A ROAD MAP TO RECONNECTING WITH YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF

Your journey back to your authentic Self will look different from mine. You experienced your own unique childhood conditioning and developed specific coping strategies as a result, which have been shaped by the events and relationships you’ve had since you were young. You have your own distinct vibrational energy that interacts with the world around you, creating an essence—your soul—that is unique to you.

Though your healing journey will be one of a kind, the stops you will make on your journey will be the same as mine and those of everyone else reading this book. Because we’re all human, we all have the same basic universal needs. And we all have to meet these needs in the same order, addressing each sequentially.

We can learn to listen to our body and meet our physical needs.

We can learn to become consciously aware of our conditioned or habitual thoughts, emotions, and reactions so we can make new decisions that will better serve our authentic Self.

Finally, we can locate and learn to trust our intuition, reconnect with our soul, and manifest our unique essence or energy in the world.

FULFILLING YOUR AUTHENTIC NEEDS

Why does the sequence of your healing journey matter so much? Because we can’t truly heal our relationships and evolve as individual beings until our body feels both physically and emotionally safe. If you’re chronically dehydrated, sleep deprived, malnourished, or have other unmet physical needs, you won’t have the energy or ability to work on yourself or your relationships. If you don’t feel safe and secure enough to express your emotions, you won’t be able to authentically connect with others. If you can’t authentically connect with others, you won’t be able to easefully be yourself, freely experience joyful play, tap into your inherent creativity, find your purpose, or feel truly fulfilled.

What I’m referring to is our hierarchy of needs, a concept first introduced in 1943 by the psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow, which helps us understand human motivation. Though Maslow’s hierarchy included five tiers of needs—physiological (physical), safety (personal, health, job security), love and belonging (friends, family, intimacy), esteem (self-respect, status), and what he called “self-actualization” (achieving our full potential)—I’ve simplified it to three foundational layers in what I call the “authentic needs pyramid,” which you may remember if you read my workbook, How to Meet Your Self.

Your Authentic Needs Checklist

Most of us are disconnected from our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs as a result of our childhood conditioning so it’s important to first notice which needs we’re currently not satisfying. Take a moment to explore the following checklist, being as honest and objective with yourself as possible as you consider the following questions and mark the response(s) that most accurately reflect your current experience:

DO I FEED MY BODY THE NUTRIENTS IT NEEDS?

_______ I listen to my body, eating when it’s hungry and stopping when it’s full.

_______ I choose foods that make me feel full and energized (whenever they’re available).

_______ I am aware of the foods that make me feel lethargic, jumpy, or otherwise unwell and avoid them (whenever possible).

_______ I typically feel mentally alert and sharp.

DO I MOVE MY BODY?

_______ I find ways to move my body a bit each day.

_______ I know when my body needs to rest or take a break, and I allow myself that rest.

_______ I feel the sensations of my muscles contracting and expanding.

_______ I notice shifts in my body and its energy feels when I move as opposed to when I don’t.

DO I GIVE MY BODY ENOUGH REST?

_______ I fall asleep quickly after getting into bed.

_______ I am able to sleep through the night without waking up (or when I do wake, I can easily fall back asleep).

_______ I wake up feeling refreshed and rejuvenated.

_______ I notice when a lack of sleep affects my moods and behavior.

CAN I DEAL WITH STRESS?

_______ I am aware of how the people in my life impact my stress level.

_______ I am aware of how the content I consume (social media, news, entertainment) impacts my stress level.

_______ I know when I’m stressed out and find moments to calm myself whenever possible.

_______ I experience moments of solitude, stillness, quiet, or nature each day.

DO I FEEL EMOTIONALLY SAFE AND SECURE?

_______ I feel safe and free to authentically express myself and my feelings in my relationships.

_______ I am aware of the things that interest me or that I’m passionate about.

_______ I am open to new experiences and set aside time to explore my creativity.

_______ I make room for spontaneous, playful, or unstructured time throughout my day.

Be gentle and compassionate with yourself if you are not yet able to mark many of the responses above. The next few chapters will explore ways you can begin to meet these foundational needs and heal your relationship with your body.

HEALING YOUR BODY

It’s easy to assume that you’re consistently meeting your physical needs if you’re fortunate enough to have enough food to eat, a safe place to sleep, and access to clean water, adequate clothing, and health care. Even with these privileges, the reality is that most of us don’t meet our fundamental physiological needs because we eat foods that inflame our body, our demanding lives stress our nervous system, or we don’t get the rest our body needs to regulate our mood and emotions. Many of us—75 percent of all Americans⁹—are chronically dehydrated, and few of us, given our modern lifestyle, take the time to practice self-care, including taking the rest we all need. When unmet, these seemingly minor needs can accumulate and become major issues, sabotaging our relationships by causing us to show up tired, stressed, sluggish, or undernourished, no matter how much therapy we attend, how well we communicate our feelings, or what our partners do or don’t do for us.

Because physical safety is foundational, we’ll begin our journey to embody our authentic Self by prioritizing our physical needs. To do so, I’ve created a practice called body consciousness that will help you become consciously aware of your physical needs, along with your daily physical sensations like your heart rate, breathing patterns, and muscular tension. These are key indicators of whether we’re meeting our physical needs or not and can help us learn and interpret our body’s different cues; an ache in our stomach may mean we’re hungry, tension in our muscles may mean that our energy is constricted, or fatigue may be a sign that we’re overusing our body in some way. Sensations in our body, it turns out, play a surprising role in creating our thoughts and feelings. Let me explain.

Though most people assume that what we think and feel originates in our thinking brain, our physical sensations help create our thoughts and feelings. Our subconscious uses our body’s sensations to interpret how we feel by recalling the emotional experiences that accompanied similar physical sensations in the past. This premise is known as the theory of constructed emotions, which was developed by a neuroscientist, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University.¹⁰ Though we’ll talk more about this concept in chapter 5, to put it simply, we can stay locked in the experiences of our past unless we begin to practice identifying and shifting the physical sensations that cause these repetitive thoughts and feelings. By practicing body consciousness, we can learn to tune in to our physical sensations and manage them to some degree, helping us modify our thoughts and feelings. Becoming aware of our body’s sensations enables us to change how we think and feel, ultimately changing how we show up in our relationships.

BODY CONSCIOUSNESS CHECK-IN

To practice body consciousness, you can start to take body consciousness pauses throughout your day. Taking body-consciousness pauses regularly will help move your attention away from an overactive thinking mind so you can practice attuning to or shifting your attention to your body’s experience in the present moment. By checking in with your body before making any choice to engage in physical self-care (like eating, resting, or moving), you will increase your connection to your body and its different physical needs. You may find it helpful to set an alarm to alert three times during the day to remind you to pause and check in with your physical body. In this paused moment, fully shift your attention to the experience of being in your body as you explore your different physical sensations.

On the lines below, write down and take note of your experiences as you begin. You may find it helpful to repeat this list in a separate notebook or journal (or anywhere else where you can access it throughout the day) as a reminder to pause and connect with your body’s physical experience.

Daily Consciousness Check-ins

Body pause: [time]

Physical sensations present:

EMPOWERING YOUR MIND

After you’ve developed a consistent practice of body consciousness, you can begin to work on mind consciousness. Mind consciousness is the practice of becoming aware of the thoughts, feelings, and reactions that you have or do on an automatic, repetitive basis. These reflect our subconscious at work; they’re our instinctual, conditioned ways of being that got programmed into our brain when we were children because we relied on them so often to feel safe, valued, and loved by our parent-figures. Now that we’re adults, few of these repeated habits allow us to feel good about ourselves. They don’t allow us to be our authentic Self, often sabotaging how we interact with others. These conditioned ways of being can actually even make us feel physically and emotionally unsafe or dysregulated.