I was always wary of any teachings that promised a return to ‘your true self’. Mainly because this much sought after being seemed always to be presented as some kind of pristine version of myself that just didn’t ring…well… true! Words such as limitless, pure, joyful, blissful all seemed to create just more rejection of the crap I felt on a more regular basis.. like worried, sad, miserable, bored, desperate, frustrated, angry, anxious, confused, exhausted, irritated… and on it goes.
 
Our ‘true self’ is not the exclusion of all the stuff we don’t like and long to be free of in favour of all the wonderful and pleasing aspects of the absolute. The ground of our being is unconditionally open. And so it contains and includes all of the messy stuff we’d rather just erase. Our true self embraces all of the crap we would rather just rid ourselves of.
 
In essence, your true self is the limitless and vibrantly alive silence of creation expressing as all the various selves that come and go… the love that allows what is, to be. It deeply involves itself in our pain. It doesn’t pretend it doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist. It loves it, the way a loving mother loves and cares for her child when it is in pain. Our true self allows everything to fully be.
 
When we know that through our direct experience, we begin to be true to ourselves. Which includes moving THROUGH the temporary experiences that are painful rather than pushing them away in favour of some phantom state of perpetual joy and bliss and tranquillity. We move through all of it with the power and the courage of the infinite, the eternal, the divine.
 
Facing pain and suffering as a lonely, separate and wandering cloud is fraught with despair. Facing that same pain and suffering as the wide open sky that embraces that cloud and yet is not bound by or in it, is an all together very different experience. We can finally fully be ourselves and yet never bound by ourselves.