How To Be Yourself
A mentor of mine once said to me that, “The easiest thing in the world to be is yourself.” This statement is reasonable enough for me from a practical sense. Being yourself should require no extra energy. Trying to be someone else or trying to be what you think others want you to be would take extra energy. In this logic, if you’re exhausted, you may be trying to be someone else, and in my personal experience, it seems easy to be exhausted. Another mentor said that, “the only cause of disease is exhaustion.” Could the rejection of self, or the attachment to the false self (ego) be the root cause of the dysfunction, the disease, the broken relationships and the other symptoms you experience in life?
The phrase “go find yourself” has followed me throughout my life. My issue with that statement is the part where you need to go out to find yourself. “You” isn’t lost somewhere in the world, needing to be recovered. Your true self is somewhere within needing to emerge. Your experiences, your stories and your challenges play a big part in this. That’s where “going out into the world” can play a part. Suffering and conflict can invite you to go deeper and to seek comfort in Truth. But suffering can also tempt you to go external, looking for comfort in distraction and ultimately making you more lost.
It may be incredibly difficult to be yourself due to the conditions we live in. The loudest voices in our society can pull you away while the most profound truths come in whispers. The gravitational pull towards your ego (false self) is strong and seeking your true self comes with a price. It involves taking responsibility, letting go of attachments, dark nights of the soul and a whole lot of forgiveness. And sadly, these costs are high enough to make the enlightened person rare and precious.
Maybe the easiest thing to be is exactly what you’ve practiced being your whole life, even if it is exhausting. You became this version of yourself because you needed to survive and cope with what has happened to you in your life. However, when you’re ready to “find yourself,” the ultimate answer isn’t out in the world. It’s within.
This is the aim of the work I do with clients in a session. Your innate wisdom knows the truth of who you are as well as who you aren’t. Knowing how to translate the language of the body offers key insights as to who you think you are based on your past experiences and unresolved trauma (your ego attachments) as well as the fundamental truths about who you really are that have been rejected and lost. This creates a roadmap back to wholeness as well as the tools needed to stay on the path. Once on this path, life seemingly unfolds before you in positive ways with no effort and dysfunction in your life dissolves away into nothing.