How much bravery and determination does it take to be true to yourself?
** **I say plenty. Being true requires standing up to what’s out there, but also accepting and correcting our own habits, weaknesses, delusions, and faults. It’s a battle, and it has to start from within if we want to see any significant results.
Fighting the external while having inner issues that need work is like fighting shadows cast outwardly by one’s own demons. The struggle becomes increasingly painful, and frustration with life and the people who inhabit this world only grows.
To me, being true isn’t about absolute freedom to do what I want. Rather, it’s about being certain that my desire to do something is truly mine and not created by some influence, pressure, instinct, or external stimuli.
That in itself is a big challenge. To know what we truly want, we have to know ourselves.
The deepest, truest drives and inclinations should come from a place of purity, from the heart. Pure inclinations don’t come from social influences, parental programming, hormonal spikes, emotional anxieties, or habits formed by tradition and culture.
It seems it should be easy to determine what’s pure and what comes from the heart, and then act on it, but we are born into the world that constantly shapes and forms our perceptions of reality from day 1. To know who we are, we must constantly work on shedding what’s not ours while discovering our true selves.
I find that with this, like with everything else, the most difficult part is to stay consistent. Working on this for 1 hour a day is like attending some phony western yoga “workout” class where no one (including the teacher) has any idea about what yoga really is. To be fair, maybe 1 hour a day is better than nothing, but practices such as this should grow to be a constant part of life, become life itself.
_Kind of like breathing. _
And to make this practice of life consistent, it helps to always remember about death (which in turn helps remember about the value of time).
