Ask most people who they are and they will start telling you their name, where they go/went to school, what sports they like, where they work, etc.
But is this really who you are?
One of the first lessons I learned on my spiritual journey was to consider who I am from the perspective of the role my soul chose to play in this lifetime.
When we examine ourselves from this perspective, we can more easily strip away the facade of our programming than consider our lives from the perspective of the persona we show to the world. For this is not who we are. This is the mask we wear.
When I ask who you are, I ask you to consider the person behind the mask. I am asking you to consider the energies you took on in this lifetime and how they’ve synergized to make up your basic personality.
Consider for example your birth order. I follow a guy on Instagram – T.J. Therrien – who creates videos from the perspective of the first born, middle and youngest child. As I am a first born, I certainly see myself in his videos, but I have no way to determine if the middle and youngest are accurate because I just don’t have that perspective.
There are no definitive hard and fast rules on how someone’s personality progresses, as there are younger children who step up if they sense a power vacuum and can take charge of older kids, but it is far less common than the oldest child having more responsibility put upon them early in life.
As the oldest child, I learned to be a “rule follower” for example. There are many other aspects, but you won’t relate to it if you’re a middle child, youngest or only child. Here’s just one link to an article explaining how parents react differently to each child and how it impacts their personality.
Another aspect to consider is your astrological birth chart. As a child of the 1960s, I had a hard time putting much faith into astrology because my limited exposure to it was “horoscopes” in the newspaper. I’ve since learned that it’s far more scientific than that and given the unique aspects of each individual’s actual birth; i.e. date, time, location…all of these factor into the mix of energies present.
I had my first real astrological chart done professionally in 1990. When I received the chart and read through it, I was astonished as there were things about myself that I knew to be true, but hadn’t ever even said out loud. It described both the positive and negative tendencies of how I expressed myself to the world. It helped me more than I thought it would by making me consciously aware of some negative tendencies that I could choose to change.
The organization that put my chart together no longer exists, but there are several astrologers I’ve used over the years. Finding an honest and reliable astrologer is about as difficult as finding any other professional. Do your research and read real reviews just like you would do for anything else.
You can get some good basic information out of astrology books and someone gave a really good one as a gift to me years ago called, “The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need” by Joanna Martine Woolfolk.
One other tool that helped me was numerology and fortunately, Dan Millman wrote the best resource I ever found called, “The Life You Were Born to Live.”
It uses the basic principle of adding up the numbers in your birth date and coming up with a two-digit number that typically then converts to another number. For example, if your birth date is November 15, 1995, you would add 1+1+1+5+1+9+9+5 to equal 32 which would then be reduced to 5 or as it refers to it in the book as 32/5. As noted on the first page of this chapter, those working this path are "here to work through issues related to independence, emotional honesty and cooperation and finally experiencing freedom through discipline and depth of experience."
I found in 2007 that the manufacturing plant I worked at was to be shut down and moved to Mexico. It wasn’t just a few of us losing our jobs; it was everyone who worked there. We were given a few months’ notice so we could wrap things up and it gave us time to talk about what we would do next.
I had recently come across this book and told my co-workers about it, but because most of my peers were engineers, they were not initially open to reading it. I had my manager sitting in my office one day and I asked him what his birth date was. He reluctantly shared the information with me and I read the first page. I had no idea if what I was reading was on point or not as his expression never changed. But when I started reading the second page, he stopped me and asked for the book. He sat there and read it and told me he was amazed at how accurate it was. He asked to take the book home for the weekend and later told me his family sat down and they did everyone in the family first and then everyone they could think of that they knew their birthdays.
That conversation gave me the credibility to be able to introduce this concept to other engineers at our company and some told me later that they actually changed their plans for “life after layoff” because they realized they hadn’t been following the stirrings of their soul and had instead been doing what they thought they were supposed to do with their lives.
So, I’m going to ask you again, “Who are you?”
As I noted in a post last week, I am going to be leading you on a journey of self-discovery by asking questions and sharing information for how to go about peeling the layers of your persona back so you can see all you have hidden and tucked away because you didn’t know how to deal with it and also so you can reveal the beauty that lies within each and every one of you. Each of you has a unique quality or gift you brought into this world to help heal our planet.
As you heal, we all heal…because we are all connected energetically.
I encourage you to create a journal and document what you learn as you go. From this post, I ask that you learn about your birth order and write down the aspects of any descriptions you find which resonate with you. Research your astrology and numerology and find those traits that you already knew about and ones that perhaps made you gasp when you read something in black and white that you had never publicly acknowledged about yourself.
Lastly, write about how this information helps you to more fully understand why you have made certain decisions in life that you may have second-guessed.
One important benefit this part of the journey did for me is it helped me to understand and accept my own unique personality. Accepting ourselves as we are is a crucial step on our journey to finding peace within.
Namaste
Jeff
© 2023. All rights reserved.
Jeff Scholl is a Certified Spiritual Life Coach through Holistic Learning Centers and a Board-Certified Holistic Health Practitioner through the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.
Learn more at: https://www.apathtopeace.org/
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