How to find yourself
22nd October 2021
There’s nothing more important to true personal and spiritual growth than realising that you’re not the voice in your head.
What’s underneath everything you have always thought to be you? What do you answer if anyone asks you to tell them who you are? If you took all the layers of conditioning that your psyche has gone through since you were born, things like your gender, where did you go to school, how your parents treated you, whether you got married or had children, which job do you have, etc.
What would be underneath it all? What would be your most pure, basic, unlabelled self you could go back to? Once you peel all those layers back we arrive to the root of the self and that I believe to be the real you.
The real you doesn’t have any preference, likes or dislikes or doesn’t really have to do anything to seek validation in the outer world. Just what you were like when you were a baby. All your likes, dislikes are preferences are linked to the conditioning that has come after, and determined by your experiences in life, and that lies on top of the root of self.
Once we’re down there, we can really start experiencing life more objectively and enjoying every moment that is presented to us without judgement and without preference. It’s blissful.
The alternative, the one that we experience normally, it’s just a patchwork of voices, desires, fears that the psyche has created over your lifetime in order to try and makes sense of the world and the reality that enters through your senses. There’s no possible peace in that place.
When I find myself in that place, in the loud cacophony that our minds can be, and when I suffer because of it, I find it very useful to remind myself that those narratives in my head aren’t me. They’re characters that my mind has created over the years to make sense off the world but they’re not the real me. And so what I need to do it’s to find a quiet spot and go to find the root of self, the place underneath all the noise, as that’s the only place where I can find any peace and anything resembling happiness.