Finding the Real You

A lack of direction. A sense of not belonging anywhere.

Those feelings come from losing touch with who you are. And once you lose touch with who you are, you lose touch with what you want in life as well, because the two travel together. So before any of the other inner work, this is the first job. Finding your way back to the real one.

The shell and the marshmallow

Most of us wear a hard outer shell. Inside it there is a marshmallow, the soft part of you that feels everything, hopes quietly and loves more than it ever lets on.

We spend years guarding that marshmallow. We fear that if anyone saw it, we would be broken and vulnerable. So the walls go up.

One thing has become very clear to me over the years. The great majority of people are the same inside. You might look at someone and admire their bravery or what they have achieved, and the whole time they are having the same battle in their head that you are. They also feel they do not quite fit. They also suspect they are somehow flawed.

Did you realise that hiding the marshmallow is what creates the vulnerability? When you let the real you out, the courage it takes to do that leaves you with nothing left to expose. People can only take advantage of you if you hand them power over your life, and there is only one person who should hold that power.

YOU.

How the shell got built

From birth we are conditioned to meet expectations. To look a certain way, to behave a certain way, to be acceptable to the people around us.

The conditioning is so powerful that we end up believing it was our own idea, and that is the biggest lie of them all. The cost is you. You lose touch with who you really are.

Think of it in computer terms. You have been hacked. Since birth you have been told things about yourself that are untrue, and when you hear something often enough you start to believe it. Society and the people around you put a virus in the system, and it corrupted the data that is you. That is why you feel you do not fit in, and why you feel something is missing.

The good news is that realising it is the first step. That is the start of running a virus scan on yourself.

I got my own dose early, from a mother who was a psychic and denied her own abilities. I learnt very young to keep what I knew to myself, and I carried that for a very long time. The Denial page tells that story.

Who are you, anyway

Is your identity your religion, the one you were born into or the one you chose? The country you were born in? Your race? Your education? Your moral values, your politics, your relationship status, where you live, what you eat, your health?

The list is endless. Compare your answers now with your answers at various points in your past, and you will find they have changed. The simple question of who you are turns out to have an ever changing answer.

Sit with that. Every one of those labels can shift, and you are still here.

Finding your way back

There are a few exercises I give for this, and they work best done daily.

1. Make a note of the times in your life when you felt happy. It does not matter when it was or what you were doing. Riding a tricycle as a very small child. Being on a swing. A particular birthday party. Write them down in your journal.
2. Go back through those memories and explore the feeling behind each one. Was it a sense of being loved? Of freedom? Of connection to life? Name it.
3. Then start bringing that feeling into your life now. The goal is to amplify it and recreate it in the life you are living today.
4. Ask yourself what is actually important to you. If you were in a desert with no water, the answer would be easy. In ordinary life it is surprisingly hard. Your job, your home, your car, the people around you, your spirituality. Knowing which of them really matters is a key to your inner self.
5. Give yourself some silent contemplation. Turn off the phone and anything else that makes noise, find somewhere you feel safe, and just be with yourself. Let things surface. Sometimes you find the answer to a question, and sometimes you find out what the question was.

Keep your spiritual goals in the same journal and read them each day. In time you will know that journal so well you can close your eyes and read it.

The deeper exercise is the map of your five aspects, physical, emotional, sexual, spiritual and mental. I set it out in the 5 Aspects of Your Being post, and the follow up, The Authentic You, walks through what to do with the map once you have it.

Just be

Discovering the authentic you is simple, and it sounds almost insultingly so. Just be. Just be yourself, no more and no less.

Underneath that are two pieces of work. The first is accepting yourself totally and unconditionally, without justifying it to yourself or anyone else. The second is living without needing anyone else's acceptance.

A few things I have learnt along the way. No matter who you are or what you do, somebody will judge you and tell you that you are wrong. You will never please people by being what they want. Ever. And being true to who you really are curiously attracts friends. Go figure. You will still be judged and told you are wrong.

If anyone around you makes you feel less in any way, a little or a lot, treat that as toxic to you. Take back the power you gave them. That might mean redrawing your boundaries, changing how you deal with them, or removing them from your life. The result is the same either way. You are left feeling whole again.

Why it matters for everything else

The more you are in touch with your true self, the more your abilities will come to you. How you feel about yourself directly affects your spiritual growth and your abilities.

A lot of people come to this path carrying depression, anxiety or another mental health struggle. I believe much of that comes from being out of touch with the true self and always feeling something is missing. It is rarely talked about in spiritual circles, where being spiritual is supposed to mean having it all together. And I have been asked many times whether medication will hold back someone's development. My answer is no. Keep taking it while you develop. I have seen it help people progress faster.

Where this leads

Once you start letting the marshmallow be seen, a few things show up straight away. The fear of being seen, which the Fear page takes apart. The masks you forgot you were wearing, which is the Denial page. And the old things you are still carrying, which is the Letting Go page.

You will be your own teacher in this. All I will do is help you remember what you already know.

Who gets to see the marshmallow in you?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.