Being true to yourself has many meanings. At its core, it’s really a mysterious journey of the soul. The journey exposes parts of ourselves we don’t yet know or want to deal with (like old wounds and shame). Yet our soul’s journey might just be to heal us, so we can grow and move on.
Perhaps after achieving your passion (or on the way towards it) you realized it wasn’t entirely satisfying like you thought it’d be. Or when your passion failed you discovered disillusionment. You felt deceived about the process and surprised that you didn’t fully know yourself like you thought you did.
Not knowing ourselves like we thought we did is a step towards growth and maturity. It’s also a recognition that we are a bit of a mystery and that perhaps other forces are at work outside our control.
By some outward appearances, being true to yourself and the journey it calls you to, may cause you to appear lost or crazy. And on the inside you can indeed feel lost and crazy. That’s the scary stuff. You wonder what’s happening to you.
It’s likened to a “molting” process where our old ways of knowing ourselves, complete with assumptions and beliefs, are shed because the journey has caused us to outgrow them.
When your skin is shed you enter a no-man’s land of your soul complete with the fear of what you’ll become.
In being true to yourself, your soul took you on a difficult journey to learn more about who you are, what you’re made of, and what truly matters.
In being true to ourselves, the soul, via the pursuit of a passion and the journey it takes us on, is the decoy to get us out there on the path of self-discovery.
The path we take doesn’t have to lead to wealth, success or fulfillment. That we are called by something greater or “other” than ourselves is a mystery and a reward.
Better yet, being true to ourselves is a journey of our soul–where our soul seeks to know itself through our living out our calling.
If that’s the case, then it doesn’t necessarily matter whether the passion “worked out or not.” What matters is that we were called, we answered and we went.
