| A question has come up about how to know who you truly are. In the course of doing emotional and spiritual work, we can come across a baffling array of concepts and terminologies that attempt to describe who we may be in any present moment. We hear talk of the "inner child", the "critical parent", the "loving adult", and it becomes a bit of a puzzle to remember who it is that we actually are. It is important to note that these concepts are merely tool and metaphors for helping us work through emotional blockages, to understand our responses, how and why we respond to certain situations, and they are not really the truth of our identity. For the truth is that we are spiritual beings, as we have discussed before, and our human existence is merely an expression of our spiritual selves. As we grow up our identity becomes smaller and smaller as we define it and limit it to the thoughts, perceptions, and beliefs that we are taught and that we decide upon, due to the forced repression of our natural self. And so when somebody asks us who we are, we can come up with a list of descriptors that are really just concepts and have nothing to do with who we really are. There is nowhere where you can find in the human body or the human spirit a part that defines you as a housewife or an athlete or an artist or anything. These are simply concepts that we think about ourselves and have no bearing on the truth of ourselves. The only thing we are and possibly can be are spiritual beings expressing as humans. The only way we can know this is to experience it. We may believe it, we may accept it intellectually, but the way to know it is to experience it. The only way we can experience it is to experience the full energetic flow of our human form without the interference of judgments and thoughts. The way we do this is by moving our awareness into the present moment, focusing on our bodily sensations, keeping our awareness there and not dwelling on thoughts and judgments, but simply letting them happen and then moving our awareness back to our bodily sensations. When we have dissociated parts of ourselves that were too painful or not acceptable, then it is our work to bring our awareness back to those parts to experience them again as part of us, which means allowing that energy to be experienced in our moment to moment awareness. Remember that the path to God is through the heart and love is what God is. The true connection with love and the heart is often the part of ourselves that was most painful and most likely to be the part that we dissociated from. So our real, authentic connection with God can't be experienced until we reintegrate that part which usually implies experiencing the pain and grief that caused us to dissociate in the first place. But eventually, the pain of not experiencing our true selves is greater than the perceived pain of connecting with our hearts. |
