Seeing your true reflection

I think one of the biggest struggles we can have is seeing ourselves as we truly are:  not as we want to be, not as we fear we are, not as other people see us...but the actual truth of our being.  This is what I feel is at the heart of shadow work, but also really at the heart of all spiritual and magical practice, because it is through knowing our true Selves that we can grow and achieve what we want in this world.

Learning to see your true reflection is something that takes a lot of work.  It is something that you will keep coming back to, like staring into a foggy mirror, trying to see what is actually there, and not just the distorted and shrouded image.  Every time you work to see that reflection, you might clear up a tiny bit, or you might trick yourself into believing that part of the false image is actually true.

There is so much feedback in the world about who we are.  There are many stereotypes and images that we may get labeled as, and it might be hard to pull ourselves away from those preconceived notions.  If we are a mother, then we must be motherly, right?  If we like to read, we must be scholarly.  If we are athletic, can we also be smart?

Sometimes, these broad categories are the easiest to pull ourselves out of.  It is easy to recognize that not every mother treats motherhood the same way.  But if we are a true outlier, if we really don't share a lot of the same characteristics as others with the same label, we may start to doubt, to question ourselves.  Am I really a mother if I don't feel that bond with my children that other mother's talk about? 

The great thing is that you are the only one who can tell you what you really are and what you are not.  The hard thing is that leaves it up to you to define the parts of yourself, and to see what traits help you fulfill the different roles in your life.

I think one of the hardest reflections to see through is our own hopes and fears.  We may want, so desperately in our heart, to be a certain way, so much so that we have actually convinced ourselves that we are what we want to be.  And yet, things keep popping up, examples of how we really aren't what we thought we are.  We may be tempted to ignore these little reminders, to write them off as random coincidences, or as other people's misguided perceptions.  But we really owe it to ourselves to listen to these little cues as they are given to us, because only by first realizing that we aren't what we thought we were, can we truly become what we want to be.

The same, in inverse, applies to our fears.  If we are afraid we are a certain way, we may trick ourselves into acting as if we are.  It's the dark side of 'fake it until you make it.'  Our fear creates the undesired behaviors because we have bought into the idea that we aren't better than the version of ourselves that we fear is true.  It can be hard to break through this fear, but sometimes it helps to talk to a friend, to get some outside perspective on what you are going through.  Sometimes, we can't see the triumphs we have gained, because we are so deep in the trouble, that it consumes us.

The danger with asking for outside help is that other people don't see our true selves, they really can't.  Each person we interact with, every person who is aware of our existence, knows us as a version of our self.  Even if we think we are sharing everything we can with another person, they will still filter their experience of us through their own history, and so they will see something a bit different.  But more importantly, we tend to show different people different sides of ourselves.  We may be a slightly different person with our family than we are with our friends.  This is absolutely natural!

The key here is to use other people's perceptions of you to check your own sense of Self.  It's almost like fact checking by seeing how other people act around you, and seeing if their reactions line up with your understanding of yourself.  In this way, they become the mirrors in which you search for your truest reflection.

Ultimately, none of these individual reflections is a true image of your inner Self.  It is only through combining them all and looking through the reflections and seeing the whole image that exists behind the mirror, that we can come to an understanding of our Self.  And our Self is both eternal (and beyond words and full comprehension) and ever changing, so our search for Self is a constantly evolving process, where we check our reflections in order to better express the Self that lies underneath.