You are not alone.
(Cue science fiction music here.)
There’s more to you than meets 
even your own eyes.
In fact, there’s more to you — and of you — than you may ever allow to be expressed.
Poet Mary Oliver identifies 3 selves in her book, Blue Pastures. The first is the child we used to be; then there’s what she calls “the attentive social self,” the part of us that often struggles to conform with societal rules, protocols, and mores. It is “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation,” she writes. It is this self that follows the clock of the ordinary world.
And then there is the self that seems to live in another world entirely. Oliver says it’s the part of us that is responsible for everything that is extra-ordinary. It’s the self that can’t be bothered with obligations or the clock or someone else’s rules. It’s the source of all that is possible in us.
Some call it the “Higher Self.”
In her book, Finding Your Own North Star, Martha Beck calls it the “Essential Self,” a sort of inner compass that always points to one’s spiritual North Star, a source of eternal reassurance that one is on the right path.
Everyone has an Essential Self… the question is whether we allow it to express itself. Sadly, the Social Self often goes out of its way to stifle the Essential Self and its otherworldliness. As Mary Oliver laments, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
How do you stifle yourself, or perhaps allow yourself to be sabotaged by your Social Self?
Do you tell yourself you’re not talented enough, smart enough, creative enough?
Do you have the guts to challenge that very old and stifling belief system?
If you want to regret-proof your life, then you’ll need to start un-stifling. Years from now, when you look back on your life, the last thing you ever want to say to yourself is, “Why didn’t I have the guts to go for it?”
