Be who you are. That is all that you ever volunteered for.
Be who you are, that is all that was ever required.
Be who you are, that is all that was ever needed.
Be who you are.
—BARBARA BRENNAN
• Becoming a fully embodied, loving, and authentic self is life’s great work, for which we are all still in training.
• The seeds of true self may be found in any of life’s experiences, including what we deem successes and failures, triumphs and tribulations.
• A vital brain, a vibrant mind, and an open heart allow for the possibility of awakening to true self, but they do not guarantee it. We must still learn to listen deeply, discern wisely, and honor courageously the yearnings of the still, small voice within.
Reb Zusya, a righteous rabbi, lay dying. His disciples surrounded him and were astounded to see that their teacher and sage, a man whom all regarded as a model of appropriate thought and deed, shook with fear at the prospect of death and judgment.
“Master,” said his disciples, “why do you fear God’s judgment? You have lived life with the faith of Abraham. You have been as nurturing as Rachel. You have feared the Divine as Moses himself. Why do you fear judgment?”
Zusya took a deep, shuddering breath, and replied, “When I come before the throne of judgment, I am not afraid that God will ask, ‘Why were you not more like Abraham?’ After all, I can say, ‘O God, you know best of all that I am Zusya, not Abraham. How then should I have been more like Abraham?’ And if God should ask, ‘Why were you not more caring, like Rachel?’ I can respond, ‘Master of the Universe, you made me to be Zusya, not Rachel. If you wanted me to be more like Rachel, you should have made me more like Rachel.’ And should the True Judge say, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Moses?’ I can respond, ‘O Mysterious One, who am I, Zusya, that I should be like Moses?’ But I tremble in terror, because I think the Eternal will ask me another question. I believe I will be asked, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Zusya?’ And when I am asked this, how shall I respond?”
The above is a Hasidic tale, graciously shared in this version by Rabbi David Kominsky, who summarized the story’s lesson in this way: “We seek not to become the perfect person, but to be the person we are meant to be.”1
To become the person we are meant to be may seem a simple thing. “How could I be anyone else?” you may ask. For others, it might feel daunting. “What does that mean, exactly, to be the person we are meant to be? And just how am I supposed to find out what that is?”
For most of us, becoming fully one’s self is not an easy task. There is no direct pathway laid out for us by science or self-help or even, necessarily, religion. Becoming the person you were meant to be involves deep inner work, and there are no clear guidelines for it since it is a journey we must each make on our own. And yet, is there any more important pursuit than to be fully, deeply, authentically one’s self? When all is said and done, is there really any other game in town?
We view this journey toward a fully embodied, authentic self as the work of a lifetime. There is no end to it while we are alive, because we are always changing, and each new moment and circumstance calls upon us in fresh ways. Everything we have written in this book so far prepares us for this task, creating the conditions for such fulfillment, but not guaranteeing it.
We humans have freedom of choice, after all. Strange though it may seem, we can choose not to be fully ourselves, and most of us do so most of the time. We seek to please others. We compare ourselves to others. We diminish ourselves. We value other pursuits more highly. We refuse to awaken and see things as they are. The result, as the Zusya story points out, is that we can fail to live our own lives.
In this final chapter, we wish to offer you guidance, of a sort, for how to claim the fullness of your own life, no matter your age, your current state of health, or what you may perceive as past failures. The good news is that, so long as we are living and breathing, there is still time to awaken to true self. There is still time.
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces . . .
—May Sarton
“What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been,” writes Parker Palmer in Let Your Life Speak. “How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity—the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.”2
Who among us has not worn other people’s faces, living out the expectations of a parent, a teacher, or a friend, trying so hard to be someone we’re not? Who among us has not felt their identity shaken, unsure who they really are or how to move forward and retain a sense of self? Think about your life for a moment. When did you begin to forsake yourself, and what prompted you to do so?
Speaking with a group of seventh graders recently, we saw clearly that for them, this process was already well under way. We were discussing depression, something they knew a lot about, and sadly much of that knowledge seemed to come from personal experience. But even more surprising was the source of their struggle. One after another, these children said the same thing in different words: that they suffered from the weight of expectations. By age thirteen, they were learning the pain of “wearing other people’s faces.”
Parker Palmer points out that this connection to true self is a frequent casualty of childhood, and one of the core tasks of aging is to reclaim the birthright gifts of true self: “We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then—if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss—we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.”3
Consider this story by Portia Nelson that illustrates how we might wake up in stages to our own lives:
Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
Chapter 1
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I am lost . . . I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter 2
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter 3
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in . . . it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
Chapter 4
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter 5
I walk down another street.4
If this story makes us laugh, it is because we recognize ourselves in it, and our own folly. We have all fallen into the same holes, made the same mistakes, repeated the same foolish things that didn’t work the last ten or twenty or hundred times we tried them. A good psychotherapist or spiritual director can help shorten the time it takes to wake up and see what we are doing, but whether we enlist a guide or go it alone, we do at some point have to awaken to our own lives, to see clearly where we are and to accept the pain and loss that have been part of our journey. Indeed, it might be through the pain and loss that we awaken. Where do you see yourself in the story? What chapter are you in at this time in your life?
There are three essential skills required of us to discover true self, skills that we have been working toward throughout this book:
• We must be able to clearly see what is (cultivate the quality of awareness).
• We must be able to face that truth without flinching (embrace the quality of honesty).
• And we must be able to read what is written in our own heart (sharpen the quality of discernment).
These qualities are not a given, nor are they easy to achieve. But each of us possesses the innate skills needed to achieve them. Indeed, we have been honing them our entire lives through our precious life experiences, any of which can be the means of our own awakening. Three of the most effective pathways for awakening to true self come directly from life experience: suffering (which is inevitable); joy (which is a choice); and longing (which is often hidden).
Most of us are like the person in the story above: it’s not until we’ve fallen into the same hole multiple times, each time causing some kind of suffering, that it begins to dawn on us that we don’t have to keep doing this. There are as many varieties of struggle as there are people: we each have our own experience in this regard. But no matter the form it takes, our pain, loss, or unhappiness can be a cause for awakening. It may be wise to embrace it rather than to resist it.
The abstract nature of these ideas calls for a real-life example. I (Dr. Emmons) will use my own story simply because it is the story I know best and is, therefore, for me most authentic. This is a story of vocation, which many can relate to since work and livelihood take up so much of our time and energy. But the process of awakening can happen in any area of life, whether you are working or not, young or old.
One of the first signs that I was not living my own life was that I entered college and declared myself a predentistry student. I had no interest whatsoever in dentistry, but I greatly admired a dentist from my hometown and thought I wanted to be like him. I quickly realized that choice was a mistake and changed course, but only a little. I became premed because it seemed an easy transition (I was good at science) and because everyone I knew thought it was such a great profession, one I would be good at: “We need people like you in medicine,” they said. I did not stop to ask whether I thought it was right for me or whether it was something I wanted to do. Lacking sufficient awareness, I stepped into a stream that carried me along with greater and greater force, and one that I met with greater and greater resistance.
The signs that I was not following my own path could hardly have been more obvious. Even then I was aware of my heart sinking when I received my acceptance letter to medical school; of my classmates seeming to be so much more grateful than I to be there; of the loss of a love for learning and my tepid effort in my classes. Three times I tried to quit and go to seminary or grad school in one of the humanities. But my parents and everyone else I knew seemed so pleased with what I was doing (and disapproving of my floundering efforts to get out) that I willingly suppressed my own growing feelings of discontent. And I continued to do so for the next fifteen years!
The pain of shutting down my own voice made an already difficult training that much harder. Living day to day with so much internal resistance proved a high cost to pay for wearing other people’s faces. That is not a path I would recommend to anyone. But it was my path.
Within a few scant years of starting my psychiatric practice, working in a medical model in which I was skilled but still conflicted, I had developed all the signs of professional burnout (a term that seems to diminish the depth and richness of the experience). My instincts, my personal experience, my heart (in other words, my authentic self) all told me to do something different, to practice more holistically, to focus more on health and resilience than on disease. But the nature of the business of health care, and my own complicity in it, made it very hard for me to see a different path. I knew that I was unhappy, that’s for sure, but I didn’t know how to change that fact. I felt as if I were in Dante’s Inferno, lost in the middle of this road I called my life.
Still, the unhappiness was enough to wake me up. One day I finally conceded that I couldn’t keep going on as I was. I decided to quit my job and take a new path, no matter what it required from me. I would like to say that it was courage that allowed me to take that leap, to leave behind a secure job and a sure income for something completely unknown. But it was not really courage—it was just that I came to the point that I could no longer not do it. In other words, I had grown so tired of living a divided life, of leaving so much of my self out of my work, that I had no real choice but to bring the more authentic parts of myself into my role as a psychiatrist. At least I had no choice if I didn’t want to continue to feel so unhappy. And I didn’t.
We all have our stories, and we need to honor them. We need to bring our inner lives out of shadow, into the light of personal and communal reflection. We need to live divided no more, and an honest grappling with our struggles can get us there. But the path of suffering is not the only way to get there, and it is certainly not the easiest or the most enjoyable way. There is also the path of joy.
Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, became known for his famous phrase: “Follow your bliss.” By this, he did not mean that we are to become self-centered or self-absorbed. He was telling us to wake up to the joy that is all around, and to let that joy, or bliss, be a guide for how to live our lives. “Awe is what moves us forward,” he said. Mary Oliver expressed a similar sentiment in her poem “When Death Comes”: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement.”5
Seeing that joy is all around us, living a life filled with awe, being married to amazement—it sounds so grand, and no doubt it would be, if only we could do it. The great poets continually bring us back to such possibilities, and we continually deny them. Perhaps the very grandness of this vision leaves us feeling that it is beyond our reach.
Yet it is not beyond our reach; it is just our thinking that makes it appear so. For example, we tend to look at our life in its entirety and think that it should be grand in a very particular way—usually some vision we adopted from other people, from popular culture or religion—but not in the way that it is. We could, however, choose to honor the life that we’re actually living, and to see it in much smaller fragments, as a series of little bits that might add up to something grand over time.
We are given continual opportunities to choose, and it is the accumulation of these small choices that determines what our lives become. Each of us must decide, in every moment, how to use our time, where to place our energy, how to think or act, what to see or to ignore. Even if we seem to live in a world of sorrows, joy is all around us, if we could only see it, if we would make the choice to live in joy. That is easier said than done; yet it can be done. It is not a onetime decision that lasts forever. It is best done in increments, one moment at a time.
When I left my job, I was unable to be guided by joy, because I could not yet see or feel it. I decided to take a year’s sabbatical and retool myself. I then studied what I’d always been drawn toward, the things that I naturally loved but hadn’t seemed to me to be very doctor-like: diet, fitness, natural therapies, and mindfulness and spiritual practices.
These had always been the stuff of my life, much closer to my true nature than the masks I wore with such resistance through my training and first few years of psychiatric practice. Since that moment of decision, now nearly twenty years ago, I have gradually embraced the things that come so naturally to me, while not turning completely away from the role of physician (which I now find fits me when it is integrated with these other approaches). Surprisingly, the greatest change has been not in the content of what I do, but rather in the growing feeling that I bring more and more of my self into my work. I am becoming myself.
It is not as if I have experienced a continuous series of bliss-filled moments since then. I have those moments, to be sure, but overall there is a feeling of normalcy, a sense that I am just being myself in a way that feels natural and good to me. But it is nothing special, and that sometimes confuses people as to whether they are on the right track. We have been conditioned to think that being our truest (our “highest”) self is something exceptional, out of the ordinary, and that we will feel some intensely positive emotion when we achieve it. My experience is that it can be quite ordinary and it doesn’t necessarily involve any special or intense emotions. Yet it is among the most satisfying states in which one can live.
It is deeply gratifying (blissful) when you find that being yourself is enough, and when you know that offering that to the world makes it somehow a better place. Indeed, giving back seems to be a central ingredient for joy—offering yourself to the world freely, without reserve. You may or may not be compensated for it (financially, at least), but it needs to be done nonetheless, and what comes back to you is more joy. It is not something to keep to yourself. It is something to be shared with the world, as Joseph Campbell knew so well:
You must return with the bliss and integrate it.
The return is seeing the radiance is everywhere.
Sanctify the place you are in.
Follow your bliss.
There is a third pathway to awakening to true self, perhaps less common than the others not because it is rare, but because it involves a depth of listening that few of us sufficiently honor. That is the path of longing or yearning. This moves us into the territory of spirituality and the concept of soul, known by some as “the still, small voice.” Not everyone believes in the existence of the soul, or perhaps they define it differently than we do, but we think it is real and welcome the sense of mystery that still surrounds it.
The soul often speaks through a quiet inner voice, hard to hear or understand if we are not listening carefully, and easy to misinterpret if we are not skilled at discernment. But understanding it needn’t be overly complicated either. All that is required is to turn our attention toward it and listen deeply.
My own attempts to heed this voice were born out of a sense that there was something missing or askew in my life. Not knowing what it was or what to do about it, I still honored my belief that perhaps the answer lay within. I had no training or any models in my life for how to attend to this, so I sought out help. Not far from where I did my medical training there was a Benedictine monastery, and though I wasn’t Catholic, I began to go there for retreats. There, I learned to be still, to do contemplative practices, and to listen within. Later, I entered spiritual direction, and later still, I trained in mindfulness and other forms of meditation. Slowly, I learned how to listen to the inner voice. But I haven’t always done so.
For several years, I chose to ignore what that voice was telling me. Either I didn’t believe it, or I didn’t want to hear what it had to say. So it got louder and more insistent. It began to speak through my body, which started to break down despite my being young and fit. I developed recurrent sinus infections, and then asthma-like symptoms including tight, constricted breathing.
Finally, I decided to pay attention. I sat down on my meditation bench and invited my highest self to speak, consciously agreeing to listen and abide by what it had to say. I then asked the question, “Should I leave this job?” and I noticed my airways open up. I couldn’t believe it, so I asked the question in a different way: “Should I stay in this job?” My airways closed. Still not trusting it, I went through this sequence three more times, and each time it was the same: yes, airways opened; no, airways closed. The clarity of the message, along with my conscious commitment to heed my own deeper self, allowed me to break through my fear and take the action I knew I needed to take.
This inner voice never goes away. If we can’t sense it, perhaps it’s because we have turned our attention away from it; or we have chosen to suppress it (as I did for fifteen years); or the din of our day-to-day busyness simply makes it impossible to hear. Yet the voice of longing is ever-present and ready to come forth when invited, so long as it is safe to do so. It speaks the language of the heart, the language of story, music, poetry. It unfailingly draws us toward goodness, toward that which is of our higher nature. It always has our best interest at heart (which is undoubtedly in the best interest of others as well). Its nuances are as varied as the human beings who receive them, but the essence of its message seems to boil down to one great desire that is shared by all: the longing for connection, to love and be loved.
Listening to this inner voice is often a deeply personal experience, best undertaken in quiet, private moments. But it can also come forth in relationship to others when the conditions are right: when there is a sense of safety, an open invitation, and no attempt to fix or judge. Below we offer two means for listening to this voice; one turns our attention inward, and the other outward. Both add value, and combining them may offer the most effective means of discernment.
A Helpful Practice
Turning toward the Self: The Inner Practice of Deep Listening
• Find a quiet space and time for personal reflection, when you are sure to be alone, awake, and alert.
• Sit quietly and allow your mind to be still. It may help you to focus on your breath for a few moments, or to notice the fact that you are sitting and how you are grounded by it.
• Silently hold the intention that you wish to listen and be guided by your inner voice, the part of you that is with you always and continuously draws you toward your highest good.
• Hold a question in your mind if you have one. If you have no burning questions, you can simply hold the desire to see what is arising for you at this moment in your life.
• Make no effort to answer the questions or figure anything out. Let go of the notion that something profound or important has to happen. Simply create the space to be with your deeper self, much as you would with a dear friend.
• See yourself as a curious observer, wondering what might arise, but with no attachment to it. Look for a felt experience, a quickening of the heart, a sense of opening, warmth, or movement. Words may arise, or pictures, memories, or sensations. Keep sitting, with your awareness placed lightly wherever it seems to be drawn in your body. Usually, that is near the heart or the gut, or somewhere in the midsection of the body.
• If you have a specific choice to make or dilemma to resolve, you can phrase it in the form of a yes/no question and observe the response. When you hold the answer yes, what happens in your body? When you hold a no, what happens? Make no judgments about this; just keep observing with interest and a sense of not knowing.
• If you’d prefer, you can hold an open-ended question, such as “How can I focus my energies on what is most important for me now?” or “How will I know whether this is the right path for me?” Or better yet, phrase your own question. Then just hold the question lightly and observe whatever you experience without judgment.
• Whenever it feels right to you, you may wish to write some of your observations in a journal. Try to stay focused on describing your experience, rather than drawing conclusions from it or analyzing the experience. You may do that later.
• Return to this inner listening often. As with any relationship, the more time and attention you give it, the richer and more meaningful it becomes.
Turning toward Others: The Shared Practice of Deep Listening
• Gather two or more trusted people with the express purpose of genuinely listening to one another. They may include friends or family members, but take care that their ideas of who you are or what you should do aren’t held too strongly. You want to choose people who can allow your true self to come forth, without judgment or preconceived ideas.
• This may be done at a time when you need discernment, when the way forward is unclear to you; or it may be done at any time simply to allow your inner voice to be spoken aloud, to be brought into the light of day.
• Set aside an hour or more and seek to ensure that there will be no interruptions.
• Allow one person to be the center of focus (it’s okay to start with yourself). If there is sufficient time, each participant may have the opportunity to speak. If not, set up another time for others to be the focus person, so that you don’t rush the experience. Spaciousness of time is a requirement for the inner voice to come out.
• When you are the speaker, do your best to speak from the heart, without the need to entertain or to impress or to present yourself in any certain light. Seek to present the unfiltered version of what you believe to be true, without interpretation, analysis, or the need to say what you think the others wish to hear.
• When you are the listener, just listen. Set your own story aside. Refrain from the desire to interpret what is said or to offer counsel or support, or even to share something similar from your own life. Try to limit yourself to asking only authentic questions (about something you really wonder about), rather than asking a question that you think you know the answer to or attempting to lead the focus person to a certain conclusion.
• Let there be periods of silence. Remember that the still, small voice speaks only under the most safe and inviting conditions. Wait for it, allowing rather than cajoling. You don’t need to fill the moments of silence. They are ripe with opportunity.
• Likewise, if painful emotions arise, just allow them to be, with no need to stop them or even to offer comfort. The emotions may need to be felt.
• Maintain a stance of acceptance and compassion. We are all in this together. We all have our blind spots and vulnerabilities, right alongside our deep wisdom and strength.
• Honor the preciousness of what is shared. It needn’t be deep or profound or conclusive. Speaking the inner voice aloud into the world allows the speaker to hear it much more clearly. As a listener, honor the speaker’s confidentiality. Do not talk about what was shared, even with the person who shared it, unless that person asks you about it later.
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
—William Stafford
As the story goes, a woman named Nadine Stair, age eighty-five, was asked what she would do differently if she had her life to live over again. Her response included, “I’d dare to make more mistakes next time . . . I would take more chances . . . I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.” She listed several choices she would make to be more daring, like eating more ice cream and climbing more mountains, and concluded with the wish to reach for more beauty: “I’d pick more daisies.”6
It does take courage, after all, to live an authentic life. You may be signing up for more actual troubles (though it would also be nice to have fewer imaginary ones). Stepping fully into your own life involves risk and vulnerability. So why do it?
How do you know when you are living from true self? What do you get from it? Below are seven signs of an authentic life, which also reveal some of its paybacks:
1. Flowing. You may still put in a great deal of effort toward your goals, but there is a sense of ease about it, a naturalness that makes it seem less like work and more like play.
2. Self-Acceptance. Knowing the truth of who you really are, that you are not broken but whole, frees you from the need to strive or achieve or meet expectations. You can then hold yourself with kindness.
3. Vulnerability. You can allow yourself to be open and vulnerable, to take more chances, because you feel more secure in yourself and in the outcome.
4. Savoring. When you stop rejecting some aspects of your experience, you can draw more pleasure from those that you enjoy. You can pick more daisies.
5. Appreciation. Gratitude arises naturally, without trying, when we live from our true center. As a side benefit, it also makes us healthier and happier.
6. Meaning. Meaning flows naturally from self-expression, from bringing your unique voice, abilities, and creativity into the world. These are meant to be manifest, to be shared with others, rather than kept to oneself.
7. Equanimity. When you stop resisting what is, when you no longer grasp some things and push others away, you are left with a feeling of deep calm. You know the deep truth that all will be well.
A line from a Leonard Cohen song puts into poetic language the experience of losing one’s connection with true self: “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul.”
Living in the wintry part of this country, it’s not hard to imagine “the blizzard of the world.” We all experience storms, inner and outer, large and small, which unsettle our lives and take us off course, “overturning the order of the soul.” Life is never a straight path. It veers and darts, and we will at times lose our way along with the connection to authentic self. It is inevitable. The only questions are, How long will it take to get back onto our own path, and how do we do so?
If you grew up on a farm in a wintry climate, you might remember seeing a rope tied on one end to the barn, and on the opposite end to the back door of the house. If the farmer had to go to the barn in the midst of a blizzard, the tethered rope would guide him safely back home. This image offers a potent metaphor for the inner life. There is a rope, a thread that follows us throughout our lives, offering guidance back to true self when we get lost or are caught in a storm. How do you know it exists? Usually a reflection on your own life journey will reveal it.
Look back over your life, especially at the nodal points, those moments you can see in the rearview mirror that were filled with risk, potential, or change. No doubt you will see themes emerge, certain constants of preference, means, or purpose. We all have our own ways of approaching the challenges and opportunities that life offers, and our own reasons behind what we do. It just takes a little inner exploration to tease them out.
Consider these questions to help gain insight into the thread you follow:
• When are you most on path, feeling most at home? What are you doing; who are you with; what do you feel; what are you like?
• What are the constants in your life? For instance, what values guide your decisions? What sustains you in times of challenge or loss? What shows up during major transitions and choice points?
• What is it that draws you out of the storms? Describe the hearth that beckons you or the home that you would like to return to.
It is useful to reflect on such things, but don’t feel as if you have to figure this out once and for all. It is not really necessary to answer these questions definitively. The thread is there whether you can see it or not, and the answers may keep changing anyway. All that is really needed is to keep paying attention, to remain mindfully aware, and to keep asking your self, moment by moment, “What is the next right thing?”
This is rather like using a satellite GPS guidance system to get you where you want to go. It’s nice to see the overview, but all you really need to know is your very next turn. And when you stop paying attention and make a wrong turn, your internal GPS can take your new location, recalibrate, and get you back on track.
Wayne Muller states this idea beautifully in his book A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough: “When we listen for, and surrender to, the simple clarity of the next right thing—liberated from the inevitability of previous plans or declarations—we are likely to find that the next moment brings with it a sense of easy sufficiency. By feeling our way along this path, moving carefully into the absolutely perfectly next right thing, we are more likely to do less, move more slowly, and come upon some completely unexpected meadow of spacious, gentle time and care that feels remarkably, for now, like enough.”7
We can let out a collective sigh: “Ah, that is enough. This moment is enough. I am enough.” Be who you are. That is all that is needed from you.