You become what you are

The embodiment of your authenticity is not a marathon with a FINISH LINE at the end. The more committed you are to uncovering your authenticity, the more authentic you are.

You become what you are. That may sound to some of you like a pretty insane statement, making no sense at all. Well if you feel that way, I can only tell you that you're probably coming at this from the mind's perspective, from the logical perspective.

Before I begin, I need to make it clear once and for all that any practice of healing, becoming better, becoming more authentic etc. is a lifelong process, an ongoing commitment that you have with yourself. There is no finish line, no sign to indicate that this is where the practice of embodying who you're meant to be in this lifetime ends and beyond that, there's a promise land.

The whole point and the challenge of becoming and embodying your best version is seeing how you already are all of that and anything else beyond it is either a skill, a new habit or behavior that you need to incorporate or a new capability that you simply have to add to your new identity that you want to embody. But other than that, your journey towards your true self is about discovering that you already are your true and best self. The key word here is discover. What do I mean by that?

We only want to become the things that our being intuitively knows would make us whole, hence authentic. Because authenticity cannot happen in a fragmented individual that has never questioned their thoughts, their emotions, their beliefs and their wants and desires. And all that "becoming who you are" means questioning and examining every little thing that you're dead sure is true about you and integrating the splits that you became aware of as a result of this deeper understanding of yourself, as many splits as you possibly can in this lifetime.

In order to proceed on this journey to discover your authentic self, start by asking yourself this powerful question: If there were no negative consequences for wanting what I want and being my full self unapologetically, who would I be? What would I want?

If you let yourself answer this question in an honest and vulnerable manner will give you an insight into who you actually are, who you were meant to become in this life. You may find how many of your desires and expectations are not yours, they don't belong to you, they've been planted into your brain by your family and society you grew up in and how many of your traits are simply survival mechanisms to keep you belonging in in world that only tolerates what it decides is right about you. We are guided so far away from our authentic truth once we come into this life, that we have a terribly hard time, later on as adults, distinguishing between what we think we want because we were told it's the right thing to want, and what we truly, actually want. And this goes not just for our dreams, aspirations, desires or values, this goes for our innate essence, for our core too. Our personal truth is made up of all of these things that are true about us, but we can't, don't want to or don't know how to own unapologetically in the way that we show up in the world and take up space.

The more painful the negative consequences for owning this personal truth, the farther we go from it. And it all starts in childhood.

Somewhere in our childhood up until 8 ys old our caregivers and our teachers, our mentors made us feel wrong and ashamed for showing our true colors, for being fully authentic. And so we decided that it was safer for us to simply hide that trait, that need or that desire that got us into trouble in the first place and so, as a protective strategy, we had to repress those things (that were true about us in order to never see them again. But by doing so, we grow up estranged from ourselves, we grow into this shell of a person who feels this deep visceral sadness, emptiness, loneliness that we try our best to numb out and silence with different things like booze, drugs, porn, any distraction that comes in handy.

But we cannot silence our truth, we cannot silence our being yearning to become whole again, yearning to call home all aspects in the shadows that we once cast away. So that means that what we do as we heal and integrate splits in our consciousness that we had to fragment in order to survive in our society, what we do is come back home to ourselves and become who we already were and forgot. The healing journey back to yourself is understanding how nothing was ever wrong with you to begin with and the growth that naturally happens as you allow yourself to learn the lessons inherent here is huge.

So wanting to embody your best version which is indistinguishable from your authentic self, is within reach and actually closer than you may think. Let me give 2 examples.

Say your version of the best self that you imagine embodying is someone who is confident. What I will have you do is look for ways in which you already are confident in this current version and I would help you choose to hone in and make use of skills or certain types of activities that will bolster and support the enhancement of your confidence.

Then, the challenge would be to see what shadows lurk in your unconscious that are preventing you from gradually embodying the confidence that you're craving to have and work to alchemize and integrate them so that they won't be in the way of your best self. If fear creeps up while envisioning yourself confident, what do you actually make confidence mean? What associations do you have with confidence? And we'd work on that.

Or another example, say you want to be more ambitious. Well how are you already ambitious? What drives and triggers your ambition? If you consider yourself a lazy person, look at what unmet needs, shadows protect you from being ambitious. The fact that you want to change and transform your life is pretty ambitious in and of itself, wouldn't you say? And there are many examples like these. So my role as your guide would be to point to all the things that are already in you under the guise of untapped potential.

It was never a matter of `Can I do it, can I become my best version` because you already are all of that! Your authenticity (which is the integration of polar opposites and the overcoming of incongruence between your words, emotions, thoughts and actions) this authentic self never goes away, never fades, never atrophies behind and under all the pile of programming, conditioning and trauma you underwent. No, it's there always and forever waiting for you to choose to live from the heart.

You become better and more authentic by becoming more of you, more of who you actually are. And if anyone says it's impossible or too hard to embody this new identity of this best self it is because they don't allow themselves to already be that. It's such a beautiful concept if you think about it, it's such a relief and such a joy to have this epiphany that there is nothing that needs to be done for you to be this authentic self, but simply allow yourself to be who you were meant to be in this life.