How to Connect with Your True Self

Are you in touch with your true self? Or do you think or feel disconnected from your essence?

When you are young, you naturally connect with your core nature. You feel it, know it, express it.

As you get older, however, you begin to suppress your true self. Maybe someone criticizes or judges you for “being you.” Or maybe you get in trouble for expressing yourself. Any experience that didn’t feel good might have caused you to assume your core nature—or parts of it—were not accepted or acceptable. It no longer felt right or okay to be yourself.

You became afraid to be authentic. So you hid parts of yourself away…essential parts.

And you forgot them. Over time, it seemed you disconnected from these parts…even your essence.

Losing Yourself

You aren’t alone. Many people feel they’ve lost themselves.

This week while leading a group coaching session, one of my students expressed her anguish over not having any idea of her purpose in this lifetime. She couldn’t connect with her passion or the things that used to make her feel happy and fulfilled let alone confident and enthusiastic. She so wanted to express her core gifts, and she couldn’t figure out how.

Can you relate? I can.

I shut away some essential parts of myself to please someone else. I wanted him to love and accept me, but he didn’t resonate with these core parts of my being. So I stopped expressing them. And now I’m struggling to feel connected to them again.

You are Connected to Your True Self

Here’s the truth: You are and always have been connected. You still know who you are at your core. And those parts of yourself that you hid away and stopped expressing didn’t go away or become separate from you. They just remain dormant…waiting for you to awaken them. They are lurking in the shadows hoping you will call them back into the light.

Part of living in this physical world involves a process of forgetting who we are—spiritual beings having a human experience (not the other way around)—and then remembering once again. We begin to believe we are not connected to our spirit or essence or a Higher Power. Then we have to reconnect with the fact that we are and always have been connected.

You and I don’t need to go through a process of reconnecting with our essence or God. We need to go through a process of reconnecting with the truth—a truth we know at our very core.

3 Ways to (Re)Connect with Your True Self

That still leave you…me…many of us…struggling to reconnect with that truth and to strongly feel in relationship with our true selves—our essence.

How do you regain that connection? Here are three ways to accomplish that goal:

1. Meditate: Spend time daily quietly being with yourself. Use the meditation time to let go of other people’s perceptions of you, your need to please others or keep yourself safe, and any feeling that you are not okay just as you are.

Be who you are. Sit with yourself. Get reacquainted.

Maybe ask yourself some questions and allow your true self to answer them. You can ask, What are you like? What do you enjoy? What do you feel passionate about? What is your purpose in life? See what answers come back.

2. Journal: Take the time to journal about the same questions you asked in your meditation. Or ask others, such as What made you hide from me or why did I hide you away? What instances or situations caused you to feel unsafe expressing yourself?

Make lists of things you used to do and enjoy. Write about times in your youth when you felt most happy, passionate, excited, or purposeful. (Then meditate on those times and try to get back into the feeling space of those past experiences.)

3. Step into yourself.### Take some baby steps that allow you to express your true self. Or take some huge leaps!

Maybe you pick up a paintbrush if you used to paint. Maybe you take a writing class if you dreamed of becoming a writer. Maybe you die your hair purple, give your clothes to Goodwill and buy a new wardrobe that “feels right,” or begin a meditation practice. Do something…even something small…that allow you to feel connected with the “real” you.

Despite anything you think, feel or have been told, your true core essence is alive and well within you. You just need to allow it to come out and express itself. If you don’t do that, you will never live your life fully and authentically.

It’s safe. And it’s time…Step back into your true self.

Photo courtesy of greekfood-tamystika / Pixabay.com