You can fart in public and nobody dies!
Who is Your True Self and Why Does it Matter?
If you prefer to listen, the link is at the top of the page.
Hello Lovely You,
last time I wrote to you about Embodying Your True Essence, Your True Self.
I was in the process of learning how to do that for myself. And what a mission that has been as my Mind (aka Ego!) has twisted and turned and made excuses for keeping my Soul in check. You know, she would rather we (Mind, Body, Soul) die than give up control of us!
I have had to become super aware and catch her (me) in the process of sabotaging everything I want to create in my life. Everything I want to be.
To avoid confusion...
To me Soul, Essence, True Self and the Heart are all the same thing.
Mind, Ego, Personality, all the same thing.
My Mind took me back down the road of being a nurse. I haven’t been a nurse for twenty-four years! But it would be easy. There’s a local college doing the return to nursing course. I looked it up. I spoke to them. I said in my head, fuck no! I’m not doing that! But I knew all along I didn’t really want to do that. It was an ‘ought’ dressed up in a nurses uniform, a status symbol, recognition and a regular salary. I (My Mind) was looking for security but my body had a massive NO to the hoops I would have to jump through to become part of the broken, stressed out, over-stretched National Health Service in the UK.
It’s done now. Done, done in fact. I don’t need to use up energy thinking about that anymore. It took me a few weeks to work that one through and I knew the truth of it it before I even had the conversation with the tutor, but I didn’t Trust myself enough.
At the same time I was exploring Art College. I didn’t have the confidence for it when I was a teenager. Didn’t think I could make a living from it as if that were its only purpose. Didn’t think I would fit in.
But now…
Was I too old? Could I get a Student Loan? What course would most suit me? Could I study part time?
After all this was answered, I applied, got an interview and got accepted to study a Fine Art Degree in the course of a week! It wasn’t hard. There were no obstacles, real or imagined. They were welcoming, interested, gave me pointers. There was no particular thinking involved. It all flowed… I Trusted.
Following my heart has led me to the place I always longed to be. It’s nourishing. It’s not even exciting. It just is. A deep, calm knowing took over me and I said yes!
Amongst the young students at the open day I could hardly contain myself. I wanted to ask questions. To stay in the library and smell the books as if I could absorb all the information I had been missing all these years in one sitting.
My current True Self, thinks she’s an artist. She’s always been secretly envious of artists, creatives and writers. She’s dabbled over the years but never been able to immerse herself in the world of art. The kind of unconscious thoughts roaming around her head have been: that won’t pay the bills; you’re not good enough to make a career out of it; it would be a waste of time, there are too many important things to do and other people to support.
I will fit into art college even less now than I would have as a youngster. The young people are not going to want a woman old enough to be their granny sitting next to them. But conversations with them, I am looking forward to almost as much as doing the course.
What is Your True Self?
I have come to understand and know for sure that The True Self, the state in which we came into this life, is the state we are trying to get back to. Our Essence.
Our True Self is connected to the Universe, quantum field, god, light, energy, spark of life, life force or whatever you want to call it..
Through our experiences, and more interestingly, our Perception of those experiences that we’ve been through, we have been conditioned (and then conditioned ourselves) into separating from our True Self.
Our True Self is what some call the Soul. Some call it Essence. Some call it God. Some call it Creation. Others call it Source, your Core Sense, Spirit, Life Force and on and on. I often refer to it as your Essence.
It’s that part that lights up in you when you know you’re on the right path.
It’s every cell in your body waking up.
It’s when you feel your heart sings.
It’s a deep knowing. A reverence for life.
It’s feeling in flow and a place of acceptance whatever is happening in life.
It’s an inner smile.
It is about Being not Doing.
It transcends and includes all aspects of our human self.
It makes mistakes, upsets people sometimes, disappoints people (maybe often) and still surrenders to what it means to be human.
It’s not interested in bullshit, excuses, shoulds, oughts or have tos.
It both observes and partakes of life.
It is the spark, the light that wants to be expressed through our human form.
It means being fully alive and feeling and accepting all emotions. The ups and downs of life.
The you that wants to be fully expressed in this world.
The you that has come here to remember who you are.
A spiritual being having a human experience.
It accepts human mistakes and moves on. It does not try to control or manipulate others but has firm boundaries around what and who it is available for.
And we forget. We forget, we forget. We have this amnesia about it and we become separated. We think we are separate from our Essence. It’s something over there to be thought about only when we have time or are desperate. So that we encourage, establish and reinforce a (false) sense of having some control over our lives. A sense of security.
Some may call it our Personality. You hear people saying, I can’t help how I am, and it’s because of this person, or this experience or whatever. So constantly looking outwards for solutions, for happiness, for satisfaction, for contentment and of course mostly Safety. To feel secure.
We put off our desires into the future when we; have time; the kids have grown up, we’ve saved enough money; the morgage is paid off and on and on…
But the love, the recognition, the joy is already inside.
Finding a sense of safety and security is an inside job.
And Essence is always there. Watching. Listening. Patient. Loving.
When we reconnect with our Essence, we find it’s been there all along.
We find joy.
We are love. We are magnificent. We have more clarity. Decisions become easier. Life flows. We find ourselves having belly laughs with loved ones and leaving the washing up until tomorrow.
How Being Connected to Your Essence Feels
It’s how it feels when you first fall in love. You think you’re in love with another person when in fact you fall in love with the person you become in their presence. With how it feels. You love how that feels and you want to hold on to it not knowing you could have that state all of the time.
And we are angry and we are dissatisfied and tired and frustrated, and sad and Human. Yes we are Human! We are all of these human things too.
How do we Honour Our True Selves?
To Honour your True Self means rediscovering and recovering our sense of your Essence and following through on its desires. The one that’s been patiently whispering to us all along. This way. This lights you up. No you don’t really like that. That person makes you feel yuck. You prefer; to be inside, outside, with people, away from people, things to people, moving, being still, maths and mechanics, art and creativity, the peace of the countryside or the energy of the city. None of them are right or wrong.
There is no right or wrong when you are Connected to your Essence.
Now it’s not easy to listen, truly listen, after years of ignoring our Spirit, because the mind, the ego, the personality is very, very powerful. Well it thinks it is but in fact it’s manipulative. It is our Self Will. We give it a lot of power, and it will have been collecting evidence over many years, and for most of us decades, that our point of view is correct. I have evidence. This didn’t work. I got my ass kicked for that. They don’t like me because of that. I have to be this way to be liked, loved, accepted. All lies. But familiar. Predictable. Safe.
The Mind Predicts based on the past. It creates what the future will look like and all the time in our imaginations we are creating our futures. Most of us do this unconsciously and create the same or similar scenarios over and over again. The Mind does this in an attempt to protect us. To keep us safe. It’s quite primitive.
It’s like a feedback loop that keeps recreating itself. It’s plugged in and can’t be something else. A wire that charges a laptop that can’t be a wire that charges your phone because the Connection doesn’t fit.
But then you discover you need to be plugged into your Essence AND your Mind. Your phone and your laptop. You buy a multi-lead Connector and you can charge both at the same time. Remembering that Essence leads because it knows what you’re here to Express. And the Mind is here to follow. To be the servant. To come up with ideas. Take action. Follow your Soul.
Together with the Body, your Soul and Mind are a very powerful Team.
But you mustn’t let the Mind (Ego) lead if you are to have a satisfying, fully expressed life.
Oh no.
When we reConnect with our True Self, we find ourselves in a state of Freedom and Flow, no matter what’s going on in our lives. No matter what’s been thrown at us?
You could fart in a room full of people and know you’re not going to die when fully Connected to your Essence!
It’s just a fart. Life happens!
When we’re truly connected with our Essence and triggers occur, we’re able to:
recognise what’s going on;
take a step back;
mind the gap between what’s happening and our response;
notice whether the trigger is external (coming from someone else) or an internal thought (that might be outdated);
check in with how we want to respond or not respond;
and Choose the response from a more empowered state. A Connected state.
Putting ourselves in a place of choice puts us in a place of Freedom.
The Choices we Make
I kept coming back to dabbling in art and writing over my entire life. How I love to go and see art. How I love to listen to people talking about it. How I’m envious of creatives, artists, writers. How I love to express myself through words. How I LOVE colour. How I keep stashes of art materials, fabrics and yarns for one day when I have time.
During the interview for the art college, I found myself saying I wanted to also contribute to the college. I had thoughts on how I might do that. My Ego thought that would impress them. I don’t think the Tutor was particularly interested and, in that moment, I knew that this had to be for me. That, having spent my whole entire life, putting the needs of others before my own, I have to do this just for me, just because this is what I want to do. To see how far I can go with it. Where it will take me. Where my talents lie. What I love. What I don’t.
Are there any skills that I can really become absorbed in? Immersed in? Intoxicated by so much that I cannot help but do them?
And because it’s time to play! It’s my time. Being, most likely, two thirds through my life, this time is for me.
What are you Committed to?
I also discovered recently that I was still not just committed to putting everybody else first, I was also committed to that old personality, to my ego, to the f*****g know-it-all.
My Ego is a know-it-all.
She says, I knew that or I know that a lot.
Yes, I had a lot of wisdom. Yes I knew a lot of stuff. Yes, I spouted it out and said all the right things eloquently, but BUT….
I hadn’t yet Embodied, what it means to be truly Connected. To be truly Connected to My spirit. My soul, my Essence, my Core Sense of myself,
AND LIVING FROM THERE!
Commitment is not about what you want to do, how much money you want to make, how things look to other people, your career, how many cars you’ve got, how big your house is or even how successful you are.
True success feels free and Satisfying. It’s Nourishing and Peaceful. It’s accepting and boundaried.
It’s the Commitment to your Soul. To your Heart. To who you’re meant to be in the world. And we can only find that out, you can only find that out, by deep listening, by practicing, by acknowledging it, feeling it, expressing it, allowing it to move through you and then every single day reconnecting with your Essence. Reconnecting with your True self and taking action from there.
And Being from that place. Not doing but Being first. From a state of grace. From a state of regulation. From a state of pure intuition.
To be aligned means to live from your Essence, from the Soul you came in as. To honour that. To honour that from your state to your thoughts and actions.
It’s BRAVE INTUITIVE LIVING!
With Love
from my True Self to Yours
xx Karen xx
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