Becoming Aware of Our Layers

 “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

As we grow through life we gain more and more layers. There is a richness in this and a beautiful complexity, but we can become blind to older layers that still play a role in our lives.

An old layer of mine is fear of abandonment. My parents left me with my aunt for a week when I was just six weeks old. My mother’s mother passed and she needed to take care of things far away. I always had this fear of being left and so was a bit clingy as a child. I thought I’d grown out of it, but I found, through deep spiritual work that it was still there and it was affecting my life in a myriad of ways.  I found that my people pleasing stemmed from this fear as well as my inability to get truly close to most people. Becoming aware of this layer and its subsequent layers has allowed me to find self-acceptance, a stronger core and to become more open.

Peeling back our layers to discover more about ourselves helps us to understand where any particular layer may be getting in the way of our best life. Through meditation, contemplation and other spiritual practices we can see the richness and complexity of who we are. And once we see it, we can then realize we are more than those aspects. We can realize that for all the beauty that is found in the combination of our many selves, even more beauty is contained in our ability to consciously choose who we become.