A nice follow up to following steps 😊.  Last year I wrote a piece talking about knowing who we are.  Millennia before the distraction of at-your-fingertips technology, in-home entertainment, or mechanized transportation to take us far from where we live, conversation reigned supreme.  A major topic of discussion was “Knowing Thyself.”  While the massive amount of work to know who we are was simplified into two words, it captures the simple essence of how important the focus was in knowing who we are, knowing our worth, and knowing what our contribution would be to society.  The one caveat I haven’t seen much work on is the brain’s inability to comprehend a negative: we know who we are not often before we know who we are.  After a while society used this to it’s advantage, especially for the gain of the state.  It’s easier to convince people who they are than it is to teach them to KNOW who they are.  It’s also more profitable to keep them in line, following the same path than it is to let them express themselves.

The very human desire to feel acceptance takes precedence to honing our ability to trust instinct.  It’s a survival trait that we’ve never lost.  Fitting in with the crowd poses physical safety benefits that going it alone blatantly ignores, so we are trained to go with the crowd, be with the group and follow their patterns before we learn to understand our own.  I don’t disparage this because, even now, even if survival isn’t predicated on the herd, there IS marked advantage to helping each other and contributing to the whole.  But we have forgotten that we can vary what contributes to the whole.  Survival looks different now than it did back then and it means something different.  We aren’t fighting for our lives in terms of hunter/predator but we are fighting to find our place and express who we are.  There has been a shift toward self-awareness and expression that there wasn’t room for previously.

Knowing who we are today means understanding and validating the emotion behind the action.  Instead of using fear to create herd mentality to protect, we’ve been manipulated with herd mentality about “lack” and needing to acquire material.  No one needs an 85 inch TV to live.  I man, they’re nice, but it’s not life or death.  We’ve mistaken convenience for necessity and bought into distraction instead of working on our gifts.  Our gifts can change the world, they can light a new path, and they can alter the existence of those who come after us.  This takes “Know Thyself” to an entirely new level.  We don’t have to fight for survival at this time, thank the universe/source/God.  We have been tasked with progressing and preserving humanity.  That means understanding our place in evolution and how to apply what we know.  That means feeling our way to the truth.

It’s easy to ignore instinct—we are trained to shrug it off.  Even if we know that going with the crowd feels wrong, we tend to follow suit because it means we can avoid the loneliness of solitude.  But when we take the time to feel our way to what is right in our hearts, we learn over time that the people who are meant for us won’t leave us.  They will embrace the ideas we share and we can learn from each other.  We can learn to live in a new way.  Percentage wise, relatively few people understand how fortunate we truly are in this day and age.  It’s so easy to whine and complain about what we don’t have that we lose sight of the privilege we’ve been born into.  Learning to dive into what you’re feeling, even if it means trusting your instinct on who you are NOT, it’s a step toward learning who you ARE.  We often feel something is off before we recognize what’s right: another gift leftover from survival.  We can use that to our advantage.  We can learn to lessen our distraction time (phones/devices/gossip, whatever it may be) bit by bit until we are comfortable hearing that intuition again.  Before you expect an epiphany of lights and magic to shine on you, learn to listen to the quiet voice of, “Go this way,” Once you hear that, you’ll quickly learn you’re on the right path to knowing who you are.