People throw around the words: self-expression, but I have never found a person who knows what it means.
Most people look how you express yourself not what it is you express… This article is about “what” not “how”… What is the Self you express with everything… your life, your job, your relationships, with your music, poetry, and your life.
There are two selves, and the reason life doesn’t work for most of us is because the two selves are not connected in any way. Self 1: your genes, your desire to survive and procreate. Self 2: your human desire to be higher than just your genes… to live your higher self.
Self in the expression of the higher self, the evolved self. The self Shakespeare means: To thine own self be true.
The smaller self is all genes, all one’s own self-interest, with maybe some reciprocal altruism: help me and I’ll help you in return… still informed by self-interest.
In this article I’ll attempt to define what being true to the Higher Self… and what the Higher Self really is.
In integrity, ultimate integrity, you are asked to be true to your ideals and principles… but more importantly: be true to your Self.
The separation in that integrity sentence is relevant and important.
You may have high ideals, high principles, but that is not who you are, who you are is how you live, who you are is what you do.
Many people, including some of my students, live as if there utterings, if their thoughts, if their ideals spoken increased their values in life.
But the only thing those words give them is inauthenticity.
Authenticity is when your words and your beingness and actions match.
We live in the age of inauthenticity. You only need to take a look at any social media website and you can’t miss it. You and “them” think that putting up a meme, or expressing compassion makes you different than you are… it doesn’t.
Being different is effort. No cheap solutions like speaking or commenting fool anyone…
What am I talking about when I talk about Self-expression then?
The Self you want to express, consistently, over time, is someone who lives by certain values.
You can get a list of values on the internet, but let’s just talk about a few?
Because you can design your Self, and train yourself to be that, over time.
People who are most successful have done that. Courage, curiosity, inventiveness, persistence, tireless, big vision are some of the values that are needed for success in any endeavor.
And for a person like that, the capacities, the beingness of values comprise their Self.
Not what they say, but what they live. Intrinsic values.
The rest of the values? You can pretend to uphold those, but you’ll suffer as a result, because you will be a liar.
I grew up like a wild child. I didn’t see values lived in my environment. I needed to learn each and every value: what they really were, how you could really live them.
I am not alone in not having seen values… but I am quite unique in my efforts to incorporate values, over time, into my Self.
Even my teacher, Robert Hartman only managed to incorporate a few… in a lifetime of teaching intrinsic values.
In my work’s parlance, intrinsic values, lived, are the spiritual capacities you have.
From the number of spiritual capacities people have, 4-7, we can say that our Self is not much bigger than our self… but bigger it is.
Authenticity: owning who and what you are, even if what and who you are is not the highest ideal you have, is the key to raising your vibration. Authenticity means, in action: telling the truth about your pretenses.
Only when you fully own the imperfect Self you have, that you have a chance for growing. Through confronting them, through winning over them.
Many soul corrections, maybe all, are a distorted relationship to the Self… believing yourself either bigger or smaller than the Self is… and that preconceived idea makes it impossible to grow: delusions make you fight windmills thinking they are giants.
In Landmark Education, the whole education is about inventing your Self and then bringing it to your life. Every course, every seminar is about that.
But most people are patent/impatient: wait for a long time to invent themselves, and then think it should happen right away because they spoke.
Developing a capacity, even after I turn it on, is a long process.
And it is quite doubtful that a person can actually speak a capacity into existence, although some people with already plenty of capacities can probably do it: I did it.
People who turn on spiritual capacities for themselves, live them, practice them into becoming a new evolutionary stable strategy.
One person who did this, and it is public knowledge what he did, Brandon Burchard, asked three deep questions of himself in a moment of awakening, and then continued to ask the same questions every day. Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?
Every day. And every day the answer is “somewhat”… “to a degree” so there is growth built into the questions.
Yesterday I announced a new workshop for communication. Confronting the tiger, that needs the courage capacity to be opened, and then practices it into an ess… evolutionary stable strategy.
Most of you have enough tigers to confront on daily, but if you don’t have enough, or if you want to start out easy, you’ll start out and follow what Brandon Burchard did. It doesn’t take you to unlimited growth, but it starts the process, and it does require you to bring courage.
Without the practice the capacity will turn off.
Courage is ultimately the willingness to confront something with your eyes open.
Not yelling, not protesting, not fighting it, but looking, getting deep, and seeing what there is to see.
That is what needs courage… the seeing. And staying aware, instead of wanting to look away, or wanting to lie, or wanting to die.
The workshop will be two sessions, and it is interactive in a webinar format.
I’ll start with turning on the capacity of courage. And turn it on again when in our interaction I see it missing again.
Is it for you? I don’t know… If you are scared of it: the answer is yes. It is for you.
If you think it is a waste of your time and money: yes, it’s for you.
If you say: I’ve tried that and it didn’t work: then maybe it isn’t for you.
I will do the workshop even if only one person shows up. And record it. And then I’ll sell it to you for double what you’d pay now.
You can ask about this workshop on the Meet and Greet on Wednesday… Really, you can ask about anything. And find out if I am full of hot air, or if I am worth a damn.
Read the original article: Self-expression: what is the Self you are expressing? With your life…