What does it feel like? Pure joy? Self-Actualization? All of the above? At first, fully embodying your organic self can feel anxiety-provoking and uncomfortable because this state of being is likely something you are not used to. However, truly loving yourself can become the best feeling you have ever experienced if you simply practice it.

Do you know how long it takes to become an expert at something? Do you think that it takes a similar amount of time to become an expert at purely being yourself? The answer is 10,000 hours, 10,000 hours to become an expert. How many hours have you spent embodying your true self in this life? Have you even come to a place of knowing yourself? If not, how can anyone else truly get to know you and come to love you in kind?

These are poignant questions, as many of us (our leadership included) have spent many years trying to be something beyond ourselves, trying to catch a buzz that does not come from within us. These were not years wasted… they were years learning… learning what does not work… on the journey to what does. The only organic buzz one can truly come to experience is that which comes from deep self-exploration and enactment. Enactment meaning putting into action that which we are called internally to do. These internal interests and passions come not from trauma programming, but are the fruits of the tree of our soul, and would exist within us even if we had not experience trauma programming growing up.

Think about that. Who are you underneath all the trauma programming that buried your shine?

There’s a famous story author Alan Cohen tells about The Golden Buddha:

“Many years ago in Thailand was a temple with a huge Golden Buddha. Word came to this village that an army was about to invade, so they covered the Golden Buddha with mud and concrete so it looked like a stone Buddha and the invading army would perceive no value in it.

Sure enough, the army rolled in and passed by the stone Buddha and had no reason to plunder it. For many years, the army occupied the village with this temple and Buddha. And there was a time where nobody remembered that the Buddha was golden.

And then one day, a young monk was meditating at the base of the Buddha, and a little piece of gold chipped off. The monk excitedly told the other monks and they started hammering at the statue and realized it was a Golden Buddha.

The metaphor is that each of us is golden by nature.

We are born knowing everything. But then we go to school and learn a certain way to live, and put a ‘casing of mud stone over the Buddha.’ And we start to believe we are the stone Buddha, not the golden one.

Then something comes along that cracks our casing and knocks off a piece of our armor and in that moment, we look inside and see the gold. At that moment, all we want to do the rest of our life is pick away the stone because the gold is so much more fun!”