What is Self? 

Who are you? Who am I? How do we know??

Our Self is not a list of characteristics, jobs or experiences we’ve had, personality traits, what we look like or what we wear, although it might include these things. 

I’d like to suggest that the real Self has much more essential nature. Self is a bit nebulous, and that’s not a bad thing. What not? Because Self is a kind of simplicity, a kind of freedom from all of the thoughts and ideas that can’t really define us. Why not?? Because our own true Self is much more incredible than a list of words, our appearance, or what others think about us. 

In today’s world, it's so easy to get distracted. We’ve been trained all our lives to pay attention to authority figures, famous people, influencers, social media, and the many problems the world faces today. What if the cure was in the connection? Connection to self? And what if that’s what could help us to feel better in ourselves and use it to help make the world a better place?

What’s so amazing about having our own Sense of Self is that it frees us from all of the external stuff that gets in the way of who we really are. Getting to know our Self is about paying attention to the inside rather than the outside. It's about sensing, feeling, listening to what's on the inside. When we let go of what's on the outside, it makes space for awareness of what's on the inside.

You’ve done it before many times, but maybe didn’t notice. We make contact with ourselves when we feel love for someone, when we make a decision based on a gut feeling, or when we allow ourselves to feel peace in the presence of nature. 

Our sense of Self isn’t about everyone or everything else. It's about YOU. It’s a kind of letting go. A re-framing. A flip. It's turning things right side up or inside out. Self is about a bit more attention on the inside rather than the outside. Self is about being centered within.

We get there by remembering to feel. And like anything, to get our feelers working again, our “spidey sense”. We need to get those nerve endings working again. We’re wired head to toe. The hardware is all there but we aren’t using it to its fullest potential. There are even fancy words to describe our ability to feel within. It’s called “interoception”. The root of the word means receiving inside. 

The beauty of our perfect human design is that we’re wired to sense. We can sense where we are in relation to everything else. We can use our proprioceptive awareness to sense our body in relation to the ground beneath us. Sensory receptors in our brain and throughout our muscles and all of the parts of our body tell us where things are without us having to look at it. Take a minute now and feel – your toes, then your finger tips, yourself where you’re sitting as you get your head connected to your body. This is the way I teach my patients and course participants to get out of their heads and into their body so our nervous system can work the way it was designed to. Our human capacity for awareness is incredible and just waiting for us to tap into its full potential.

This simple mind body awareness is the missing piece, the magic button that connects us to our sense of self. When we use our mind to pay attention from a deeper, more centered place in ourselves, our nervous system relaxes, our body shifts into healing mode, our thinking stops, our breathing slows, and our mind stills. This connection is really about our inherent mind body spirit interconnectedness. The more we do it, the better we get at it. We become connected, integrated, centered and whole. Our sense of Self is an inner knowing of who we are in relation to all that is.

So often it's our ego or ideas that limits us. We tell ourselves stories that aren’t true. We live in a false reality that we get free of when we stop overthinking and allow ourselves to feel. It's our brain that so often gets us into trouble. When we think and forget to feel we separate ourselves from ourselves. True mindfulness isn’t about thinking, it's more about feeling, sensing, and knowing. When we start to listen from within to our inner knowing, to trust our gut, when we want to act from our truth instead of a lie, we become centered in ourselves and can access more peace and freedom.

The word I like to use is perceptual awareness. We can perceive all kinds of things, and as I’ve said many times, humans are really good at paying attention to what doesn’t feel good, but not so good at what feels good. So often we start to learn to really connect to ourselves when we're going through something difficult. Sadly, it's often only through our suffering that we finally get to the place where we are ready to try something different. We start to realize that we want to feel better. Over time we realize that we deserve to feel better. We start to get there by “faking it until we make it”. This was something I learned to do as a medical student. We get thrown into the hospital and are expected to know a lot of stuff but at first we have to act like we know as we’re learning. Over time we really start to get it. 

Getting to Self is similar. We get there by starting to connect to what’s positive, and positive sensations that wake up the healing, wisdom, and power within us. When we pay attention only to suffering, pain, lack, or unworthiness, we perpetuate those feelings. You could look at it as the perpetual battle of good vs evil, or enlightenment vs illusion. Instead of paying attention to something negative, when we connect to something that feels good such as nature, divinity, love, and peace, we start to create and nurture that reality within us. Over time, through sensing and feeling these positive breadcrumbs, we transform and transmutate our awareness into the truth of who we are. It's so powerful and beautiful and we all have the capacity and we get there through following the breadcrumbs, through sensing and feeling.

The true essence of Self is pure and good and feels good. It's our own “still, small voice”. So part of learning to sense our self involves awareness and attention to something simpler and clearer. As one of my amazing course participants likes to put it, it's about feeling “The Goodness”.

The mystery of life, the mystery of you is in there. It's up to us to find our way out of the labyrinth of confusion into the center of our own Self. Through the storms of life we can better navigate by paying attention to the good stuff. There is a calm in the center of the storm and the calm can be within us. In my course and book I call it Self Centering. This isn’t ego, it’s self care and self empowerment. We must follow the thread of what's good, what’s positive, to piece together who we are back into our own wholeness. 

We can use our senses to get conscious, to access our consciousness, and to have more conscience. Many spiritual practices use prayer, contemplation, and communion to access this connection. But we must be careful not to think because thinking takes us away from the centered state. Those of you who have taken my courses have experienced this and the power it has in our lives. When we drop into our body, sense something that feels positive, it frees us from the false self and gets us quickly closer to our true self. 

We can use our mind to use our awareness to center from within in relation to all of creation. We can access and raise our consciousness. Through centering within, we make contact with Stillness, something more subtle and sublime. Stillness is a field of awareness where we can have access to the cosmos and all that is. The universe is outside us but also inside us. We’re a part of all there is from the macrocosm of the stars to the microcosm of the atoms and smallest known particles of light that make up our body and our being. As you’ve heard me say before, everything is connected. It's a matter of what we do with the connection. 

Even in Star Wars the Jedi knight feels the force “flowing through”. If we want to “Use the Force” we need to “Let go” of the ideas and false narratives that are distracting us from our own true power so we can use our amazing magical inner human senses to feel and make the most of our own human superpowers. All of my courses include guided experiences to help one develop their own inner senses and awareness of the goodness within one’s True Self. And as a reminder what I’m talking about isn’t my stuff, it's about your stuff. I’m simply showing you how you can connect with your own true self to make the most of all the work you’ve already done and are doing every day to make the most of your life. Your Self is here and now and what if today is the day to start to make the most of it?

Over time, the more we sense the “good stuff”, a kind of alchemy occurs. Our internal chemistry and nervous system upregulates into a higher frequency of health, wellness, and freedom. We gain more clarity of Self. It becomes easier and easier to drop in and sense. To “Be Still and Know”. Our senses are what get us there, or here, to this place of interconnected peace and healing. We’re empowered to help ourselves to feel better, when we need it, anytime and anywhere. We’re empowered to know who we are and what we want and then make it happen. This is the power of our Sense of Self.