The blog post below contains a story about Lora and her search for her true self after divorce. It took divorce for her to start uncovering who she really is and what makes her happy.
The Search for Authenticity http://bit.ly/aeKmT4
The question was posed, “why is this lesson one that so many of us have to learn the hard way?” “How can we help our children so they don’t have to learn the hard way?”
Why did I have to do it the hard way? It was because I already had an idea of what life was suppose to be like as I matured into a young adult. Get a good education, get a good job, find a man, have kids (this step never materialized) and this is what life is all about. I continued on this path until one day I realized I had lost all sense of happiness. It wasn’t until then that I started asking the questions; What is life about? What do I want? I then went on a journey to find happiness.
On the journey I found out that I had to do lots of personal development work to drop off baggage from my growing up. I think we all develop baggage — emotional conditioning — that we can choose to deal with in adult hood or not. For me dropping off this baggage has allowed me to find my authentic self — who I really am when I am fully showing up as me.
I think we all need to do this as adults. It seems to me the problem occurs because we avoid doing this work until a crisis precipitates — such as divorce — and then we start the journey. In my case I started when I had major stress at work and was looking for happiness.
How do we help our kids? Let them know that there is another kind of learning that they can do as adults — personal development and spiritual development. There is more learning to do than what is taught in high school and university.
Is all the personal development learning worth it? Absolutely. I love who I have become and how I relate to people and all the opportunities that are in front of me. Plus I get to use it for the rest of my life.
Jacque
