The Purpose of Life is to Know Yourself, Love Yourself, Trust Yourself, and Be Yourself

Know Yourself

ALL of You is Welcome, Wanted and Needed in this World

Know Thyself: This ancient Delphic maxim has rung true throughout the ages but holds especially true for today’s mothers — the guides of the future generation. But chances are there was a time in your life when you didn’t feel safe to truly be yourself. You had to sacrifice the unpopular and unappreciated parts of yourself to fit into your family and peer group to get your most basic needs met for connection and social engagement. At the time, disowning parts of yourself was in fact a very good idea! It ensured you survived the psychological minefield of your childhood. But now? Now that you’re no longer at the mercy of your nuclear family or middle school peer group, chances are your old ways of getting your needs met are no longer working so well. Now you NEED those unpopular and unappreciated parts of yourself to free you from anxiety and make you feel safe, secure, and whole again. 

The war of psychological survival ends when you have sufficiently developed your inner and outer resources for mature self-care. . . . healthy friends, mentors, and a dependable social network — people who really care about you . . .  your authenticity; your skills in emotional integration, conflict resolution, self-sustenance, and social-life management . . . and your skills in generating emotional safety, intimacy, and belonging. The war is over, in other words, when you have cultivated the emotional and social skills to nurture yourself in the face of harsh criticism or rejection by someone who matters to you . . .

— Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind

Signs You Have Disowned and Untapped Life Force

Life force energy — Shakti — is the source of health and vitality in your life. Stress, anxiety, panic attacks, and chronic pain or illness are all tell-tale signs you have disowned and untapped life force energy tied up in imbalanced perspectives, disempowered narratives, inauthentic values, stored survival stresses, and trapped procedural memories — just waiting to be reclaimed, expressed and enjoyed.

You see, if you disown parts of yourself, you don’t have access to ALL of yourself — all of your juicy regenerative life force — your inherent power — and are therefore dis-empowered. 

To empower yourself you must reclaim and own ALL of yourself — not just the socially acceptable parts but the unacceptable parts too, the good and the glorious as well as the bad and the ugly bits too.

Only when you have access to ALL of yourself and ALL of your power, do you finally feel powerful enough to fend for yourself — and that self-reliance is what makes you feel safe, secure, serene, sexy, sensuous and POWERFUL.

Only when you’ve reclaimed all that power do you actually feel and act like the kind of person you can be proud of. Only then do you really know, love, trust and live as your true authentic self. Only then do you know the purpose of your life. 

And only when you’ve reclaimed your power and purpose can you raise children who don’t need to disown so much of themselves to get acceptance because they have a mother who sees and knows them for who they truly are and doesn’t demand they cut off so much of themselves to fit in Cinderella’s metaphorical slipper. When a mother knows the fullness of her own power she isn’t intimidated by the fullness of her child’s massive life force, because she knows how to match it and celebrate it!

Ways of Getting to Know Yourself

Whether tropical or sidereal, astrology (including Human Design and the Gene Keys) is an ancient, tried-and-true tool for self-discovery. Investing in a simple or in-depth birth chart reading — a symbolic map of the heavens and the celestial geometries that imprinted on you at the time of your birth — just may open your eyes to many forgotten aspects of yourself.

The archetypal language of astrology offers a powerful tool for understanding varied human natures. . . . In Latin the word disaster, dis meaning ‘apart’ and aster meaning ‘star,’ forewarns us of the unfortunate outcome of losing our connection to the stars . . .

— Niki Dewart & Elizabeth Marglin, The Mother’s Wisdom Deck

 

The following practices are also tremendously useful in uncovering and restoring displaced aspects of Self:

• Menstrual Cycle Awareness
• Journaling
• Shadow Integration
• Grief Work 
• Authentic Value Determination
  
• Autobiographical Story Work 
  
• Somatic Capacity Building
• Emotional Digestion and Assimilation

 (Watch for future posts on these powerful practices.)

Love Yourself

Once you truly know yourself there’s no way not to love yourself. Because you are an infinite being of love and light, a unique expression of Divine Consciousness — a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event! There has never been anyone exactly like you, nor ever will be. 

Yet you may still believe there are parts of you that are genuinely unlovable, parts of you that would be better left on the chopping block. But the truth is, nature's intelligence far exceeds your ego's assessment of what's good or bad. Nature's wisdom ensures that every part of you exists for a reason. Every human characteristic exists because it's useful. If a specific trait weren't useful it would have been phased out by natural selection. The trick is to become so familiar with all your traits that you recognize them when they present themselves and use them consciously at your discretion, instead of letting them get the best of you.

You've got to learn to love all parts of yourself. How are you going to love yourself if you're trying to get rid of half of yourself? . . . That's like trying to get a one-sided magnet, which is unobtainable. If you cut the magnet in half and try to get a monopole, you won't find it.

— Dr John Demartini

You are special beyond compare and the fullness of who you are is wanted and needed in this world! But if that’s not the message you received as a child it’s going to take some work to unlearn all the lies you’ve told yourself to keep yourself unthreateningly small and safe. It takes work but it’s totally doable and absolutely necessary if you plan to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime shot at being YOU! And it’s absolutely necessary if you’re going to raise kiddos who know and love themselves as well. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to your children to love yourself unconditionally.

Ways to Show Yourself More Love and Build Self-Trust

• Learn Your Personal Needs and How to Get Them Met
• Treat Yourself the Way You Wish Others Treated You
• Have Gentle and Realistic Expectations of Yourself
• Slow Down and Give Yourself the Time You Deserve
• Stop Betraying Yourself
• Consistently Show Up for Yourself
• Become Your Own Best Friend
• Schedule Nonnegotiable Alone Time to Do Something Special for Yourself
• Set Healthy Boundaries with Others and Your Inner Critic
• Take Accountability for Your Shortcomings While Holding Firm to Your Self-Worth as a Perfectly-Imperfect, Evolving Human Being
• Remember: You are always ENOUGH Just as You Are!

Trust Yourself

If you struggle to trust yourself chances are you're letting the mistakes of your past get in the way of trusting yourself in the present moment.

We all have very good reasons not to trust ourselves. We've all betrayed ourselves badly, repeatedly, shamefully, and knowingly. . . . Ignoring your own needs and deserting yourself is a universal mistake.

— Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control

Life involves trial-and-error. It’s just a fact. You can spend your energy avoiding, hiding, or denying your mistakes OR you can spend your energy learning from them. When you make mistakes, it’s tempting to lose faith in your abilities and stop trusting yourself to branch out and try new things — to stop learning and growing. But upon closer inspection of your mistakes and missteps you’ll quickly realize something remarkable: You actually did a pretty damn good job and you LEARNED! You may not have navigated the situation perfectly, but you did a heck of a job with the limited tools and understanding you had at the time, AND YOU GOT THROUGH!!! One way or another you survived (sitting here reading this is proof!). You are a survivor. It wasn’t easy but YOU MADE IT and you ought to be sooo proud of yourself. You may have fallen down a million times, but you got up and as long as you keep getting up, nothing in life can ever keep you down and you can trust yourself to grapple with anything life throws your way. And don’t you forget it.

Paradoxically, the people who trust themselves the most are usually the people who have betrayed themselves most profoundly, but then made the decision to walk themselves home—inch by inch—to their authentic selves.

— Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control

Be Yourself

When you know yourself, love yourself and trust yourself you get to finally luxuriate in being your full magnanimous Self. You have a heart of gold and can trust that being yourself is the greatest gift you can give to the world. Being yourself is the greatest thing you can do with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that is YOU.

How To Be Yourself

Authenticity is the Name of the Game!

As you get to KNOW yourself, you begin to truly understand what makes you tick, your likes and dislikes, your motives and your heartfelt longings, what you truly value and what no longer deserves your time and attention. You step out of struggle and into your full potential. When you step into your wholeness you remedy all that is fractured within yourself and your ancestral line. The most powerful thing you can do with your life is to live it as the highest, truest and fullest version of yourself.

The magnificence of who you are, is far greater than the fantasy you might have imposed on yourself.

— Dr John Demartini

Living as your most authentic self requires a conscious effort to live in alignment with what’s truly in favor of your highest and greatest good. Taking good care of your body, mind, spirit, heart and soul — doing the things that genuinely light you up (and the necessary things that get you there) while saying a confident ‘no’ to everything else.

You’ve reclaimed ALL of yourself, ALL of your power, and you're familiar with ALL of your traits and use them wisely. You know yourself and the purpose of your life and are proud of the life you live. You do what you love and you love what you do. And because you know and love yourself so fully, you know, love and celebrate the fullness of your children, and the world is truly a better place for your being in it!

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YOUR TURN

Tell Us: What holds you back from your fullest authentic expression? What can you do to address it?