Back in 2021 I wrote a post called The Authentic You, and I finished it by promising to write more about what to do next.
Five years later, here is that post.
Nobody can accuse me of rushing.
In June I gave you the five aspects of your being. Physical, emotional, sexual, spiritual, mental.
If you sat down and made your notes on each one, you have something most people never make. A map of yourself.
Today is about what to do with it.
Step one. Find the one that runs the show.
Read your map back and one aspect will be louder than the rest. More written, more feeling, more contradiction. That is your dominant aspect, and it is the lens you view your whole life through.
The emotionally dominant person feels their way to a decision and reasons about it afterwards. The mentally dominant person builds the case first and wonders later why it still does not sit right.
Neither is better. But knowing which one you are explains an enormous amount about why you keep making the same kind of choice.
Step two. Find the parts written in someone else’s handwriting.
Go back through the map and mark anything that is a judgement rather than a fact.
I am 170 centimetres tall is a fact. I am too short is a sentence somebody handed you, and you have been repeating it ever since.
Most of us are carrying a pile of these. You were conditioned, gently and constantly, into an idea of what a NORMAL person is supposed to be, and every place you fell outside it got marked as a fault.
I got mine early.
I was four years old when I told my mother what I had seen, and she gave me two aspirin and sent me to bed. She was not being cruel. She simply had no shelf to put it on.
But I learnt in that moment that the truest thing about me was the thing you do not say out loud, and I carried that for a very long time.
Some of you will have your own version of that story. Mark those lines on your map, because they were never yours.
Step three. Accept the whole thing, without justification.
Here is where it gets hard, and this is the actual work.
Total and unconditional acceptance of yourself.
That does not mean approving of everything you have ever done. It means accepting that this is who you are today, all five aspects, including the parts you would rather nobody saw. And it means doing it without explaining yourself, to other people or to yourself.
The moment you start justifying, you are still negotiating with somebody else’s standard.
Step four. Stop needing anybody else to do it for you.
These are two separate jobs, and most people only ever attempt the first. You can accept yourself completely and still be quietly waiting for a parent, a partner or a room full of people to confirm it.
That wait is a leash.
The day you stop needing the confirmation is the day you get your life back.
And then, just be.
That is the whole destination, and it sounds almost insultingly simple.
Just be yourself. No more, no less. No performance, no apology, no running commentary in your head about how you are coming across.
You will know you are getting close when a conversation ends and you realise you never once checked how you were doing.
One last thing.
Your map will also show you what needs healing. Do not try to fix all of it at once. Pick the one aspect that hurt to write about, and start there. The rest follows more easily than you expect.
So if you did the five aspects back in June, get your notes out this week. And if you did not, this is a good week to make them.
Which of the five is your dominant one? And which line on your map turned out to be somebody else’s handwriting?
Come and share your stories or ask any questions in the Perth Spiritual Learning group on Facebook.