Prepare a stable base for when you inevitably lose your balance. You will regroup in a new and more solid way.
Now, you take on the task of working through the polarized tensions in yourself to evolve out of the status quo and into your more developed life.
Your inner psyche is as vast and as complex as the universe. You have systems within systems, all in motion and which adjust to one another. In your unconscious depths, you have shadow and light, penetrating and absorbing forces, psychic translations of your biology and an unending life force that insists on your identity manifesting itself.
To release it all at once is impossible, thank goodness, because it would overwhelm your mind. This inner system is wise and allows the right amount of awareness to come forth as you can accept the knowledge.
Perhaps you have always appreciated art, the construction of buildings, or mathematical equations in simple forms. If you attend to your appreciations, you become more involved in their significance.
Then, one day, much to your surprise, you decide to paint or discover that you want to change your vocation and become an architect, or instead of helping friends with their accounting tasks, you want to look at mathematical design in music or teach math.
Those interests, coming from your deep self, blossom as you do. The Judge may come down hard, saying if you follow these interests, you will disrupt your life and the lives of other people. That may be true.
Part of your task is to explore how you value the standards the Judge is attempting to enforce. Often, the challenge comes down to one question: Do you live for others, or do you live for yourself? Ah, says the Judge. If you live for yourself, you are selfish.
But isn’t it selfish for others to demand your life and your life energy rather than take responsibility themselves? And if you live for yourself and honor your depths, aren’t you contributing to the world in ways that could benefit many people?
That Judge is rigid and forceful but lacks expansive thinking. If you honor the direction your life force attempts to lead you, then you are honoring not only your life force but the life force in nature that encompasses all living beings.
You can’t know the details of where that will lead, but you do know, as you proceed, that your life gets better and the lives of the people around you are challenged to improve themselves.
You take yourself out of the old equation that is comfortable for those around you and step into what is unknown to your conscious mind but eagerly desired by your true self.
Action for Your Authentic Life in Six Steps
Action for Your Authentic Life in Six Steps - Steps One and Two
Action for Your Authentic Life in Six Steps - Step Three
Action for Your Authentic Life in Six Steps - Step Four
Action for Your Authentic Life in Six Steps - Step Five
Action for Your Authentic Life in Six Steps - Step Six
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Written by Joanna Poppink, MFT. Joanna is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in eating disorder recovery, stress, PTSD, and adult development.
She is licensed in CA, AZ, OR, FL, and UT. Author of the Book: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder
Appointments are virtual.
For a free telephone consultation, e-mail her at
Add comment