DISCOVERING YOUR INNER SELF AND CREATING YOUR OWN LIFE

"If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within, secondary reality without" Eckhart Tolle

This is part 1 of a two part series of, Discovering your Inner Self:

Part 1:  Discovering your inner self and creating your own life
Part 2:  Self Reflection

Have you ever got to a point in your life where you feel there's more to you, the universe, more to real living?  A feeling that there's more to the daily hustles of life? you get crippling fear on the thought that you are going to get stuck in a cycle of patterns that will make you forget to truly live? You get tired of the same old habits and wasting your time and energy on things that do not help you grow? Well I got to  that point and I am really glad I embraced the feeling.  

It's a point in life where you get the wake up call and it suddenly hits you that you've been sleepwalking through your life all this time.  When you get to this point you begin to question how much of what you do even has meaning to your true being. You become conscious of the idea of living from the inside rather than the outside. You begin seeking knowledge of who you really are.
  
Aristotle a great philosopher once said, "knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." Has it ever crossed your mind to think of who you really are? And no, please don't confuse who you are with what you are.  Have you ever given meaning to the question, "Who are you?"

Most people confuse who they are with what they are.  Who you are is what you represent, your values, what you stand for, what makes you unique, whereas what you are could be your roles, or social identities.

 You could be a brother, entrepreneur, employee, musician but that doesn't fundamentally represent who you are. We often describe ourselves by what we do, where we live, where we went to school, rarely do we mention our core character traits or even our true personalities.

 

Your Social Identities Aren't Who You Are, You Are Way More Than That

Whereas there are so many social identities that we hold, e.g your job title,this isn't who you really are.  Your job title for example is something that has been conferred to you by someone else and can be taken away from you just as easily as it was given to you. You should never identify yourself with something you can't and have got no control of. Sadly, some people even spend their whole life building themselves around such identities.  

There could be values, goals or visions that have been set by your company for you that you should conform to in your job title. Remember however, that these aren't your personal values, they are values that have been imposed on you as what you should be in your job title.  This is the case with every other identity you hold, its got its own set of values, vision, purpose, goals which in most cases are not congruent with who we really are from within. 

We are all unique in our own personal ways, and your true self can't be simply described with a single identity or a label for that matter.  For example, you could be an employee to your employer, a parent to your kid, a wife to your husband and vice-versa, a real-estate owner, however, that's not your true self there's much more to you than just that. Those are just roles and titles which can't simply summarize who you are. 

Why It Is Important To Discover Your Inner self

Most often, you will find that people define themselves with their identities rather than their inner self.  Some become so ingrained with their identities, such that, take away those identities from them and they become totally lost.  Lost because they simply haven't discovered their inner self.  Lost because all they've known all their life is who they've been created to be by others but not who they've created themselves to be.

Discovering your inner self requires deep and regular introspection, along with a high level of self awareness.  Discovering your inner self is knowing your values, your vision, your goals, your purpose, knowing what motivates you, your beliefs.  Thing's that you have personally discovered for yourself and not what you've been made to believe by others.

This awareness, I must say is by far the greatest lesson I've learned so far on my self discovery journey.  Learning to differentiate who you are and what you are.  Once you come to this realization you begin to understand that everything in your life is dictated by you.  You come to the realization that you are in control of your life and the importance of making choices that come from deep within yourself.  You stop caring about what other people think about you  and seeking approval from others because you  know there  is something much deeper about your real sense of identity where that comes from.  You begin to love yourself more.  You stop living your life for others and start living your life for you.

With this realization, you start questioning your negative behaviors, habits, action and beliefs and you start replacing them with more positive ones.  When you can't make out the difference of who you are from what you are, you become a victim in every circumstance of your life, blaming everything that's happening in your life to be from an outside force.  You start thinking that things are happening in your life out of nowhere, you start shifting blame to people and situations around you, things outside of you.  This however weakens your power to do something about it, the power to change your life.  

To start making changes in your life, you have to awaken your inner self, to discover who you really are from within so you can start living the life you consciously choose.  You realize that everything happening in your life is as a result of who you are from within and that only you have the power to change it.  You need to come to the realization that just as the quote in the beginning of this post says, the external reality is determined by the internal reality.  That the primary reality is within and the secondary reality without.

In Conclusion

Don't beat yourself up if you haven't discovered yourself. I for one I'm a work in progress, we all are.  We should however wake up from slumber and start the discovery process of why exactly you're put on this earth and what it is that you are put to do. We should strive to discovering and unleashing our full potential.  You can never unleash your full potential by not knowing your values, your purpose, your goals, your beliefs or even knowing what motivates you.

Discovering yourself isn't the destination.  It is a journey.  What you discover today about yourself could change in future, because after all we are evolving and time's changing.  Focus more on your now, who you are and what you feel at this moment.

Catch me on part two of this series, Self Reflection, questions you should be asking yourself to help you in your self discovery journey and that will help you to identify how much you really know about yourself.