The True Self

Your true self is your true nature and identity, found at the very core of your being. Your true self is not your conditioned personality self formed from childhood that you commonly identify with because of its link with your physical body. Your true self is certainly not the roles, behaviour patterns, labels, or identities you create. And your true self is not the folk fiction of an ideal personality state that some misinformation online suggests. Your true self is the deepest, most fundamental part of your identity—deeper and more enduring than the layers of personality you’ve acquired. Think of your true self as your unconditioned, spiritual self.

In this post, I’ll share insights on the true self—what it is, how it relates to your true nature, and why it’s essential for self-development and authenticity. You’ll also find practical tips for discovering it. I invite you to reflect deeply, gain clarity on your true identity, and explore with enthusiasm the nature of your true self. In doing so, you’ll free yourself from automatised living, limiting beliefs about your identity and potential, and unconscious conformity to unfulfilling societal and cultural norms. Embracing and embodying your true self not only brings greater fulfilment and wellbeing but also contributes to the evolution of the world—a world in need of the light of awakened, liberated consciousness.

The True Self as Your Unconditioned Self

Your true self is your unconditioned self, meaning it hasn’t been formed and shaped in reaction to your environment and your patterns of thinking and behaving like your personality has. Prior to the formation of your conditioned personality self, you exist as pure being. Your true self isn’t your thoughts and emotions or the patterns they form. Your true self is experienced as the centre of pure being that you can return to in meditation when you disengage from the pull of thoughts and emotions and focus on being.

When your personality starts to form in early life, it’s new and highly impressionable. This can easily be seen with a young child. Over time, experiences shape and condition the child’s personality as it attempts to adjust and adapt to them. This highly formative time is the best time to begin integration with your true self, along with the practice of mindfulness, so that your personality is guided and shaped by the light of your true self and becomes a more rounded expression of it. Without integration with your true self, your personality forms in a reactive, adaptative way and becomes self-affirming. This is called conditioning, and the self-affirming tendencies lead to what we think of as an ego self with its egocentricity bias—a form of self-preservation that can cause you to overestimate the accuracy of your limited and often distorted personality judgements and perceptions.

The True Self Can Reset Your Experience in the Best Way

At times, you may become so entangled in your thoughts, emotions, and conditioned reality that you lose touch with your true self. This is when you need to reset your experience. Coming back to the present moment with mindfulness helps to reset your experience in the moment, but the deepest reset comes from reconnecting with your true self—restoring authenticity and clarity at the core.

Because your true self is free from conditioning, distortion, illusion, bias, reactivity, and ego-defence mechanisms, anchoring your presence there keeps you clear of these. From this clear state of presence, your true self can guide you to live authentically so that you can embody your deepest values and true life purpose, while simultaneously disengaging from the inauthentic ways of living that cause you and others harm.

The Danger of Losing Touch with Your True Self

Losing touch with your true self means losing your conscious connection to the deeper reality of who you are. This has profound consequences:

• You repress your true self and neglect your true needs.
• You lose sight of your true life purpose and potential.
• You no longer shine the light of your spiritual self.
• You become trapped in a reactive, conditioned existence, driven by maladaptive ego-defences.
• You unconsciously adjust and conform to destructive and dysfunctional patterns of society.
• You unwittingly become a role model for all of the above.

This explains why so many people struggle with addictions, compulsions, and distractions and why they are experiencing mental and physical health issues.

Conforming to dysfunctional and destructive collective patterns of living harms your health and wellbeing and may in the worst cases put your life and the lives of others in danger (think what has happened in history). This adjustment and conformity is generally motivated by the unconscious addiction to comfort, in which ego-defence mechanisms blind you to the risks of that conformity. The egocentricity bias and conformity bias obscure the dangers, even for those who are otherwise highly intelligent, as mindfulness research has shown.

The True Self and the True Purpose of Life

Your true self came first. Your personality self has always been second to it, and is only really meant to serve as an interface between your true self and the physical world, with your mind serving as a means to integrate physical and spiritual awareness. The whole idea is to maintain contact with your true self and integrate it into your personality self, so that your personality self grounds the light of your true self into material reality. My post Activating Your Light Body encapsulates this deep wisdom. The true purpose of life has always been the realisation and expansion of truth in this way. It is how you master your spiritual lessons in life. But without mindfulness and spiritual awareness, it is easy to become stuck in reactivity and the distortions of conditioned reality when your personality self loses touch with your true self.

The true purpose of life is to learn to integrate the true self with the personality self, and to release the conditioning and distortions of the ego that create limiting and maladaptive patterns, illusions, and suffering. The whole idea is to live with love, compassion, gratitude, and joy, and an expanded state of consciousness. But this can only really happen when we are aligned to and embodying our true spiritual self, are free from the entanglement of reactive living, and undo the suffering we have created through our acts of commission and omission.

Being Your True Self Has a Collective Purpose

Being your true self is not just an individual lesson, but a collective one also. We are all in this together, influencing each other for better or worse, whether we like it or not. This is why communities of light are so important at this time as the stakes are raised by advances in communications, technology, and artificial intelligence, as well as other challenging world events.

It is wise not only to practise being present in your true self and living life from there, but also to form spiritual communities of people who understand the wisdom of the true self and authentic living—people who commit to the integration work and the activation of the light body. As role models, we can serve as beacons of light and build a more authentic light-filled world where the true self and personality self are in harmony. This is the most important transformational act of spiritual service you can ever do. And it will make the world a better place.

Finding Your True Self

I previously explored how to find your true self in my post Finding Your True Self, and I gave two practical examples in its companion posts A Meditation to Find Your True Self and A Visualisation to Find Your True Self. In this post, I expand on the process and invite you to book a personalised Guidance Session, in which we can explore your unique journey and work together on your integration process.

The most direct path to your true self is through mindfulness and meditation. These practices help you to find your true self by enabling you to come off autopilot, break out of your reactive conditioning, and cultivate a metacognitive state in which to experience your multidimensional being with full presence. These moments of self-revelation, of realising you are not contained by your conditioned personality self, are powerfully awakening, liberating, and healing. They release you from a lifetime of conditioning and reactivity and enable you to start living an authentic life filled with true fulfilment, wellness, and happiness.

Because your personality is the vehicle you live through daily and seems inseparable from you, you can easily mistake it as your true self. But you have only adopted it. Your true self is actually at the heart of your being, waiting to be embodied in your moments of clear awakening and presence, but otherwise remaining forgotten as you dissociate and live in a trance.

This dissociation is caused by the magnetism of the material world, your reactive survival mechanisms and associated stresses, and your general entanglement with thoughts and emotions. It’s why you may not be living from your true self and why you may confuse authenticity with being true to your personality self. When you are not fully mindful and present as a multidimensional being, you dissociate from pure being to identify with thoughts, emotions, roles and labels—all of which are temporary and can change and contradict each other at the drop of a hat. The contradictions, inner conflicts, and fragility of your personality self are why you might sometimes struggle to hold yourself together, especially at times of overwhelm or crisis. It’s also why you search for greater meaning, because deep inside, you know you have a true self and are more than just the events that have shaped you.

Authentic self-development requires releasing yourself from your reactive mind, your entanglement in thoughts and false identities, and your habitual dissociation. In my post What is Identity? I explained that our identity becomes arbitrary when it is based on how we and others see ourselves, rather than on the true self. If you see yourself as your job title, your identity becomes your role within the workplace. If you see yourself as an athlete, your identity becomes that role. If you see yourself as depressed, your identity becomes that of depression, which is why you would then say “I am depressed”. This is how your personality forms when you are not mindful: in a state of reactivity rather than a state of mindfulness, purity, and integration with your true self.

Your personality can be shaped by your reactive mind to give you a reactive ego, or it can be shaped by the mindful experience of your true self to give you a personality that embodies your authentic values and holds the light of your true self. By committing to your authentic self-development and the practice of mindfulness and meditation, you can reshape your personality to reflect your true self.

In summary, to find your true self, first develop a mindfulness practice so you learn to control your attention, strengthen your centre, and build metacognitive states that facilitate being present to your true self. You can then use meditation and visualisation as tools to connect with and embody your true self. However, it is ideal for you to also work on your self-development to release ego patterning and clear the way for embodying your true self more fully. To support your mindfulness-based self-development, book a one-on-one Guidance Call with me and we can begin this transformative process together.

Integrating Your Personality with Your True Self

The integration of your personality with your true self is essential to authentic living and is the core teaching of my work. As a key process of self-development, it begins when you learn to practise mindfulness and meditation to consciously direct your attention upon your experience in the present moment, without reactivity or judgement. This enables you to drop through the spaces between your thoughts so that you can find your true self waiting for you, which exists behind your thoughts, emotions, roles, and behaviour. To learn more about this process, I encourage you to read my post Finding Your True Self and to practise my Meditation to Find Your True Self and my Visualisation to Find Your True Self.

Once you have established a conscious centre of awareness aligned to your true self through mindfulness and meditation, that centre can serve as the foundation for your your personality, grounding your authenticity. This means that your personality can begin to integrate with your true self by expressing your true self through it. One way you can do this is by uncovering your authentic values as guiding principles for staying true to who you really are, and then honouring these values by actively basing your decisions upon them. You can also use self-inquiry to identify the reactive, inauthentic patterns in your mind, including your shadow aspects, and transform these patterns within the greater perspective of your true self. By doing so, you gain the power to break free from the worldly things that trap you in reactivity and release your conformity bias. For those more experienced with meditation, you can also work on Activating Your Light Body. Most of all, the practice of simply staying present to your true self, and extending this presence into your personality, will provide a context to start transforming all of your personality experience into authenticity.

This integration of your personality with your true self is a lifelong journey of evolution. You most likely have an extensive collection of unprocessed experience to work through, yet at the same time, you are reborn in every moment, with new experience to process. However, when you are growing in authenticity through your commitment to honour your true self, you will become more and more your true self.

Your True Self and the Whole

Your true self is defined as much by its connections with all life as by its centre. This is because it enables you to experience the spiritual state of being one with life. For this reason, when you embrace your true self you are also embracing your spiritual self, which in a physical sense allows you to experience your physical interconnectedness and identity with all life on Earth in a sense of shared being (interbeing). As a result, I suspect that you, like me, will naturally want to honour the Earth and all life with compassion and gratitude. This is the ultimate form of sustainability and enabler of peace that reduces the need for regulations, laws, and religious and political ideologies that infantilise us and can so easily be exploited for other ends.

As a strong, authentic individual in alignment with your true self and informed by your spiritual identity with the greater whole, you can free yourself from toxic conformity while honouring all life from your sacred heart. By integrating your personality self with your true self;  strengthening your authentic individuality in equal measure to your sense of wholeness with life; and exploring how the two can inform and enrich each other, you can maximise the potential for individual and collective self-realisation: you can truly be a light to the world.

Next step: book a Guidance Call with me to explore how you can embody your true self and integrate it with your personality—so you can live with deeper authenticity and step into your true life purpose.