Your Past Doesn’t Have To Be Your Future

I’ve never been good at being dishonest to others.

But I can be pretty good at lying to myself.

Manipulating the truth when engaging with others would always make me cringe, a painful side effect of knowingly not honoring the truth. Yet that cringe could easily be suppressed when I’d engage myself in discussing how I was not honoring the truth of my own authentic self. Lying to yourself by not accepting your true self is quite traumatic. But if that’s all you’ve known, it doesn’t really feel like you’re being emotionally dishonest with yourself at all.

We instinctively know when we are living inconsistently with our authentic self. Life feels like a compromise, we know we are settling, we disregard our value system and boundaries, we’re forcing what we know isn’t for us, often ignoring the clearly visible red flags and warning signs in hopes of making something work that really was never designed to work. It’s a painful process to witness or experience.

Somewhere along our life’s journey we felt our authentic self wasn’t good enough. Childhood is often a place where the vision of who we are is contorted and molded into who we are told to be. Parental expectations, peer pressure, conditional love, and a fear of being alone are powerful forces that can dim even the brightest of lights, especially the light of an individual’s sense of identity and worth. We learn to conform and fit in, abandoning who we really are in the process. Life experience simply reinforces the narrative as history repeats itself again and again and again.

It’s the only life we’ve lived yet that persistent inner voice keeps trying to tell us it’s not the life we are here to live.

But do we trust ourselves to live such an aligned life?

Stepping into our authentic self can feel quite daunting. Perhaps unnatural. Because it goes against the life we’ve long been living. It requires us to become the center of our own universe rather than just revolving around the soul-crushing expectations and demands of others. It requires us to tell ourselves a new story of accepting who we really and teaching others how we will now be treated.

The authentic You will certainly meet with resistance, especially from those who’ve benefitted from the boundaries that were fearfully never set. Resistance in the form of the withholding of love or even threats of isolation and abandonment as “punishment” for our own evolution. Have these people brought you closer to the real you or have they simply perpetuated more of what you’ve come to expect and accept?

Screw ‘em.

Your inauthentic self attracted them into your life and their predatory energies have always been about extracting from you knowing you were conditioned to let them do so. They lack the emotional capacity and willingness to help you create an environment in which the real you can grow and thrive. Their resistance to you embracing your authentic self can be quite painful. It’s not easy releasing those who will not benefit from your metamorphosis into your highest self. But as the real you takes hold, your alignment with authenticity will attract the right people who will honor and respect and encourage you on your path of reclaiming your authentic self, people who will accept you and celebrate you in your entirety.

There is an unconditional peace and strength which can only be found living a life aligned with one’s authentic self. It’s a beautifully defiant and courageous act of self acceptance and self love in a world which has seemingly worked to conspire against you. Passivity transcends into power. The energy of living a life aligned with your true values, vision, and ideals will create experiences also aligned with that energy. It’s a new paradigm, deciding that your authentic self is no longer subject to compromise and then building a world – your world – around this new paradigm.

Trust in yourself. Trust in this process. Trust that your new direction will take you exactly where you know you were created to go.

It always does.

It’s been said we’re just one decision away from a completely different life.

Honoring your authentic self is a decision which will do just that.

It’s yours to claim.

If you choose to.

Your past has gotten you here. It doesn’t have to be your future.

Ready?

Photo by Soroush Karimi on Unsplash