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Who Am I, Really? A Holistic Approach to Self-Discovery
This is perhaps the biggest question anyone could ask. We can begin with our family and its generational roots. This helps to explain the reality that shaped our perceptions of life thus influencing our lives to come. But what we’re really asking is, “Who am I as a person living my life and is the life I’m creating making me happy?” This question is profound because it speaks to a desire to know our authentic self, more than just the roles we play. It speaks to the depth of who we are in our wholeness: body, mind, and spirit. Answering this can be the journey of a lifetime by coming in touch with our uniqueness from the inside out. I started asking this question in my teens and it’s become a lifelong process. I wondered about the nature of happiness and how it might be maintained. This led to embarking on a spiritual path which partly was my seeking for a way to feel comfortable in a rapidly changing world. After years of doing the classic spiritual by-pass, I realized I needed to face who I was as an emotional being. However, like many men, I was so out of touch with my feelings that I didn’t know where to start. I remember sitting with my first therapist, trying unsuccessfully to tune in to my emotions. However daunting as this was, I persevered and ended up being able to extrapolate what I was feeling from the four basic emotions: mad, sad, glad, and afraid. It wasn’t until years later that I learned why feelings are so important: emotions are the gateway to our needs as well as the all important avenue of empathic connection with another. This certainly differed from my earlier path toward enlightenment. I had to learn to work with my thoughts and feelings and also to get in touch with my body – very challenging indeed. Emotions differ vastly from cognition: they are quite a bit messier, last much longer, and seem to arise at the drop of a hat, almost from nowhere. The use of the mind is helpful in analyzing their source, since most of our dramas are triggered by some historical memory or replication of family trauma that feels so real that we’re driven to run, fight, or shut down to protect ourselves. Understanding our minds is a province of therapy and the analysis thereof has made great strides in the understanding of the self. Newer experiential modalities have us realize that the self is more than just thought patterns from early imprinting but includes the body that has been imbedded with emotional memory. This memory gets triggered in life situations often with deleterious effects but can be therapeutically released and healed through an emotionally corrective experience. Knowing we are spiritual beings having a human experience can help make sense of our world and the suffering we can endure. Spiritual practice frees our minds so we’re able to perceive reality differently as well as expand the small egoic sense of ourselves to the realization that we’re part of a supreme intelligence that is implicitly and unconditionally loving and forgiving. The question of our existential identity forces us to explore the depth of what forms the whole of who we are. The discovery of our authentic self can be both rewarding and exasperating depending on where we are in our journey. This is where our awareness of our different parts and internal resources can help us stay centered and aligned with the greatest of who we are and what we have to offer.
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