What is Self?

Awareness is the greatest agent for change.

- Eckhart Tolle

Aloha!

Have you wondered - what is this self we keep talking about. ‘Become more yourself’. What does that even mean. I’m going to share some of what I understand as the Self.

Carl Rodgers called it our inner personality. Freud called it the psyche. It is the inner person - what you are at your core.

What it is not - our self-image, our ideal image, what we project to the world. It is not just our mind or thoughts or actions. It’s who we are deeper than the labels, the masks and responsibilities. Our real self with all our secrets - secret desires, secret hopes and dreams, our secret fears. It also includes the parts of ourselves we are unconscious of. This is also known as the shadow.

Do you remember the first time you became aware of the idea of shadow? I do. I was playing out in the sun and suddenly noticed that something was following me. I started playing around with it, seeing if it would imitate everything I did and whether it would follow me. Our psychological shadow is the same.

A shadow will naturally exist where there is no light or awareness. Think of awareness or consciousness as light - you can see things clearly. Instead of taking the shadow to mean something ominous, we should have the same curiosity as we had when we were children. Really look at it, examine it. And don’t you know…the more you examine it with curiosity, the more light you bring to it. So, as we integrate and accept those parts of ourselves we most want to deny or where we are most ashamed, the more we learn about the Self.

Other people are often very aware of these parts of ourselves. Sometimes they are found in the people who most irritate us or even in our enemies. We may project these qualities on others or find ourselves triggered without understanding why. All this means that the self is also relational. It is inextricably linked to other people. We learn more about ourselves by relating to others.

Jung says it best; it is the ‘unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person, and represents the psyche as a whole’.

There is a level of mystery in conceptualising the fullness of the Self. Suffice it to say that self-realisation or individuation is a life-long process. If we’re prepared to go on this journey, we’ll be amazed at the things we can learn about ourselves.