Coming Home to Your True Self
When we come home to our true self, it means that we have become the Observer of our inner experience.
There comes a time in our lives when we realize that looking outside of ourselves is futile and unfulfilling. We recognize that nothing outside of ourselves makes us truly happy. We have tried to please, to be good enough for others, to seem smart, beautiful, caring, helpful and no one really seems to care much. We start to notice that when we depend on others to validate us, it falls flat much of the time. This is because it’s not anyone’s job to validate us but ourselves. We can be consistent with this for ourselves while other humans cannot be. This isn’t because they don’t believe in us; it’s because everyone is actually on their own journey and it’s not always on someone else’s radar to feed us with the compliments, understanding, and compassion that we seek in any given moment. Needing anyone else to give us this kind of external validation is disempowering for us as well. When we depend on anyone else but ourselves to make us happy, we have expectations that often cannot be met and we feel very disappointed as a result. This is how we create unneeded suffering in our lives and world.
On the positive side, coming home to ourselves is the definition of self-love, freedom, and inner peace. The struggle we often face is knowing how to go inward instead of seeking external validation. No one really explains it or, when they do, we don’t quite understand what that means until it’s time to understand. And then, it’s like a math problem clicking: we just get it! This is when we finally learn exactly what self-love is and how to DO it. We are ready to finally come home within. Coming home to ourselves is where we feel our best. We are our authentic selves and we don’t care what anyone thinks about us. We live unapologetically and on purpose.
People who love themselves and live with intention and in their authenticity do this by becoming the Observer of their inner life instead of going down the rabbit hole with every thought and feeling they experience. They are the higher self, the inner parent, the Self that witnesses, without judgment and with a lot of compassion, what the smaller self is experiencing. It’s like the parent watching a child having a temper tantrum without interfering. They allow the child to feel what he or she is feeling without trying to stop the feelings. The child eventually stops screaming and crying and relaxes again. When a parent tries to interrupt or correct (interject a story or reason for the outburst) this normal part of toddlerhood, the child resists and there is way more drama than was necessary. The child is simply upset and needs to be able to feel and move on. Children are perfect examples of what it looks like to move through feelings and then move on from them, which is what we are supposed to do. Instead, our minds analyze the feelings in order to “make sense of them” and that creates a story, unnecessary drama, and judgment of our feelings instead of compassion and detachment from a normal body sensation that might actually be meaningless. Emotions are simply energy in motion. They are energy that needs to flow. When we create a story to explain the emotions, we block this energy flow and it gets trapped in our bodies, which causes more trouble—mentally and physically.
And, just in case you are wondering if not caring what people think makes you selfish and cruel, I will argue that no, it does not. Or, it IS selfish, but in a good way. Now, to be clear, you choosing your truth and your feelings may hurt others. This is true. It may in fact hurt someone deeply if you choose your own heart over theirs. There is really no way of escaping hurting some people some of the time when we choose our path over someone else’s dreams. And this is why people very often do not leave their comfort zones and follow their hearts: they don’t want to let anyone down. So, they choose to let themselves down instead. This is staying in our heads, out of our bodies, and away from our inner homes, however. So, coming home to ourselves is a tall task, I know.
Once we get to the place in our lives where we simply cannot work so hard to fill others’ cups and we see that each of us—including the ones we promised to do for—has to do our own work, we feel less guilty about choosing our own hearts over others. Erecting healthy boundaries, leaving relationships that we committed to for life (whether healthy and without drama or quite dysfunctional and toxic), quitting jobs that pay well but that we actually despise and that we chose only to please our parents in order to follow our true interests and dreams is very scary, but the price we pay to stay in these situations is even scarier. This is because (seemingly) behind the scenes and deep within our nervous systems, we feel a deep sense of stress and anxiety when we are going against our true self. We may or may not even consciously notice this anxiety. When we do feel it palpably, we often will cover it in outward, risky activities, keeping excessively busy, or by numbing out in order to “stay the course” and “do the right thing” by someone else’s rules and standards. This is killing us. The stress that is accumulating, day in and day out, is wreaking havoc on our bodies, minds, and souls. Lying to ourselves or avoiding our feelings in order to please others creates a steady stream of stress hormones that affects our health in a direct way. Numbing out with unhealthy food, alcohol, and drugs also contributes to our declining health. We numb out to avoid our true feelings and desires because going along to get along will make someone else happy and when we codependently want to control another’s happiness, behavior, or mood, we feel a false sense of peace for a little while. I will repeat…a FALSE sense of peace. “Making” someone happy is not your job, is only temporary and is not really something you are doing (because no one can “make” anyone feel anything), and is not true peace. True and lasting peace is your natural state of being that you experience once you are at home in your authentic self. Giving to others feels good, of course, but being their constant happiness crutch is not giving. It is being used and taken advantage of by someone who has not yet learned how to access their own inner happiness and self-love and to source from within.
When we reconnect with our bodies and sit in stillness, we can observe our stress. We can notice our inner critic (thoughts) telling us that we need to be better for our partners, stick out the job for another ten years until retirement, and do what our parents and friends expect of us or we are “bad” and “selfish.” Is it really selfish to want to be happy instead of dutiful and miserable? Coming home to ourselves asks that we find true peace within, but that, yes, it might hurt someone else in the process. The good news is that when we choose our own happiness, it allows for others to find theirs as well. When we simply notice our inner critic telling us we are not good enough, we have the power to change it by noticing it—just letting it sit there without adding the extra level of drama and story about it. We can see it as a bully who needs to simply be ignored, not interacted with. This creates inner calm. We realize that we never had to leave home. We never had to ask others for validation because when we simply notice our inner criticism, we can decide not to believe it anymore. And then no one else has to tell us we are good enough. We will know for ourselves that all of it was a lie. A story. We were already good enough…always.
Our inner Observer witnesses what we are experiencing and allows it. It doesn’t try to judge or make a change because whatever we are feeling or thinking is okay.
When we live from a place of self-compassion and curiosity over self-judgment, we are more at peace. We allow life to flow and we are more creative, calm, clear, and confident as a result. We are present and can make better decisions because we have slowed down and can really think about what we want or need to do in each moment. When we are at home in ourselves, we attract others who reflect our home back at us. They will feel like home to us because we are sending out the energetic signal that we are safe and that we allow safe people to be in our world. Coming home to ourselves is the absolute best gift we can ever give to ourselves.
Let me help you do this!
