“I have to live a glamorous life like all of my friends who graduated from law school with me!”, says your social self, leading you to feel guilty every weekend you’re not slaving away at your computer, responding to emails within minutes of their arrival in your inbox and feeling overwhelmed before you can even start your own agenda for the day.
Meanwhile, the small, childlike voice of your essential self says, “I want to create something I am proud to call my own, and sound like a human being again when I write. It’s like I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be me.”
How is it that we can end up with the demands of the outer trappings of our lives leading us one way, and our innermost desires – the thoughts and feelings we are hiding from – leading us in another?
From the moment we are born, we live in contact with a world of ideas being absorbed into our brains, becoming part of our habitual thinking. We also have an innate intelligence that is present inside us before, during, and after all the habituation. If you’re like me and have lived most of your life without consciously examining this innate layer of intelligence (which some call “intuition”, others call “heart”, and others call “soul”), at first it might seem downright outrageous to even consider that there might even be a distinction between what we’ve been taught to believe versus what we know in our hearts to be true.
All of the “learning” that we do in school is basically training the social self. If we were really lucky, we had one or two outlets in our childhood which allowed us to explore the expressions of our essential self – a sport, a musical instrument, dance, visual arts, collecting comic books, or staring at the sky. And when I say “if we were really lucky”, I mean that many of our essential self expressions are not easily accepted in social settings or approved of by parents, and not always encouraged in school.
The essential self speaks through passion, imagination, and hard-to-explain joy. Continued…
