By Wendell Shortt | Purpose Fairy
Have you ever wondered if who you are now is the best version of yourself?
Many of us have heard the saying “You are your thoughts”, and more aptly put, I venture to say, “You are your thoughts as you consider them and act on them”.
The proactive process of meditation is the ongoing effort through which a person organizes and structures their own personal psychological product to present the “best version of themselves” to their world.
None of us can necessarily help that we have all had some degree of “bad” external events happen to us outside of our control at various times in our lives. Some of these bad events leave traces of emotions that still routinely try to characterize our life decisions and our personalities to this day.
For example, we may not have had the greatest parental influence growing up, and those experiences leave lasting effects on (or better yet as we shall understand, “over”) our psyche.
I would like to present that, buried beneath the negative (and obviously, positive) effects of our past experiences, lays our unique personality, or our inner self, that simply, is.
Your Inner Self
Our inner self can be contacted through consistent, focused meditation, apart from the massive amounts of emotional responses, memories (both recent and more so in the past), as well as our personal evaluations of our life successes (accurate or otherwise) that involuntarily seem to clutter our mental “airspace”.
How Does Meditation Help with Finding the Best Version of Yourself?
Meditation, as an active process, gives us the ability to identify and categorize what is jockeying for position in our mental airspace, and then once performed, we have the ability to suppress our negative perspectives, such as our victimizing and self-deprecating thoughts that result from some past negative external event or influence.
None of us can change the past. None of us has the ability to essentially erase bad memories. However, we can actively identify and categorize, and resultingly, choose, what to do with whatever “flavor of the day” negative thoughts may be assaulting our mind, and jockeying for the top position in our thoughts that may ultimately cause an action to be performed.
The best version of our true self is the person that continually exists, sovereignly apart from the negative thoughts of our past experiences and even the tendencies that are created by those experiences.
For example, we may find that due to a past experience of being belittled by a parental family member, that we have a resulting behavioral tendency that causes us to avoid interaction with the public where we think we may be belittled in some way, which could simply, in all reality, be no more than constructive criticism.
Through the haze of our muddled thoughts and experiences, however, we may make inadequate interpretations of such events that then affect how we present ourselves to the world.
How to Use Meditation to Find the Best Version of Yourself
As genuinely unique individuals, we possess valuable and irreplaceable qualities that, I believe, can have a lasting positive effect on the world, by the simple fact that we are, indeed, unique. However, as alluded to above, some less than adequate upbringing and life experiences, or simply the lack of enough positive life experiences, may have had a hand in shaping our psyche, and what thoughts that tend to cloud our minds.
I have found that it can be viewed that it is our responsibility as stewards of the life that we each now possess, to challenge ourselves, in spite of the existence of various degrees of mental negativity, to present the best version of ourselves to the world, along with our unique qualities and perspectives as individuals.
Too many of us, especially in the western civilizations of the world, get lost in the hustle and bustle of the altogether unfulfilling pursuit of materialism, and falling prey to the pyramid constructs of corporate jobs which happily make us devoid of individuality, simply to serve the whims of the “elite” higher up on the pyramid. Life, however, like a river that carries us along a journey, tends to make its own path.
