Healing Through Your Authentic Self

To begin this episode, Healing Through the Authentic Self, we must first understand “What is the Authentic Self?” Our participants described it as the inner flame within that is you and only you. Or that part of you that guides you in life and, when you listen, there is a sense of ease and peace, and when you don’t, there is a sort of cognitive dissonance, friction, and usually pain.

We aren’t our authentic selves when we try to please, say yes when we want to say no, are more concerned with another’s happiness than our own, or when we ‘should’ ourselves. Pleasing others and pushing ourselves to do things that we cringe are things we learn to do as children and young adults that we then think is our personality (but it isn’t).

We are our authentic selves when we follow our gut, our intuition, or when we do things or be certain ways that come naturally and almost without effort.

Why is Being Our True Selves Important for Healing?

There are many examples of how not being our authentic selves can lead to pain and illness.  Karen Curry Parker of Quantum Human Design explains it as:

“There is a direct correlation between how much pain someone is experiencing in their life and the degree to which they are living inauthentically.”

If you think about the time in your life right before you experienced your first symptoms, there might have been a lot of pressure to perform tasks that were difficult yet you couldn’t ask for help, a lot of beating yourself up for not working harder, a lot of sweeping emotions under the carpet or pretending everything was ok because you wanted to look successful, or perhaps saying yes to commitments you didn’t truly desire. Also, explore the decade before your first symptoms because autoimmune diseases take a long time to develop. How long have you been telling yourself and your immune system, ‘it’s not ok to be me?’

To heal you must create a healthy environment with foods, detoxing, and plenty of rest, but also begin the journey back to your truth. There are many authors, doctors, psychologists, and health coaches that point to this path towards healing. Gabor Mate, doctor, and author of the book “When the Body Says No” says:

“Healing… is the reconnection to our authentic self.”

So how do we find and become our authentic selves?

Becoming Your Authentic Self

There are two ways to become our true authentic selves.

One is through more traditional psychological methods – understanding and healing all those critical experiences that steered us away from who we truly are. The second way is to connect with your authentic self directly. Learning who she/he is, and with that knowledge, heal the old beliefs about who you are while beginning to live, day by day, as our true selves.

Unfortunately, if we follow the traditional path, we’ll find that there are many instances, sometimes very minor, that have steered us away from who we are.  Trying to address each one might require years of therapy. Learning and connecting to our authentic self and allowing that part of us to be the driver in our lives from this moment forward would be easier. Not only will it help heal those instances almost spontaneously but also serve to direct our lives and our healing journey.  So how do we do that?

How to Learn About Your Self?

There are three paths to discover and heal through your authentic self.

In the next few months, we will explore all these methods to reconnect to our true selves. Personality assessment tools such as the Enneagram, Strength Finder, Meyers Briggs, or Human Design are just a few examples. Another way to explore is by connecting directly to our inner guidance, our higher selves, our authentic self, and allow ourselves to be lead from within.  There are many methods and styles of connecting. Some examples are morning papers, channeling, automatic writing, muscle testing, dream work, ayahuasca, or hypnotherapy. And lastly, we will be exploring the inner child.

Our inner child has the key to who we are naturally and authentically. When we were born, we were our authentic selves.  As we grew up, parts of us were closed down, swept under the carpet, told it wasn’t ok to be that way, or told we had to be just like the rest of the family (or we decided we didn’t want to be like our family because of the poverty or suffering they experienced). Yet, despite all those changes, the inner child knows and remembers who we truly are and can steer us back to being ourselves once again.

Step one to Healing Through Your Authentic Self

Notice what makes you unique and different from those around you.  We were never meant to be like our parents or our siblings.

Make a list of those traits.  Anything goes.  This isn’t about being good in tennis or Quickbooks but all the quirky things that others around you don’t seem to have.