externally in the world will only take you so far. You need to look within.” ~Yut
This “self” quest was the start of what would become years of daily meditation. But know that my journey of knowing self was not easy. It was one of the hardest things I had to do because I had to be HONEST about myself, my life, my family and things I allowed to be in my life. I got depressed but had made a commitment to ME and so took 5−10 minutes per day to meditate, pray, be quiet, which connected me with my intuition and the real me. Once I connected, I was able to live from that guidance, using it as a navigation tool then and now..
- Knowing yourself opens the way to limitless possibilities.
As we become more enlightened by being quiet, listening, mediating/praying, as we know ourselves more, truly anything is possible. When you connect to your true self, then life is limitless and anything you can possibly imagine can be your reality. Manifesting your desires and wishes happens when you take the steps to manifest. Visualize YOU and what YOU want in your life. Make a plan to receive that and take the action to get it. The trouble with manifesting YOU and your desire is that YOU don’t know who YOU are and therefore can’t make the real you manifestation happen. It is something that you do every day and commit to yourself in doing. But how can you feel important enough to commit to yourself if you don’t know you? It is one day at a time and one step at a time.
I had big, audacious dreams for my life—to be a international trainer, to be a writer and coach, and to pursue my passion for energy healing, preferably while traveling the world!
Hearing that meditation was a path to my true self, and connecting to my true self was a path to enlightenment, which in turn opens up limitless possibilities for me, well, I was ready to get my meditation time on my daily schedule!
- Face your inner demons; own your responsibility.
“While we are all connected, we must face our own challenges alone.” ~Yut
While I believe deeply that our family and friend support networks are fundamental to thriving in life, the truth is that when we’re talking about inner demons, fears, blocks, and limiting beliefs, we have to face up to those ourselves. Our “messages” received from childhood on create a hologram of resistance that keeps us from recognizing our fear of responsibility to get rid of things we have been taught that simply aren’t true, or from being misled by well-meaning and not so well-meaning parents and family members and/or friends. Unfortunately, we have been told things about ourselves that simply aren’t true and we take a back seat in our lives and let others opinions and beliefs to take a front seat.
It’s a very personal journey to honestly look into the dark crevices inside yourself and truly own the way you feel, the way you behave, and see what is blocking your own thriving.
Taking responsibility for how we are being and what we are doing is something that requires great courage.
Nearly in tears if not in tears in the beginning of finding “ME” – I had to face my “reality” and get rid of the fantasy I needed to make in my life appear normal. The act of having to face your challenges alone actually empowers you. It strengthens your resilience, it uncovers lies so truth can replace them, it opens your heart to empathy and insight, in creates opportunities for happiness and joy in your life. It gives you the “YOU” so desired to know, have, and BE.
It certainly woke me up and made me realize that no one else could set me free from my limiting beliefs and attitudes about what validated me as a person and the blocks I had about risking my security in pursuit of a more meaningful life. I went through my fears with trembling but persistence to get my dreams of knowing me, being a international trainer and healer. I have manifested writing my books, making a difference for others through my speaking, writing, and trainings. I know who ME is because I took the time and did the work. I had to do this myself. I had to build a relationship with the true me and let her emerge, just as we are all called to do.
It was worth the journey and allows me to have the best relationship ever – with myself!
More in finding “Self” –
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all. The greatest and most important adventure of our lives is discovering who we really are. Yet, so many of us walk around either not really knowing or listening to an awful inner critic that gives us all the wrong ideas about ourselves. We mistakenly think of self-understanding as self-indulgence, and we carry on without asking the most important question we’ll ever ask: Who am I really?
Finding yourself may sound like an inherently self-centered goal, but it is actually an unselfish process that is at the root of everything we do in life. In order to be the most valuable person to the world around us, the best partner, parent etc, we have to first know who we are, what we value and, in effect, what we have to offer. This personal journey is one every individual will benefit from taking. It is a process that involves breaking down – shedding layers that do not serve us in our lives and don’t reflect who we really are. Yet, it also involves a tremendous act of building up – recognizing who we want to be and passionately going about fulfilling our unique destiny – whatever that may be. It’s a matter of recognizing our personal power, yet being open and vulnerable to our experiences. It isn’t something to fear or avoid, berating ourselves along the way, but rather something to seek out with the curiosity and compassion we would have toward a fascinating new friend. With these principles in mind, the following guide highlights seven of the most universally useful steps to this very individual adventure.
- Make sense of your past
In order to uncover who we are and why we act the way we do, we have to know our own story. Being brave and willing to explore our past is an important stepping stone on the road to understanding ourselves and becoming who we want to be. Research has shown that it isn’t just the things that happened to us that define who we become, but how much we’ve made sense of what’s happened to us. Unresolved traumas from our history inform the ways we act today. Studies have even shown that life story coherence has a “statistically significant relationship to psychological well-being.” The more we form what Dr. Daniel Siegel talks about as a “coherent narrative” of our lives, the better able we are to make mindful, conscious decisions in our present that represent our true selves.
The attitudes and atmosphere we grew up in have a heavy hand on how we act as adults. As Dr. Robert Firestone, author of The Self Under Siege, wrote, “As children, people not only identify with the defenses of their parents but also tend to incorporate into themselves the critical or hostile attitudes that were directed toward them. These destructive personal attacks become part of the child’s developing personality, forming an alien system, the anti-self, distinguishable from the self-system, which interferes with and opposes the ongoing manifestation of the true personality of the individual.”
Painful early life experiences often determine how we define and defend ourselves. In short, they bend us out of shape, influencing our behavior in ways in which we are hardly aware. For example, having a harsh parent may have caused us to feel more guarded. We may grow up always feeling on the defense or resistant to trying new challenges for fear of being ridiculed. It’s easy to see how carrying this uncertainty with us into adulthood could shake our sense of identity and limit us in different areas. To break this pattern of behavior, it’s valuable to acknowledge what’s driving it. We should always be willing to look at the source of our most self-limiting or self-destructive tendencies.
When we try to cover up or hide from our past experiences, we can feel lost and like we don’t really know ourselves. We may take actions automatically without asking why. In his book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, Dr. Siegel wrote of an interaction with his son, in which he’d lost his temper. After reflecting on the incident a bit later, Dr. Siegel realized that his emotional outburst had more to do with feelings he’d had as a child toward his brother than with his perception of his son today. He wrote of the experience, “I realize once again how many layers of meaning our brain contain, and how quickly old, perhaps forgotten, memories can emerge to shape our behavior. These associations can make us act on automatic pilot.”
By reflecting on the past, using a technique called mindsight, “a kind of focused attention that allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds,” Dr. Siegel was able to make sense of his experience, then talk to his son about what happened and repair the situation. “With mindsight I was able to make use of the reflections that arose from that conflict to arrive at more clarifying insights into my own childhood experiences. This is how the most challenging moments of our lives can become opportunities to deepen our self-understanding and our connections with others.”
By engaging in this type of thinking and being willing to face the memories that arise, we gain invaluable insights into our behavior. We can then start to consciously separate from the more harmful influences from our history and actively alter our behavior to reflect how we really think and feel and how we choose to be in the world.
2. Differentiate
Differentiation refers to the process of striving to develop a sense of ourselves as independent individuals. In order to find ourselves and fulfill our unique destinies, we must differentiate from destructive interpersonal, familial and societal influences that don’t serve us. “To lead a free life, a person must separate him/herself from negative imprinting and remain open and vulnerable,” wrote Dr. Firestone. In his work with hundreds of individuals struggling with this exact process, he’s developed four essential steps of differentiation.
Step 1: Break with harmful internalized thought processes, i.e., critical, hostile attitudes toward self and others.
Step 2: Separate from negative personality traits assimilated from one’s parents.
Step 3: Relinquish patterns of defense formed as an adaptation to painful events in one’s childhood.
Step 4: Develop one’s own values, ideals, and beliefs rather than automatically accepting those one has grown up with.The greatest and most important adventure of our lives is discovering who we really are. Yet, so many of us walk around either not really knowing or listening to an awful inner critic that gives us all the wrong ideas about ourselves. We mistakenly think of self-understanding as self-indulgence, and we carry on without asking the most important question we’ll ever ask: Who am I really? As Mary Oliver put it, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
