Are you ready to be yourself?
We live in a society that encourages, or perhaps even pressures, us to conform. We are bombarded by messages that tell us how to live, look, eat, act, and think.
We likely follow mainstream tastes in fashion and music. We want to be cool. We want to be accepted.
There are lots of laws embedded in our social structure. And many of them have a good purpose. Violence and theft are to be discouraged. As consumers, we want to be protected from dishonest, dangerous, or discriminatory business practices.
But laws also can sometimes become too invasive in our privacy. We may avoid doing morally benign things because they are illegal.
The upshot of all this constraint of us is that we often may not feel free to be ourselves. Even worse, we may not even understand who we truly are in our core being. We may have shaped ourselves, with society’s encouragement, into a vague facsimile of our true selves.
In order to tune into our true selves, we need quiet and alone time. Initially, that experience may not be entirely comfortable for us. We may discover parts of ourselves we don’t care for or are unfamiliar with.
But in learning ourselves and then loving ourselves, exactly as we are, we become truly free. We lose the weight of our own and others’ expectations. We are able to drop the burden of what we may have believed we should or shouldn’t do. We can simply relax and be ourselves.
Today’s message reminds me that being precisely myself is the best way to be. In doing so, I am free to honor my unique role in Creation.
Please reflect and share. Are you comfortable being yourself? What choices might you make to empower this?