A few years ago the expression “Become who I really am” came to my awareness and slowly transformed into a life-changing revelation. When I first heard it, I felt empowered; it was like a call to become who I always intuitively knew I was. However, it didn´t stop there – it got complicated as I went through a lot of thinking:
- Who was I really? If normally I am not who I really am, then who am I most of the time?
- Am I being invalidated in some way?
- Is someone going to know who I am, better than I do?
I had found relief in defending that I am both my shadow and my talents. After all, it seemed impossible to get rid of my darkness; therefore I should stop fighting against it and accept it as part of me as well. I also thought about what I had done in my life: my studies, working life, abilities, insecurities, relationships, and projections onto the future. However, I was still a bit unclear about “Who I really was.”
My mind came with a possible list of qualities that could define me. They were more like talents I had been trying to cultivate, ideals I had picked up in my psychological researches and spiritual searches, values I had taken from all sorts of institutions such as family, school, friendships, and things that I had admired or envied in others.
What became clear though, was that I spent most of my time in my mind; I used self-criticism a lot, tried to control how I came across, and was always trying to better myself as I craved being recognized.
The expression, “Be who you really are,” expanded and I was offered the possibility to know myself by my essence of Love, Harmony and Joy.
Could someone be described through these qualities and nothing more? What about all the things I´ve done? What about my intellectual knowledge? What about my hidden cravings and not so nice stuff?
Being Love, Harmony and Joy sounded quite simplistic… like a new age passage, nice to hear, but proclaiming from one day to the next that I was Love, Harmony and Joy felt a bit far-out and uncomfortable.
I also didn´t like that, if I was these, or had these qualities in myself, I was not the only one, the rest of humanity had them as well. It implied a sort of dissolution of the attachments I had to my personality, my little stories that felt very important and authentic. All my efforts to become someone in a world where recognition, identification and standing out over the crowd are very much appreciated, all of a sudden became meaningless.
Even though accepting this reality would mean the liberation from the many struggles in my life and the end of the separation I felt to others, I just wouldn’t accept it so easily.
What change would it make to know myself through my essence rather than through what I did, my achievements, losses, all my behaviours and ideas on weak and strong self-esteem?
If I could stop identifying myself with all the heavy stuff I´ve been dealing with for ages, could it be that everything that was holding me back, keeping me messy and re-creating more of the same, would start to finally shift?
What if all the struggle and dissatisfaction of never feeling enough had no true foundation after all? What if we are all equal in our essence, but express in many different ways and it is never about validation, competition or defence?
Lastly and gradually, I gave myself the chance to possibly accept something grander – even grander than my old ideas on the higher self, God and spirituality – ideas that were always outside of me.
Accepting myself as being Love, Harmony and Joy has made me go through lots of self-doubt and hesitation. Sometimes I have felt apprehensive about losing my identity and certain relationships.
What I never imagined though, is that my acceptance of something so simple, yet so powerful and universal, would take me through a journey of deep self-transformation and acceptance of humanity.
My well-known imperfections haven´t magically disappeared from one day to the next. I am actually more aware of my past, the way I used to live and the unloving consequences of my past behaviours come back at me sometimes in discouraging ways.
However, what has truly changed is my understanding and how I relate to all these in ways that no longer seek to indulge in a debilitating self-loathing or self-condemnation and the evasiveness of aloofness and avoidance of responsibility:
- I now know that all of those shabby places within myself shouldn’t be accepted as normal or inevitable parts of Who I am, but ways I have ignorantly used to self-protect, and self-defend, from all sort of deep emotional hurts, and ultimately for survival and self-gain.
- I have come to understand that the connection to my inner amazing being was progressively lost when growing up as I learned to adhere to ways of living and being that allowed me to fit in and gave me accepted identities, but in truth didn´t support my loving qualities to expand from within and express out confidently.
- I know I am in a process of healing, saying goodbye and discarding issues that have a strong hold on me because for so long I believed they were me. When feelings of emptiness and misery look like me, or when sabotage looks like an easy way out of difficult situations, I use honesty, discernment and detachment to support me with these.
My focus is not anymore about changing or judging my personality, my looks, my nose, my job, my family, my friends, my country, but how to live in a way that allows all the beauty I am reclaiming back to come out and express. This has required a new level of acceptance, as to claim who I am is not something I can get by only using my mind, incrementing my knowledge or changing my beliefs, but through how I live in my body.
My body was just `something´ I took everywhere without much care or awareness and respect for its powerful intelligence. I now know that Harmony, Joy and Love can only expand and be expressed through my body and how I connect and live in it.
The more I discern and keep aligning back to a quality that to me feels closer to harmony, the more I organise my movements, my choices and all of myself in ways that allow for a more loving way of living to unfold naturally, without sacrifice or becoming alien in a very busy world. It is not perfect, but a deeply powerful process that is forever unfolding and deepening towards the true Harmony, Love and Joy I am.
Accepting our natural essence of Love, Harmony and Joy and looking at how to live in a way that lets it expand from within can really make a difference in human life. It is something that deserves true consideration and a commitment to be explored in each one of us. It is true evolution!
I have been inspired by Serge Benhayon and deeply appreciate the trust he brings back in the deep knowing of Who We Really Are.
by Luz Helena Hincapié, Bogotá, Colombia
Further Reading:
Essence
How Amazing it feels to Be Myself
Inspired By Universal Medicine…Just Being Me
The Truth about Serge Benhayon 
I really resonated with this statement, ‘what became clear though, was that I spent most of my time in my mind; I used self-criticism a lot, tried to control how I came across, and was always trying to better myself as I craved being recognized’. This invaded my life for many years and probably life times. This self-criticism was debilitating and projecting unto others was unacceptable too, thinking they could fix it.
How we live with our bodies is the key to how we live with others around us as within our bodies is everything. That quality is then reflected to others and others will feel this too. What they do with it is their choice too.
We all have this quality and at some point in our lives we either stop to consider that there is another way to live. Or we continue to search for it outside of ourselves and we will never find it.
I know everything is within me, it is far from perfect but boy I am not going elsewhere to search for it anymore, it’s too tiring to do so anymore!
Luz billions of people are being who they truly aren’t and in this a level of anxiety is within us. It plays out in whatever format and we identify ourselves in that. The simplicity of what you have explained here is what needs to happen, whoever we are inspired by, it doesn’t really matter.
I find when we are being something else, it is exhausting and when we finally becoming who we truly are, then we are filled with a lightness and life feels different and we see life differently too. Then who we truly are becomes our norm, and in that, two things occur, people love the reflection or they react to that reflection. At the end of the day, it is a simple choice of what that person does with this reflection, and we let that be till one day they may be ready to see the offering, till then life continues…
It is beautiful to read how you are returning to the harmony, love, and joy that are naturally you, ‘The more I discern and keep aligning back to a quality that to me feels closer to harmony, the more I organise my movements, my choices and all of myself in ways that allow for a more loving way of living to unfold naturally, without sacrifice or becoming alien in a very busy world.’
When we experience that quality within, it cannot be described to anyone, it is felt by the every bit of you. The joy that once was is no longer it anymore, it is Godlier then that. The choices we make will eventually connect you to those qualities, they are not from the outside, always within. So where will you find yours?
Luz, this is absolitely gorgeous and I love how it must come from and through the body and be lived so that it is not just another fancy bit of information for the mind to think about: “My focus is not anymore about changing or judging my personality, my looks, my nose, my job, my family, my friends, my country, but how to live in a way that allows all the beauty I am reclaiming back to come out and express.”
Judgment, comparison, jealousy, berating etc. are killers of who we truly are. Everything we have been given, are given for a reason, love every piece of you and then what the world thinks about you does not matter…
Why is it that we have trouble accepting how grand we actually are and that we hold onto those things that keep us small? After all this is far more common than the opposite: “Accepting myself as being Love, Harmony and Joy has made me go through lots of self-doubt and hesitation. Sometimes I have felt apprehensive about losing my identity and certain relationships.”
Talents, skills, ideals and beliefs are all too often used to define who we are. But rather they are the things we take on or adopt from the outside to cover up who we are.
This is an interesting point
“Is someone going to know who I am, better than I do?”
When we give our power away to other people we can feel that they know us better than we know ourselves, especially parents when we are young because they seem to know what we are going to say or do before we do. When we give our power away to other people then we are at the mercy of their whims. We can turn ourselves inside out and it will never be enough. Claiming ourselves is the most powerful present we could give to ourselves because then we are in charge of our choices and not making choices based on what others say, think or believe.
Be who you truly are is an easy thing to say, but we also need to be reminded of the starting point which is to be told we are a Son of God, just as Patanjali shared in the Yoga Sutras eons ago. If that is our starting point, then we have something to work from to return to the truth of who we are.
The beauty of who we are as love, harmony, joy, truth and stillness is a model for simplicity, it’s a return to what’s already there, and then a letting go of what we have built on top of our essence after we stepped away from ourselves.
I believe that there is a part of us that finds it very hard to give up our stories and our personality as we feel these are what makes us who we are.
Mary to me that’s why the reflection of another living the truth of their essence is so powerful, the false identities we live away from our true selves feel very real and they become part of our sense of security, but when we see the beauty another lives from their soul it’s a kind of awakening … and then the choice is ours.
What if this is a story, we so easily make up, ‘What if all the struggle and dissatisfaction of never feeling enough had no true foundation after all? ‘
“What if all the struggle and dissatisfaction of never feeling enough had no true foundation after all?” Ah, what a doorway to liberation this is.
Until we connect to our inner heart are we just living in the worlds biggest masquerade ball?
Could it be that ‘who I really am’ is all of me and the connection with all others, all of the time?
Whenever I understand behaviour as protection then I am able to be a lot more understanding with myself. I find that it is only ever really protection that I am attempting when I am doing the things that take me away from harmony, joy and love.
“Is someone going to know who I am, better than I do?” God and our Soul know the Divinity of who we are.
I can remember many times throughout my life when I used to wonder who I really was, for at times there seemed to be ‘someone else’ running my life, as what was playing out didn’t appear to relate to what I knew deep inside. It was very confusing indeed, but until Serge Benhayon came into my life in 2005, I kept on living in this confusion. And it was from his amazingly supportive and inspiring presentations, which made so much sense of life, that I began to understand why, and at the same time began to understand me so much more; and the me I finally uncovered is one gorgeous woman, who I fall in love with more each day.
This is the true gift we can give ourselves Ingrid – the beauty of re-discovering who we are and then appreciating this deeply and knowing that life is about our relationship with this part of ourselves and sharing it with everyone else.
When we know who we are from our qualities there is no need for perfection. When we know who we are from out abilities, we will never be enough.
Jennifer so beautifully said as it takes such a huge pressure off and allows us to simply be and let live, and in the process ‘shine’ so to speak and hence inspire others likewise.
Many of us go into survival mode to survive whatever it is that we feel is trying to harm and or crush us especially when we are small as our current way of raising children is not so that they can be all that they naturally are by essence but to crush them so that they give up and become like the adults around them robots of life, and not living life to the full.
Yes, unfortunately our current way of raising children does not allow them to remain true to themselves, ‘the connection to my inner amazing being was progressively lost when growing up as I learned to adhere to ways of living and being that allowed me to fit in and gave me accepted identities, but in truth didn´t support my loving qualities to expand from within and express out confidently.’
I know I lived a reduced and smaller version of myself for many years, I was miserable and exhausted and felt disempowered. Meeting Serge Benhayon changed all that I was awakened to the truth and beauty of who I truly am, this was only possible because of Serge’s powerful reflection inspiring me to live the true me.
I didn’t realise that for most of my life, up to 55, I had been living a ‘reduced and smaller version of myself’ and like you, it took meeting Serge Benhayon to begin to clearly see this. There were many times when I struggled to understand how I was ever going to grow into my true form, but presentation by presentation, book by book written by Serge, I slowly began to let go of the smaller version of me and embrace the much larger version that had always been waiting for me to say yes to it. I must say, that living the true version of me is way easier than trying to live the reduced version.
Yes, I am learning to come back and live who I truly am, a continual unfoldment.
When we become overwhelmed we loose our conscious presence of the moment we are in. This is the worst trouble we can get ourselves in. Who we really are, is with us in our present time, all we have to do is being still from within in our every move.
‘allows all the beauty I am reclaiming back to come out and express’ … and this we can do, allow our beauty out, bring understanding to where we are and let go our ideas of how we and the world should be.
To me Serge Benhayon has been the only person in my life who said to me
“Mary you are far more than you are currently living” and that got me thinking what is this man seeing about me that no one else has. Why has no one told me this before? Is it possible that there is more to me and more to life than ticking the boxes? And if there is more to me then there must be more to us, and of course there is much more to us all than we are willing to admit. I say ‘willing to admit’ because if we did admit to be much more then we would have to forgo our comfortable but dissatisfied lives and reevaluate our way of living.
Mary you have touched on something quite beautiful here, that we can all be that person for another who knows they are far more than they are living and lovingly meet them in this.
To accept who we are, to understand that we are not all those roles we take on, that always there is in all of us an essence that is untouched, that is there to be lived, a beauty ready to come out, that is the journey to discovering who we truly are, and the best thing of all, is that it’s all there in us ready and waiting. We often just need a trigger to remind us, for us to look beyond how we’ve been and where we are to see and feel that we are so much more than all that, a call back to the depths of us, and in that we connect to both us and everyone, for we all have this in us, no matter how we present outside. This unites us all.
Disconnected from my true essence, I lose myself and more likely to react to the world around me. This has a ripple effect that impacts on others that is unloving and should be avoided.
I am now in my 60’s and it is only in the last few years can I can say that I have begun to truly know myself which is extremely beautiful and am forever indebted to Serge Benhayon for being the inspirational reflection and guiding light for this to happen. Prior to meeting him I knew myself by the roles of how I believed I should be and endeavoured to fulfill. It has been, and still is, a journey to divest myself of these identifications.
‘Accepting our natural essence of Love, Harmony and Joy and looking at how to live in a way that lets it expand from within can really make a difference in human life. It is something that deserves true consideration and a commitment to be explored in each one of us. It is true evolution! ‘ Consciously being aware of the quality of touch that I bring and the quality that I move within and from my body and the gentle quality of my breath all support me in re aligning to my natural essence. I can feel this in the centre of my chest and can nurture this feeling as I deepen my connection.
If we call us a version of us, who we are is always bigger than whoever we pretend to be. That is why, learning the truth of who we are changes quite a bit, if we walk it.
I remember when I first started hearing and re-discovering ‘who I really was’. I wondered about this phrase and how this could be related to people who thought they knew who they were but were actually knowing themselves from their talents, ideals and feedback from the world. The only thing that changed and brought awareness for me was the Gentle Breath Meditation, then Esoteric Yoga, which allowed me to feel who I was for the first time since I was a kid, free of who I thought I was.
This is so profound and mega important.. As we live with ourselves everyday.. So does it shows our reality that we have lost our true sense of purpose in life, because we have forgotten who we innately are. Thank you for sharing.
This morning while being out, I kept seeing the word ‘vessel’ in all kinds of places and it feels like a perfect reminder for me right now.
Good question – if we are not being and expressing who we truly are then what or who is expressing through us?
and if it turns out that many if not most people are not truly being themselves then who is talking to whom and what sort of crazy world do we live in!?
Understanding this life comes from a deeper connection to our essences and then absolutely that when we living in a certain way that that energy will be carried over when we pass-over, so we are in consideration of how we can live responsibly, by knowing “myself by my essence of Love, Harmony and Joy.” This is why some babies are such a joy to behold and be around as they hold that past life energy into this life.
I have just completed an exercise where we stood back to back with someone while doing a specific movement and I got to feel my grandness no holding back and the other person’s equal grandness and just how delicate and sensitive we are when we allow ourselves to feel our true being. It’s like going back into childhood when we were last in contact with these feelings but then purposefully buried.
How many of us actually get to stop and consider who we really are, we are mostly too caught up in just getting by in life to question what is really going on.
For example I was talking to a lovey woman recently who is just a few weeks away from having a fourth child and she has no time to stop and think for herself, everything revolves around her children so I asked how were they supporting her to cope with this new arrival? Are they helping to do the chores that needed to be done? And they are not that helpful at all. So then my question has to be
“Do we set up life so that we don’t get to feel who we truly are and if so why?”
Letting go of any old ideals and beliefs about myself has uncovered more of who I truly am, such a valuable exploration when we learn to connect more deeply to our essence and then express this out into the world.
“My body was just `something´ I took everywhere without much care or awareness and respect for its powerful intelligence.” Oh what a common behaviour. Changing that to honouring and being responsive to my body has been life changing and with that an ever deepening connection with Love, Joy and Harmony.
‘What if all the struggle and dissatisfaction of never feeling enough had no true foundation after all?’ We allow our thoughts and perceptions about ourselves, others and the world to run us to such an extent that they can colour all our actions and completely distort the Truth. Life becomes complicated and we lose touch with ourselves, our essential selves. Coming back to the simplicity of Love, Harmony and Joy allows for a clarity and an understanding that we are enough, we have always been enough. Building on this reconnection we allow for more confidence in ourselves, and as we see the lies we have allowed to be part of the way we live we can, with the support of those who also truly care, bring ourselves back to a way of being that is true, free from struggle and the pain or hurt of never feeling enough.
When completely focused on quality in all that we do a lot of the other ‘stuff’ that comes in to distract and undermine our potential can be eliminated.
As I begin to live life in the knowing of who I am especially in the bringing of joy it is making so much sense to me that when I have moments when I don’t feel joy or the truth of who I am that those moments are not real. Yes I may feel the hurt in my body but it is not who I am. It becomes very clear that I do not have any issues and if I do catch myself experiencing an issue of any kind it has been purely created by me simply to avoid and dismiss shining the light and love I am in essence.
Learning to live by the understanding that although we experience ‘issues’ we are not them is very liberating and definitely allows for joy.
The key point here is BE who you truly are. There is nothing we need to do, nothing to work through, nothing to achieve or work at. We already are who we are, it’s only a matter of allowing it to shine out.
This rings several loud bells of how I used to compromise true expression by conforrming to what was required by parents, school, society etc. There is much to appreciate in the teachings presented by Universal Medicine and the support to make changes and new choices to bring more understanding of who I am in truth.
“I have come to understand that the connection to my inner amazing being was progressively lost when growing up as I learned to adhere to ways of living and being that allowed me to fit in and gave me accepted identities, but in truth didn´t support my loving qualities to expand from within and express out confidently”.
On re-reading this blog today, I am again inspired to deepen the true relationship with my body and continue to build a deeper level of nurturing and care with it.The teachings that Universal Medicine offer are a blueprint for returning to live from the truth of our innermost essence that is there in all.
One of the most beautiful Contributions to humanity that Universal Medicine brings is offering the doorway to that simple profound knowing of who we truly are.
We invest in so much that brings us identification just so that we stand out from the crowd or so we think, and yet none of it assists us to know who we are without the doing – it all still leaves us feeling empty.
Reconnecting to who we truly are is to reconnect to God and His Divine Love.
We have made it all about being right or wrong so it is understandably to feel a bit unsettled with the idea of being Love, Harmony and Joy in essence, whatever we have done. But it does not make it less true!