The Real You

Here’s a great exercise to learn important stuff about yourself. Many people try to wrestle themselves into activities or lifestyles that aren’t for them but they have convinced themselves they need to be following this erroneous path. It helps to track one’s natural inclinations to figure out what the correct direction is.

The exercise: give yourself 6 hours of solitary, guilt-free do-nothingness at home. Set aside those 6 hours as the time when you’ll do whatever you fancy at that moment. No work, no chores, no to-do list. Only the pleasing, enjoyable stuff.

Caveat: If all you want to do is scroll social media on your phone, lock the phone in a time-release jar. If you find yourself unable to do that, it means you are living in a way that your brain finds intolerable, which is why you use the phone as a coping mechanism.

The result: Usually, the real you starts to emerge by the end of the second hour. People often say, “if only I had time, I’d go back to the violin” or “I’d learn to cook” or “I’d read all day”. But they are wrong. What they actually want to be doing is something completely different.

Important: Pay particular attention to which part of the body you engage in this activity. Is it the hands? The ears? The legs? The eyes? Which of the elements are you trying to gorge on? Air? Water? Earth? This is what you are getting in insufficient quantities and need to integrate into your daily life. On some level, we all know what we need but we turn away from that because we pile on received opinions that hide reality from us.