When you live your life according to the way the world teaches you to live your life, it’s easy for you to lose sight of who you really are.
Life teaches us all sorts of things about ourselves that simply aren’t true. It’s as if your true self is straight ahead and the people and situations you face in life keep turning your head to the right and left so you never see who you truly are.
When you’re young, life teaches you how to interpret who you are. We tell ourselves we’re the good girl, or the difficult boy because other people decide who we are based on a few tendencies we project … or based on who they want us to be.
You believe these people because they are your parents, siblings, teachers, role models, or other authority figures who must be right about you. After all, you reason, you’re just a kid, what do you know?
Then you start making friends, or encounter bullies, who tell you who you are or show you who you want to be … or who you don’t want to be.
Lastly, few of us escape the influence of pop culture and the media. The media bombards us with images of what it takes to be loved, happy, and successful. Most of us buy into the dribble that the magazines, movies, television shows, and celebrities are constantly shoveling out to us.
These outside influencers project the “rules” for living a wonderful life. Women are to be thin, beautiful, gentle, sexy, cheerful and sweet. Men are to be strong, tall, and make a lot of money (and they’re never, ever, ever allowed to cry, unless it’s at a funeral, and even it’s only deemed okay if the deceased was someone close to them).
Most of us become a creation we came up with to get our needs met. You no longer see yourself as you really are; there are too many fake layers on top, layers that can be both stifling and exhausting.
This is a very useful lesson as we are so busy with life and our need to be functional and accessible to everyone but ourselves. I love the five ways to live your life as your higher self. I will have to laminate this and place it on my fridge so that I am reminded everyday that I am a priority. It is true that wisdom start from within; you cannot preach something so well unless you practice it yourself.