Who is the Real Me?

When we are not aware of or connected to our internal power, we are not really ourselves. At the same time, living out of touch with ourselves prevents us from accessing our own power. And so we are left with a chicken or egg problem.

Sounds simplistic but think about it: if you are trying to constantly be someone else in order to please someone, to escape from something, to obtain something or for whatever other reason, how can that someone else have access to your power? That someone else you are trying to be, the persona you are building, is not real. It will not have a reservoir of personal power to tap into. It will have to rely on getting some power from others, and this might come from pleasing them or from being admired by them. This energy influx will be a poor substitute for the real power base that remains untapped.

When we are not authentic, we are weak. To maintain an image or a mask we spend incredible amounts of energy, because this image or mask is not naturally anchored into our power base. We have to constantly work at maintaining it.

Being authentic, on the other hand, is effortless. It comes naturally to us to be who we are. So then what happens that prevents us from being true to ourselves?

We may care too much about what others say or think about us. If we are not fully anchored within ourselves, if we leave a little piece of us inside the heads of everyone we want to please and try to assess ourselves through their eyes, our energy is not fully home. We are not grounded. It is very difficult to be grounded and not be authentic. If you want to check how authentic you are in a given situation, check your grounding.

Or maybe we don’t want to hurt the feelings of others so we refrain from being fully ourselves, from saying what we think or doing what we feel is right for us. For a while, we achieve our purpose: we don’t hurt them. We hurt our own selves instead, and as a result we lose energy. We then struggle to keep the mask we have created and we lose even more energy. Then we end up depleted quite quickly and when there is no more energy to spend on trying to keep the mask on, we lose it anyway and revert back to who we are naturally. Which hurts the very same person we initially tried to avoid hurting. Except that in the meantime, we have depleted ourselves too. It's not really worth it.

I’m not saying it’s good to be insensitive to the feelings of others. By all means, find a compassionate way to express what you need to express and then live your truth. If you don’t do it you will end up hurting them anyway, and hurting yourself too.

But what I'm saying is that there's only so much time that we can play the game of being someone else. In the long run it never works out. It leaves us depleted and it depleted the others too.

So how to find the real me? It's the one persona that gives you the most energy. When your energy is high, and things flow easily, it means you're authentic, there's not a shortcut around it.

Energy never lies.