When we think about the end of our lives, what do we think we are most likely to feel regretted? One of the possible regrets in our final reflection of our lives may be not having the courage to live a life true to ourselves. We may spend our whole lives working in a job that we do not enjoy. We may be trapped in a marriage that we no longer treasure. We may also be not courageous enough to try out new venture that we aspire to try. When we ask ourselves, “are we living a life that is aligning with what matters us most?”, we may find out that we may not live truly to ourselves.
Before we know whether we are living truly to ourselves, we need to have the self awareness of our “self”. In the basic level, we need to have an understanding of ourselves, such as our aspirations and our personality traits. For some people, they may treasure human connections and giving themselves to serve others. If they work in an area that is contradicting to their values, such as working as a hedge fund manager, they may feel their lives as not as meaningful as they expected. Another example is that some people may value a lot about having spent more quality time for their family, their parents or their children. If they are working in a job that requires them to have long working hours and even working in weekends, they are actually not living truly to themselves.
Sometimes, we may be distracted by values that belongs to other people or the collective culture of our environment. For instance, if we are growing up in an environment that is very competitive and values achievement and materialistic possessions, we may gradually adopt these values and strive for what we may not intrinsically treasure. When we are being unable to strive for what most people value in our collective culture, we may also engage in self criticism and self doubts. We may criticize ourselves for not earning enough or not achieving high enough in our career ladder. In fact, these self criticism and negative judgment will make us believing that we are defective. This possible distortion of our capability and ourselves being defective may cause us to overlook our true nature and our strengths.
In order for us to be able to step out from these self doubts and self criticism, we need to be able to take an observer view of our “self”. That is, before knowing our true “self”, we need to be able to observer our “self”. This means we need to be an observer of our feelings, thinking, behaviors and bodily sensations. With this observer view, we can be aware of ourselves being trapped in our negative judgment towards ourselves when we compare with others in the collective values. Furthermore, we may also be able to be aware of our uneasiness or uncomfortable feelings when we act not according to our values and our true selves. With this awareness, we may be able to step out of our trap by reflecting more on our true values and our aspirations. For example, a hedge fund manager realised her passion in yoga after months’ practice of mindfulness meditation and yoga, as well as, her aspiration in serving others through helping others to cultivate well-being. After these realisation, she quitted her job as a hedge fund manager and started her journey as a yoga and mindfulness teacher.
Under the impact of the pandemic in recent two years, we may experience a lot of adversities in our lives. Sometimes, we may question about our lives as we start to realise we may not live truly to ourselves. Before we really know how to live truly to ourselves, let us be more mindful of inner self first. Gradually, we may be able to find a path that we really treasure and enjoy the rest of our life journey.
