How can you reclaim your true self when you’re the reason for the separation in the first place?
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that
separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery,
and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.”
~ Thomas Merton, Elected Silence: The Autobiography of Thomas Merton
I am always intrigued and delighted by how certain themes tend to appear during my coaching sessions with entrepreneurs. This past week was no exception. Every client is grappling with their own version of the same issue: reclaiming their true selves and living in concert with what truly brings them alive.
What feels like freedom.
How do we cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves as Merton suggests?
A Creative Point of View
The answer is found in the open focus of a creator. This state is, without a doubt, one of our most precious commodities for loving life in consonant vibration with every living thing, most notably ourselves. From this ledge, we have a twenty-twenty grasp of our point of view.
For entrepreneurs and creators, our point of view is the mirepoix base of our secret sauce. The vision, voice, perspective, and unique genius that make us who we are. Like no one else. This is what calls our audience, our clients, our community, right to us. Our sexy siren song that we play simply by living in accord with our true selves. This is the ethereal realm of the deepest connection we can experience. It is the origin of creative worlds powered by our unique fingerprints.
It is an inside-out job. And we cannot get there if we are spending too much time looking at what everyone else is doing and saying, obsessed with the notion that everyone except us has it all figured out. Wielding a stick to measure our progress and worth and convince ourselves how far short we fall.
Reclaim Your True Self: An Inside Job
Here, we are trapped in the hideous pursuit of compare and despair that is the kill switch on our sense of self and our ability to connect with our intuition. Here, we are stopped from receiving juicy intel and insights that can only be born within the stock of our cauldron. Remember: when we are disconnected from ourselves, our efforts to connect with the market falter, sputter, and drop.
How might you open the aperture of who you are? Where do you need to turn your attention away from others so that you can see what only you can see? How can you reclaim your true self? What can we fashion from the images that appear only to us? And why should we bother?
When we have the open focus of a creator, we are more optimistic, which ushers in our ability to see more possibilities, creativity’s raw material and driving force. We muster up courage to make bold moves in our work and lives. We refuse to stall out and stay stuck. We discern and decide, letting our choices power our creativity with a confidence born from focusing on what we love. We more easily find meaning and enjoy feelings of fulfillment, a greater engagement with the world, and access to success.
An Exercise to Reclaim Your True Self
It’s essential that you reclaim your true self. Here’s how you can begin. Block out a minimum of two hours to devote to your own wellbeing, thinking, and access to your open focus. Take yourself and your journal on a solo date to a park bench, a café, the woods, or the shore.
Turn your phone off. You can’t reclaim your true self if you’re distracted.
Open your journal and begin doodling all kinds of different shapes, patterns, and marks. Draw spirals, boxes, circles, squigglies, outlines of fish, birds, clouds…whatever. The point is not what you create on the page. The point is to access your brain and your heart.
Just doodle for about 10 minutes and let yourself drop into no mind. Settle yourself down. Sooth your overly active brain.
Then, turn to a new page and write the following:
“You know, what I really want in order to feel truly free is ….”
And then spend one hour answering that question. Write in sentence fragments, bullets, or sketch rough pictures of what you really want. What is the one thing you want, that could help you reclaim your true self and true power? Maybe you want time to write and finish your book. Sketch out a pen and paper. Or, maybe you ache to travel. Write down all the places you dream of exploring. Perhaps there’s a personal decision weighing on your mind that your soul knows requires a courageous move. Write it down.
Resist your Inner Censor’s insistence that what you are writing is not possible, is unattainable, is too expensive, too foolhardy, or too risky. Just keep writing and sketching for an hour.
When the hour is up, take stock of your journal … the contents of your heart, what you need to reclaim your true self. Do not try to “solve” anything just yet. Turn the matter over to your subconscious mind and let it soak. Your mind will work the puzzle for you in the background. When you are ready for the ideas and access to your intuition to come through, return to your place of solitude with your journal.
Open the Valve
Open the valve and write. Solutions, ideas, and unique problem-solving will come to you. Get it all down.
The ability to hear ourselves think is a sacred and rare superpower. When we get out of the clamor, we can come to know what is and is not us. When we turn away from the din on our screens, we can feel and tap into the verdant void of silence and stillness. The quiet and calm are unnerving at first, but if we recognize we are merely reacting to old habits of distraction, we can settle into this new state.
Open focus provides us with an expansive state of being that bends time and coaxes us across the threshold from clinging control to empowered self-trust. Once through this portal, we inhabit a world of momentum, working with a tempo kept by the drumbeat of us. Energized and expectant of serendipity, we seek and find what our minds believe to be true and create what only we can create.
This is how you reclaim your true self, and the well of your unique creative power.
