Are you seeing your True Self?
One the biggest obstacle or block to self growth is one's self perception. How you perceive yourself, how you think of yourself, how you identify yourself can determine how well you access your potential. Something that I've noticed a lot during soul plan reading sessions, is a resistance or even a reluctance for some people (especially women) to acknowledge and honour their natural talents and instead keep holding on to old identities. By old identities, I mean outdated perceptions of oneself that do not align with the soul truest expression. I've always found it quite intriguing, how some people can radiate such a beautiful and powerful spiritual energy and yet have little if no awareness of it and instead struggle with low esteem and poor confidence. For me it shows the power of focusing our attention. If we focus our attention on the negative thoughts or limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves, we may create a long lasting self perception which does not align with the truth of who we are. It creates a dissonance between the emanating core soul essence and how we are projecting ourselves into the world from our limited mind. In the physical, this dissonance may cause us to experience a sense of being out of place or out of sync with something which often eludes us if we don't take into account our energetic and spiritual dimension. Understanding the energies that make up our physical expression is key to understanding our role and place in the world and a Soul Plan reading is a good starting point.
Our old self perceptions are often based on labels that have been put upon us early in life and sometimes self limited beliefs that we have developed over time. Some of those limited beliefs can be reinforced by our cultural or social environment. It's very common for many of us to think of ourselves rather negatively. There is a tendency in our world to focus on negativity and problems to fix and totally overlook the beautiful blessings and synchronicities of life. And we can do the same at a personal level, focusing and identifying with our problems and struggles mainly (or only) and totally ignoring our natural talents and abilities. We cannot make best use of our talents if we don't acknowledge them first. Also, many of us are conditioned to look out for external validation, however it really is up to every single one of us to take the first step in validating and honoring our talents and not wait for others to recognise them. The old self perceptions or identities can also come from a mask or persona that we choose to put on and present to the outside world to align with what we think is expected from us. This persona can become so real over time that we start to identify with it and believe that we are the persona.
If we struggle to let go of limited or distorted self perception, deeply relaxing the mind and training our attention to focus on the physical and energetic sensations within the body can help us become more consciously aware of our inherent human capabilities. It takes time to develop body and energetic awareness so patience is a virtue. Yoga and other type of body movement based therapies and contemplative practices can help by using movement and breath to give access to underrepresented parts of Self. Developing a daily practice of self acknowledgement and self gratitude is also very important. Self awareness is of course necessary to identify what kind of limiting thoughts or beliefs people are holding about themselves and so the work of letting go of those disruptive thoughts can begin. Letting of the need to compare ourselves to others or the need for external validation may also be helpful.
