Rediscovering Our Authentic Selves
We live in a culture where we are always striving to be better. We want to look better, feel better, work better, and live better. We read self-help book after self-help book to show us how to be better. We subscribed to every diet and fitness program. We keep us with the latest trends. We spend a lot of time and money trying to be better. However, being better is not what we need. We need to be ourselves.
Each one of us has a unique, authentic self. We have often lost touch with our authentic selves in the pursuit of being better. Better means that there is something about us that is lacking. That lacking comes from being told by someone else that we are not good enough as we are. I want to challenge that notation. You are good enough just as you are right now. Do we all have flaws? Yes, even I admit I have quite a few. Yet, our flaws are often the result of running away from our authentic selves. They are the defense mechanisms that allow us to put up walls between our authentic selves and the rest of the world who can reject us, abandon us, or harm us if they truly see who we were underneath the disguise. Being ourselves is truly a dangerous game. However, being ourselves is all that we can be. Anything else is just a fake version of ourselves.
As a Christian believer, I believe God wants us to be our most authentic selves. God made us who are for a reason. The faith journey is about not becoming a better version of ourselves, but rather rediscovering the person we were created to be before others and experiences convinced us otherwise.
So, how do we begin? I wish I could tell you it will be a quick and painless process, but that is not the truth. It is challenging and uncomfortable sometimes to rediscover our most authentic selves. It all begins with us first looking for that one glimpse of who we are at the core of our being. Maybe it is thinking about that moment when you were a kid and free from the world’s expectations as you swung high up in the sky. Or maybe it was that dance class that you lost yourself in where you were one with the music. These experiences tell us about who we are, and the clues are often found in the emotions we experienced in those moments.
Our feelings are not something we can have control over. We are taught to suppress our emotions. Our society tells us at an early age that having emotions is a bad thing, but emotions actually help us connect with our most authentic selves. We can think away our emotions all the time, but we can never stop them from popping up, especially at the most inopportune times. In those moments, we try some way to block them out, but we never go back to them. We forget them and move on because truthfully most feelings are not fun to feel. However, neglecting our feelings takes us further away from our authentic selves. We must learn to embrace our feelings and find ways to express them in a way that is helpful and healthy.
First, let’s practice acknowledging our feelings:
Take a deep breath, breathe out, and close your eyes.
What are you feeling right now? Is it embarrassment because you are trying this at your office? Is it uncomfortable to try this? Are you worried and afraid of what might surface?
Acknowledge what you are feeling. I feel {insert feeling} and that is okay.
Take a deep breath, breathe out, and open your eyes.
Try to make this a daily practice until you are able to accept your feelings as you come. If you have difficulty naming your feeling, google “emotion wheel” and several images with appear. Click on one and explore the feelings listed. Which one seems most like what you are feeling?
Next week, we will work on how to express those feelings in helpful and healthy ways.
May God bless you in your work to focus on your feelings, move past becoming better, and welcome the person you were created to be!
