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When you truly know who you are, you are in a place in which you can make better decisions. Most of us have the understanding that being true to yourself is finding yourself and defining yourself on your terms, or acting on a set of values or virtues you subscribe to. I am highlighting in this article a different understanding of being true to yourself, namely acting from a place of your true nature.

In this blog post I share with you my own struggle of discerning who I am from all the haphazard, random and self-diminishing self-talk we are exposed to on a daily basis and which often determines how we act and how we feel about ourselves.

Be in Touch with Your True Nature

There was a point at which I felt unhappy with the way my life was unfolding. One year ago I declared bankruptcy, since a book with the title, “A New Language for Life, Happy No Matter What!” with a publisher in New York did not go anywhere. This did not bother me so much. What bothered me most was that despite all my accomplishments in the world, despite my spiritual evolution, and despite all the positive affirmations I had created, I felt that there was a part of me that had not come to the surface. I felt that I was not in touch with my true nature.

I felt that all my accomplishments and spiritual awakening were on top of something else. Something that was not addressed, not revealed. The essence of my being had not found voice in the expression in my life. I felt inauthentic to my true nature. I found that I was not true to myself.

I decided to look at my life from the only place that made sense to me, which was in the middle of my life. Being true to myself began when I started to look at what I was responding to in my life. I started to make the distinction between what is actually occurring in my life and my response to it.

The Tyranny of the Random Voice

I noticed that what was occurring for me – my thoughts and the feelings they evoked – were pretty random. What I mean by random is that I had very little control over their occurring. Sometimes these thoughts had an imposing character and seemed to carry a voice that was directly speaking to me. I started calling this random phenomenon “the random voice.”

I noticed that when I was present to something new, to a new possibility in my life, to a sense of a new freedom or when I stepped out of a familiar pattern, the random voice became very loud with immobilizing and diminishing comments.

Some examples of the random voice:

“You can’t do that!

“You should be ashamed of yourself!”

“You are out of your mind!”

“How dare you!”

“What are you thinking!”

I can give many examples of the random voice occurring in different situations. Sometimes the random voice was prompted by just something that was happening in my life. Sometimes when I made a mistake. Sometimes when I took a risk. Sometimes when I just bumped myself against something. And sometimes when I was just alone and I allowed for my thoughts.

Realize How You Have Built up Your Life

I kept a diary. I realized that I had this unexamined relationship with this random phenomenon that often determined how I felt about myself, what I did, or did not do. I realized that the random voice determined whether I give urgency to something, or not. The random voice set my pace. It steered my life. It created the idea of a future. It was what organized my behaviour. I had very little control over its random appearance in my awareness – yet it determined the course of my life.

I came to realize that the different ways in which I had been reacting over the years to the random voice were in fact ineffective and did not give me a sense of freedom. I often felt captured like a fly in a bottle bouncing back and forth against the glass wall, never really being able to find my way out of the bottle towards my freedom. For example, in the past when something bothered me, and stayed with me for a little while, I tried to figure it out. I looked for solutions, hoping that it would go away. I looked for explanations. When I engaged with the occurrence, I found out to my annoyance that the noise of the random voice only became louder. Sometimes I succumbed to it, hoping it would give me relief or it would just go away. None of these responses really give me peace of mind or were satisfying. It never let me fly out of the bottle. It brought me to realize how I had built up my life one way or another in a futile reaction to the random voice:

– Decisions I took in my life

– Relationships that I ended

– Choices I had made in my life, in my career, regarding my lifestyle

– How it set some of my preferences

– How it set my boundaries, what I saw as possible, what I could and could not do

– How I viewed myself

– How I expressed myself

– How I acted in social situations

– The ultimate trap: blaming my parents or my circumstances for the burden and the lack of

freedom I experienced in my relationship to the random voice

You Can’t Separate Yourself from Your Occuring Reality

On my journey of awareness, I realized that I cannot separate myself from the occurrence. This is where the problem lies. I am the occurrence, whether I like it or not. Any attempt to separate myself from it – by questioning it, challenging it, or finding a solution – only strengthened what was occurring for me. I noticed that in my response to what was occurring, language itself defined me inside of an experience.

I didn’t like some of the things the random voice threw at me. I often felt annoyed. I often felt entrapped in the debilitating and random occurrence that seemed to grab my being and immobilized me.

You Can’t Change Your Occurring Reality

I started to notice that most of my responses to the random voice had something fundamental in common. Something which was so obvious that I had not seen it before; something that had escaped my attention. I realized that when something occurred in my awareness that I did not like and which seemed to grab my being, all of my interactions were in fact geared towards a futile attempt to undo or change what was already occurring for me. I realized that any active engagement with every thought I was having had a similar intent behind it, which was an intention to change my occurring reality. How could I possible change something that had already occured as existing? Changing an occurence, trying to get rid of it, or denying its existence now seemed absurd to me.

The overpowering truth and logic of this insight gave me the trust and and the strength to start a new journey that went against anything I had ever tried before, and went beyond anything that was ever taught to me.

Allowing and Letting Be

I was determined to awaken to my true nature, and was willing to take all risks, and go against anything that I was familiar with and lived in the world as a convention. I felt frustrated, entrapped, but determined to discover the truth about myself and life.

This insight gave me the courage and the strength to let be totally whatever occurred in my awareness, to allow for it and start looking at what was presenting itself to me from this perspective.

I became aware that the many paths I had previously traveled in my life in order to gain more freedom had mostly to do with my circumstances. This time I was determined that the way to free myself in the moment of what was occurring for me as diminishing and disempowering, was by letting the occurrence be totally, and see where this would lead me. I decided to take this on as an experiment, neither in defeat, nor in surrender, but from a place of curious allowing.

Realizing that I can’t change my occurring reality, and that neither can I separate myself from my occurring reality, I decided like Odysseus travelling on his way home from Troy to Attica to withstand the siren-song of the random voice, and totally let be and allow  for my occurring world. My compass, and what gave me direction was my commitment to existence: knowing that I can’t impact the existence of what is already occurring in my awareness. I decided to accept this as a fundamental truth, the only truth I knew at that moment, when there was nothing else to hang on to. I decided to honour my commitment to existence – no matter what – and was willing to discover where this would lead me….. perhaps to a new awareness of my own existence.

What started to unfold was a journey of discovery of what was true for me.

The Journey of Awareness

In the beginning the journey was chaotic, and I felt like I was sitting in a fast running rolling coaster, being jerked from side to side, up and down. Sometimes I had to take myself away from the occurrence, because it was too much to be with. After going through a period of annoyance and frustration, realizing that I had absolutely no control over the random occurrence of what presented itself in my awareness, I started to ask myself the following questions:

What is true for me?
Who am I?
Where am I in the daily occurrence of my life?
How does intention manifest itself my life?
What is human life all about?

I discovered that what was occurring and my awareness of the occurrence were one, and that this was not how I usually lived my life. I noticed that any engagement with the random voice
took me away from my true sense of presence, from the sense of my true nature. I noticed that when I react, when I interact with my occurring world, no longer my relationship to what was occurring was that of an occurring reality, but the interaction itself threw me in a relationship of separateness from what was occurring.

Be True to Yourself

At some point I found peace and gained in my capacity to let be and allow for what was occurring, no matter what the content of the occurring reality was. I started to see what I was attached to, and what I was inclined to engage with. I realized that the future was just a thought, and that my engagement with it would give it suchness. I realized that when a thought or emotion carried suchness, it started to organize my behaviour. I came to realize that I am the experience, and there is nothingindependent from my awareness that I am experiencing.

I had discovered that any intention to change or deny the existence of my occurring reality – rather than letting it be and allowing for it – interfered with the discovery of what was true for me and interfered with awakening to my true nature. I became less reactionary in my responses and started to act more in harmony with my occurring world and my true nature.

I had discovered that being true to myself started out with a willingness to allow for my occurring world – no matter what and that this will lead me to discover what is true for me and act in alignment with my true nature.

Making Better Decisions

Once I realized that most of the time I was not responding to my occurring reality, but was reacting to the random voice and I was able to let be the random voice, I started making much better decisions. I started to listen to my own truth.

Then a strange and wondrous thing happened…..

– Problems I had wrestled with for years came to peace
– My relationship with my wife improved dramatically. We stopped fighting.
– Money came into my life exactly at the time I needed it
– My teenage daughter started to excel in her education
– My productivity increased dramatically
– No longer was I hesitant in my self-expression
– Writing became easier for me, and more expressive
– I made my first perfect Hollandaise sauce
– I felt dramatically better in my well-being, and needed only five hours’ sleep
– I felt genuinely happy with far less material affluence