Where exactly do I find my True Self?

For years I have thought of my True Self as being located somewhere inside me. I don’t mean like literally inside my body – but definitely inside me. It never occurred to me that this might be a misrepresentation.

To be fair there are lots of representations of the True Self or the soul as existing within. As a Quaker I was familiar with it as the Inner Light. Then there is Michael Neill’s metaphor of the True Self as a diamond at the centre, surrounded by the BS of limiting beliefs and ideas about ourselves. Jamie Smart has used the image of the Golden Buddha, concealed inside a layer of stucco.

But there’s a problem with this way of thinking about the True Self – for me at least, it contributes to a sense of being separate. And the whole point of this spiritual approach is that we are not separate – we are all part of the wholeness of everything.

When I saw the True Self as being inside, I saw it as being hidden away inside the walls that we create as children to keep ourselves safe. As if the True Self needs protection. As if!

It’s our vulnerabilities and our fragile ego which need protection. Well we operate as if they do.

In my work with boarding school survivors (and from my own inner work as a boarding school survivor), I’ve realised that the walls we create as children to keep the world out and to protect our vulnerabilities merely serve to cut us off from who we truly are. So the True Self is outside those walls and may feel very hard to access.

When I thought about the walls I created to keep me safe at school – the blueprint for my survival personality – I saw it as a moated castle. Maybe this reflects my own childhood love of castles and moats. But anyway the point about a moated castle is that it has a drawbridge, and to extend the metaphor a little further, it’s possible to let the drawbridge down just long enough to make a quick foray out into the world before retreating into the castle and pulling the drawbridge back up.

It’s only by lowering the drawbridge that we can come out and reconnect with the world we shut out when we were at school. And it’s the only way we can connect with the people close to us and let love in. As long as the drawbridge stays pulled up it’s impossible to make those deep connections. But it helps to know that if that connection gets too overwhelming you can retreat back inside and pull the drawbridge back up for a little while.

I’ll be exploring this metaphor and what it means for us in my workshop for ex-boarders and their partners next Thursday, Beyond the Moat.

If you’re ready to explore what it might look like to venture out from behind your walls, join us next Thursday.