Imagine Your Reality

“Love is the truth of who you really are” Ptaah

 I came across this quote on Sunday night. I was meeting up with some of the people from the Baraka institute, and I’d gotten some constructive feedback for my future website. I hit the home button and was directed to a page where this quote was displayed.

Right now I’m doing a year long dedication to the value or element of love in my life, so finding this quote was indicative of a lesson to be learned from it. I’ve been learning a lot of lessons about love, since I started my year long dedication in October 2007, but there’s still a lot to learn, and the lessons are…quite challenging. 

I hadn’t exactly been in touch with the truth of who I really am. Over the last few years, I’ve been doing a fairly intense regime of meditations, which has helped me uncover a lot of who I am, but really being in touch with the truth of who I am…that’s something I’ve only really begun doing recently, both in terms of pursuing life coaching as a career path and in terms of starting to honestly communicate with myself about what my values are, what I want, and whether I’ve really been living a life aligned with my values. 

The truth of who you really are. When I think of that, I think of a book I’ve been reading lately, Finding your own North Star. In it the author discusses the social and essential self. The social self is the self who lives according to what society wants. It’s the self, which is concerned with social consensus, and everyone being happy and agreeing with what you do. The essential self, on the other hand, is your values, your desires, what sings when your following your calling. It’s the self that you really are, the self that provides you a sense of mission.

These two selves are important. The essential self is important because it provides your values, your calling, your sense of identity as it applies to fulfilling those values. For instance, my pursuit of life coaching is a recognition that as a career it is much closer to my essential self, than say a career as a fast food worker or a corporate lawyer. Neither of those jobs would bring any sense of fulfillment to my innermost values, though those jobs might do that for other people. The social self is important because it helps you navigate the social realities you are in, finds people who can be important to you, and provides a sense of belonging. The two can be successfully balanced, though to do so, you really need to listen to your essential self, and help your social self find the people who are in alignment with your values and can be supportive, as well as sometimes constructively critical, albeit with an open mind, and no assumptions made in offering the criticisms (This ties into an essential skill of life coaching, which is the skill of not knowing, more on that in a bit).

If love is being in touch with the truth of you who really are, then to me it seems that love, at least as it involves self-love, is recognizing what your values are and how they inform your actions, both towards yourself and others. While love is an emotion, it’s the action one takes that really defines the truth of that emotion, or rather what it means to feel that emotion. It’s not enough to say you feel an emotion, because anyone can say it. It’s the actions that occur, which really determine if the emotion is felt. Until you can demonstrate these actions towards yourself, it’s likely you won’t feel self-love and there’s some truth to the concept that if you don’t love yourself, it’s hard to love another or be loved by another.

When I think about love, and being in touch with it, I think of my choice to pursue certification of life coaching as an example of taking action to get in touch with my essential self. Instead of continuing to pursue a career I don’t feel very enthused about, I’m choosing to get in touch with my inner values, and find out how I can manifest those in my life. I’m choosing to engage in a genuine relationship with myself and find out what actions I need to take to really manifest that love in my life that shows me I’m in touch with who I really am.

But I think this principle of action as it applies to emotions is also integral to relationships you have with other people. If I feel love for someone else, am I automatically in touch with who that person really is? Not necessarily. I could have an idealized perspective about that person.

And this is where we come back to the art of not knowing. It’s very easy to make judgements about people or situations, especially if you only have partial information. Those judgements can also lead to assumptions, to thinking you know more about a situation or a person than you do. And sometimes because you do love someone, you might expect that person to be in touch with you, to know how you feel or think about a situation. In the end, however, those assumptions can lead to problems, because chances are the person isn’t as in touch as you think, not because s/he doesn’t love you, but because s/he simply isn’t you and if most of us have trouble being in touch with ourselves, just imagine how much more trouble we have being in touch with each other.

The art of not knowing is the recognition that you can never know everything about a situation and the only way you can get more information is by asking with an open mind, instead of making assumptions. This asking of questions is an action. It is an action that shows a curious, open mind, but also a desire to understand what the other person is feeling and thinking. Further actions can follow, in a manner that allows each person to demonstrate the emotions felt, and more importantly get in touch with the truth of the self and the truth of the other person.

Are you in touch with the truth of who you really are? If so what actions are you taking to demonstrate that truth?