Stepping Into Alignment
If you want to stand fully in your power to affect change and make a significant impact, you must first face yourself directly in the mirror and see beneath the veil of illusion that you’ve crafted over your true face. Once you see past this layer of falseness and disconnection, you can look deeply into your eyes and see your truest self. You painted a mask over your face at some point in your development for survival purposes. It allowed you to move about this landscape and blend in with other people, and it gave you a sense of safety in an uncertain world. This difficult emotional work allows you to step into alignment with your authentic self. Every bit of falseness that you are willing to see and address frees you a little bit more and allows you to be more authentic. When you’re looking at yourself, you must discern what parts of you are real and what parts you developed to suit others.
Once you identify your true self in wholeness, give them a big energetic hug. Your inner child deserves to be seen, loved, and cherished for the exact person they truly are, and you’re the perfect person to deliver this unconditional love and acceptance. It is important to purge yourself of self-judgment and criticisms to step into alignment. You cannot be your greatest critic and your own hero. You must choose one, and when you do, know that you will no longer be able to rely on validation from others to fill your cup. Each time we accept validation from the external, we deny ourselves the self-validation we crave on a deeper level. Fill your own cup and allow your energy to overflow into the universe blessing everyone it touches. You can appreciate when others give you attention and validation, but if that is the only energy you’re receiving, you’ll surely starve without it if it disappears. Ensure your own nourishment and success.
Seeking external validation is a symptom. It’s letting you know that you don’t see your own value and that you have an unfulfilled need for unconditional love. The beauty of this is that you can provide that unconditional love for yourself, and you can learn to let go of anything that’s holding you back from seeing your worth in order to give yourself this unconditional love. When you’re unable to offer yourself unconditional love, a void is created in your heart space that can only be healed by fulfilling this demand. We try to fill this void with many addictions, including validation from external sources, but it is never restored until we can see our most authentic self through the lens of unconditional love and self-acceptance. No matter what has happened along your journey, this is possible. You just have to decide that you’re done blaming yourself for everything that went wrong and let go of your self-judgments.
For those of us who have a tendency to be self-critical and have extremely high expectations, this exercise is particularly difficult. We have to quiet the negative self-talk and our perfection-obsessed inner monologue once and for all. If you find yourself saying mean things out loud when you make mistakes, I would encourage you to correct this out loud until you start speaking more kindly to yourself. We are only human, and we make mistakes frequently out of necessity. This is how we learn. In order to truly love yourself, you must forgive yourself for every mistake you’ve ever made. Things don’t always turn out the way we hoped, and honestly most of the time the end results aren’t exactly what we had planned. Our task is to overcome the disappointment we’re feeling at that juncture and accept whatever happened instead. After that we just have to love ourselves enough to try again and trust that we’ll do better the next time around. Trust yourself. Love yourself. Be yourself. That’s all.