How much are you willing to lose to find yourself?

Harsh truth: your personality is mostly not you.

Its mostly just strategies and mechanisms that were honed and tweaked throughout the years & that you identify with strongly now.

Your personality is not what is authentic about you.

But there's an upside to this: what is NOT authentic about you tried to keep you safe and surviving. So it's not bad.

It's just... not you. Or not fully you, anyway.

Shadow work is the way to coming back home to yourself. The unabridged, untethered, unapologetic and integrated you.

Shadow work shows you how to embrace the pieces in you that you have shun away long time ago, without which you cannot be authentic.

Start by looking at what you hate/despise/reject in other people. In most cases, that which we hate/reject in others we have rejected within a long time ago and decided was bad, wrong and unwanted.

And it's not just the trait that we hate, it's mostly what we make having that trait mean.

Becoming authentic is not an easy task. It takes work, bravery and commitment to embrace the ugly sides in you (or what you may perceive as ugly) & become ok with them even if everyone around you leaves you for it.

Because authenticity is mostly about giving up the illusion, it usually (not in every case) implies losing people and losing what guaranteed you safety until now.

This can literally mean everything you believed was true about your life.

So the hardest question arises:

How much are you willing to lose to find yourself?