It can really sweeten your life to be able to distinguish your natural, healthy personality attributes – your ways of celebrating your existence – from those that you have cultivated as a shield against whatever you have grown up to fear, reject and mistrust in yourself and others, or that you wear as costumes and masks so that you can appear to be who you think you are supposed to be. Far more significant is to realize that YOUR PERSONALITY IS NOT WHO YOU REALLY ARE.
Whatever it is like, your personality is nothing more than your personal style. Depending on how nurtured you were as you grew up, it may give you a realistic, rose-coloured or judgmental perspective on life. It may give you a permissive or a controlling attitude. It may uplift you or make you depressive. It may require you to be flamboyant or to make sure nobody ever notices you. It may turn you into a power-monger or a victim. It may put you on the road to fame and fortune, or drive you to drink and drugs. Or both. Of course a defensive or aggressive personality has a detrimental influence on how you live your life, and especially on how you relate with other people, whether as friends, family, colleagues, lovers, peers, authority figures or adversaries. If your family and childhood experiences were less than ideal, your personality is quite likely to adopt such self-sabotaging beliefs as “I don’t deserve … I’m not good enough … I’m better than … I don’t belong …” But no matter how self-supporting or self-sabotaging your personality is, you can only believe that this is who you are until your real being shows up. When this happens, your personality is dethroned. It no longer controls the show. Not that is vanishes; but it becomes the servant of the one who has come home, rather than the usurper who kept you from yourself.
And who is this one? It is you, awake and aware in your body, energies, senses, feelings, heart, intelligence and soul. It is you, in touch with all that you are, and all that is here and now. It is you meeting life unencumbered by pre-programmed beliefs and attitudes, transparently free of masks and costumes, and with no need to impress or pretend. In your being you no longer need your personality as a place to hide from yourself and the world. Instead it can assume its rightful role as an array of resources that serve your being.
The first step towards this life-transforming realisation is to become aware of your ingenious personality and the sometimes brilliant tricks it uses to keep you under its thumb.
The rest of this post is for any of you readers who resonate so much with what you have just read that you might like to participate in the Art of Being experience that guides participants out of personality into being. The 1st Circle is an enthralling personal and inter-personal adventure, often playful, and sometimes deeply touching when it reconciles you with feelings and inner states that you have habitually shunned and may not even know you had. In the circle of participants, the warm and often humorous sharing sessions build mutual trust and encouragement as the days go by. Through each other, you come to appreciate and nurture the personality traits that serve you, and you learn how to dissolve those that get in the way of your happiness, creativity and well-being.
The 1st Circle gives you the experiential foundation to make the quantum leap from personality-based existence into what has rightly been called the miracle of being. It is in itself a complete experience. It also gives you the opportunity to see if you would like to continue into the 2nd Circle of The New Art of Being Training.