Finding You

Just as light brightens darkness, discovering inner fulfilment can eliminate any disorder or discomfort. This is truly the key to creating balance and harmony in everything you do 

Deepak Chopra

Finding yourself is an enlightening experience. You become self-sufficient and do things for others without expectations of something in return. You are no longer needy and become utterly grateful for all the things people have done for you in the past. Finding yourself is a time of harmony because you develop that philosophy or belief system that will carry you throughout the rest of your life. When you love yourself and who you are, you will savour and enjoy both life’s pain and pleasures.

How do you know you have found yourself? When you are able to help others find themselves. Finding yourself is not easy. If you have never felt connected to who you are, and you want to find whatever makes you YOU.

Create your own life’s life time line. Write down all of your major goals in your life that you feel you want to achieve. In turn, write down the events in your life that have already happened that you believe have affected you and have made you who you are now. This isn’t an exercise in wallowing but one about clarification and identification of issues that might be hampering your present potential and the blossoming of your true sense of self.

 A timeline is an incredibly objective method for marking down past occurrences in your life that you consider to have been major. You can look at them as formation blocks and as changing experiences along your timeline without imbuing them with too much emotion .

When analyzing negative past experiences, look to the positive learning message in it and don’t dwell on the mistakes or the negatives. Everyone has these blips in their timeline but pretending they are either worse than they were or non-existent won’t do you any favours. Instead, recognize that if it had not been for those past experiences you would not be where or who you are today. Look at what you have learnt from them.

Prepare to recommence with a clean slate. Develop your own moral conduct and practice sticking to it. Remove vice from your life; vices are any actions or habits that curtail your true self and involve escaping having to think about the harder questions and finding your true sense of self. Smoking, over-eating, and addictive-drinking are examples of lapses or habits that will prevent us from functioning at our peak while letting you “off the hook” of the hard internal analysis as to why you use these crutches instead of finding better ways to brighten your existence. This may take some major rehabilitation for some individuals but putting it into the too-hard basket won’t make it go away. You can’t drive your life forward if you are always gazing through your rear-view mirror!

Let go of the need to be loved by all. Accept that some people  may think you ‘stink’! It’s important to remember that you cannot please everyone. And while you wouldn’t want to disappoint the people closest to you, they should want you to be happy. As long as you continue to exist to fulfil other people’s ideas of who you should be, you’ll never know your true talents, aptly summed up by Raymond Hull who said: “He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.”

Realize that some people are jealous, afraid, or overwhelmed when a person changes and becomes more enlightened. It’s a threat of changing relationship patterns and it can sometimes cause them to have to face their own foibles that they’ve been trying to escape. Give these people space and compassion, and they may come around in time.

Learn to rely on yourself.

At the heart of finding yourself is believing and relying on yourself. If you don’t have a solid foundational sense of your self, you will be inclined to listen to what others have to say all the time and to be swayed by their insistence on what is wrong, right, and appropriate. When the views of others envelops your own self sense, you’re caught up in the maze and you’re not likely to find yourself any time soon, detouring you from making the right choice for you.

Immerse yourself in.solitude.

Take some time each day to go for a walk and think. Plant yourself on a park bench and look. Take a long, thoughtful road trip. Whatever you do, move away from anything that distracts you from contemplating your life and where you want it to go.

Every person needs time out, whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, single or in a relationship, young or old. Solitude is time for rejuvenation and self-time, for utter peace and for realizing that purposeful “aloneness” is not a bad place to be but rather, a liberating part of your overall existence.

If I had all the resources in the world

If I didn’t need to make money – what would I be doing with my day to day life and why?” Perhaps you’d be painting, or writing, or farming, or exploring the Amazon rain forest.

“What do I not want to look back on in my life and say that I regretted….?” Would you regret never having travelled abroad? Would you regret never having asked that person out, even if it meant risking rejection? Would you regret not spending enough time with your family when you could?

 “Who am I?”

This question is not static and should be one you continue to ask yourself throughout your life. A healthy person continues to reinvent themselves through life; by asking this question, it’s updates your understanding and acceptance of personal change. And instead of answering who you think you ought to be, keep it focused on who you actually are, because in all likelihood that’s a very good answer, warts and al

 Act upon your newly discovered knowledge.

Do the things that you want to do! Pick up those watercolours. Write a short story. Plan a trip to Mombasa, Mt Kenya, a walk at Nairobi Safari Walk. Have dinner with a family member.  Open up. Tell the truth. Whatever it is that you’ve decided you want to be or do, start being and doing it now.

Serve others.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that “the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others”. When you get to see how hard life can be for those in greater need than you, it’s often a wake-up call that puts your own worries, concerns, and petty issues into perspective. It helps you to see what you do have and the opportunities you’ve been able to seize through life. That can fuel a great sense of self because suddenly everything can fall into place for you and you realize what matters most.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfilment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
Viktor Frankl