From: Positively Positive
By: Gretchen Rubin
As our weekly series, Your Soulful Sunday continues, enjoy this article by Gretchen Rubin and Positively Positive.
Your Soulful Sunday series helps you fill your life back up with purpose and alignment.
Do you really know who you are?
Would you like to be more in touch with who you are?
This article should help you.
In my writing about habits and happiness, I kept coming back to the same idea: to shape our habits,to build our happiness, we have to start with a knowledge of ourselves — our own nature, our own interest, our own temperament.
It sounds so easy to know yourself — after all, you hang out with yourself all day! But it’s very, very challenging. We’re so distracted by how we wish we were, or by what think we ought to be, or by what other people expect from us…we lose touch with what’s actually true.
The first step in self-knowledge is self-consciousness. I was struck by these two stories, by two great minds: Carl Jung and Edith Wharton. They both remembered exactly the moment when they knew themselves for the first time.
In a 1959 “Face to Face” TV interview, Carl Jung describes:
That was in my eleventh year. There I suddenly—on my way to school, I stepped out of a mist. It was just as if I had been in a mist, walking in a mist, and I stepped out of it, and I knew, “I am. I am what I am.” And then I thought, “But what have I been before?” And then I found that I had been in the mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things. I was just one thing, among many things.
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