- How I am an the inside
- Ideal for self
Figure 7A. The gap between “who we really are” and “how we appear.”The top hand represented how I appeared on the outside, and the bottom
was how I knew myself to be on the inside. In my self-reflection, it dawned
on me that we human beings live in a duality, as two separate entities
—“how we appear” and “who we really are.”
How we appear is the image or the façade that we project to the world.
That self is everything we do in order to show up looking a certain way and
to present to others a consistent exterior reality. This first aspect of the self
is a veneer of how we want everyone to see us.
How we really are, represented by that bottom hand, is how we feel,
especially when we are not distracted by the external environment. It is our
familiar emotions when we are not preoccupied by “life.” It’s what we hide
about ourselves.
When we memorize addictive emotional states such as guilt, shame,
anger, fear, anxiety, judgment, depression, self-importance, or hatred, we
develop a gap between the way we appear and the way we really are. The
former is how we want other people to see us. The latter is our state of
being when we are not interacting with all of the different experiences,
diverse things, and assorted people at various times and places in our lives.
If we sit long enough without doing anything, we begin to feel something.
That something is who we really are.