Tuning into Peace: Your Authentic Self

“If you don’t hear the whispers you have to listen to the screams!” Denise Linn

What whispers to your heart? When you listen deeply what do you hear?

Do you listen deeply? Do you pay attention to your inner life, your longings, desires and dissatisfaction or do you careen through life running to catch up or perhaps running to outdistance the voices that keep threatening to burst through your busy mind and life through the carefully or not so carefully constructed guise that you believe is you?

The concept of an essential, true, or authentic self is a relatively simple one. The authentic self is our fundamental spiritual nature: wonderfully vibrant, alive, and capable of great joy, bliss and unconditional love. While the idea may be simple, the ability to live from this core self may not be easy! Our ego self, our more human nature, exerts a strong influence on our personal expression. With its rules, regulations, judgments and fears it keeps us constricted and small only expressing a dried up version of ourselves.

Many spiritual teachers in recent years have stated that we are learning to embody more of our spiritual essence.Through this process we may eventually bring forth the best parts of ourselves to create a better world individually as well as collectively. Before we at that goal however we are challenged to seek out and release the ego’s negative (albeit protective mechanisms) and ways of being. In spite of what our lower mind may tell us those means are not truly effective in the realization of our most beneficial goals.

Differentiating Authentic Self from Ego Self
The authentic self or spiritual self has an inner focus or center. It directly experiences life through the energy field. In addition, everything is experienced directly without judgment, analysis or even description.

The essential self come into contact with life through feelings in the moment. Its experience is not that of isolated qualities, but more that of a network of relationships, rhythm and vibration. The spiritual self holds an awareness of the interrelatedness of all of life.

By contrast the ego self is outer focused, sees things from a cause- effect perspective and an either/ or polarity. The ego mind is very busy analyzing, categorizing, judging and describing. To its credit, this is a task that fundamentally designed to protect us and keep us safe. Generally for most of us it has run amok with its self appointed agenda!

We need to look through the eyes of self compassion and realize that we have all needed to have some protection in order to make it through whatever we had to face in our lives. Once we realize that we are not to blame for these constructions, but are to be applauded for our creativity, perhaps we can move on. If we simply understand our process in this way, we can open the door to developing different skills that can serve us better in the
future.

Developing our inner selves, learning to connect with our authentic nature, moves us into a personal energy flow that affects our entire life in a strong and positive way. Our energy system is the means through which we contact and receive information regarding people, places and things. Our inner self or higher nature communicates through the energy system. We call it intuition. We are in constant contact with this information but tend to not understand it, discount it or ignore it. Emotional reactions to people and events, half formed or unexplained feelings and hunches are all ways that our psyche is trying to inform us of the true nature of our interactions. Our thoughts, wishes, desires and attitudes are also a part of this mix. This can make it tricky to sort out what message is coming from which source. It is much more effective to have an open, clear and flowing system in order to be informed in the best possible way regarding our lives.