There is an extraordinary journey being offered to you, an invitation down a quieter, less-traveled, yet all the more scenic path.

It's the journey into your own authenticity, but to get there requires the courage to cross through more treacherous terrain: the crags of fear and the bogs of doubt.

At points along the way you'll reach clearings that will stop your breath with their beauty, their aliveness.  You may not believe it to be a real place, but after time you'll realize that it's true and it's there, a place inside yourself where a distant voice whispers to you that you are enough, where the rain calms your soul and the sun warms you through - all this at once.  In those places you begin to learn how to not only coexist with fear, but how to thrive in its presence and how to nurture the part of yourself that can stand up in your truth to comfort that fear.

The journey is an inward pilgrimage, and it begins by releasing our unhealthy attachments.

We slowly start to turn down the volume on other people's influence on our thoughts and actions;

we create more quiet

and more stillness for our authentic self to step in and guide us.

And then, finally, we learn what it means to experiment with no longer playing the roles we conjure for ourselves:

parent,

or child,

or sibling,

or spouse,

or boss,

or employee.

And it's in that beautiful, foreign space of contentment that we begin to know our authentic selves for the first time.  It's there that we meet Grace.  From that place, we find compassion enough to calm our fear, to trust our authentic self, and to hope and believe in the very best.

But it starts with letting go of the role, letting go of the search for validation to be found by being something else for everyone else.

It starts with choosing the stranger: yourself.

Photo: Natalie Collins

Sometimes, I write love letters to myself.

They're healing, they're powerful; they're necessary.  I'll scribble them from time to time into my journal and fold down the page in dog-eared fashion so I can quickly go back to find a compassionate pep talk when I feel like I need one.  I don't remember how I got started on this practice or what motivated me to stick with it through the initial awkwardness.  (Because it was awkward; and how!)

Like first beginning a journaling practice, writing letters to yourself can seem positively painstaking - even when you have no intention of sharing this writing with an audience, you still feel ever so much like a fool.  Maybe this is because self-compassion is still a radical idea for many of us.  But the more you do it, the more powerful the practice becomes, and the more in touch you become with your own capacity for kindness, patience, and love.

For me, the process has helped me grow more compassionate toward myself as well as others, but it has also caused me to see messages to myself hidden within different perspectives - a happy accident that comes as a result.  It's most true for poetry and music, and I was reminded of it again in this piece from Tyler Knott Gregson's Wildly into the Dark:

I have a few promises to offer you,
the believing is up to you, the
proof will emerge, but I cannot
say the when.  Here is what I have,
my sincere offering, scar earned and
burned into me:
when you think you can't, you positively
can, when you think it's over,
it may be beginning.  There is always more
to find, always something left in you
when you would swear on your soul
you've been emptied out.  Finally,
and most exquisitely important,
I promise you it is worth it,
it is always worth it, every drop of
ache and sorrow, every perfect pinch
of joy, it is worth it.  Promise me you
will keep waking up, keep finding it,
and finding the strength in you
to believe me.

"I promise you it is worth it."  I've written those words to myself many times, a reminder that there is a strong, hopeful self within me who not only believes that I can achieve my dreams - but that I deserve to.  And this helps.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash (blog)

 Somewhere on the journey of learning to live fully as someone with social anxiety, there's a new hurdle: learning to keep up emotionally with the newly active social part of yourself.  As you grow more comfortable in the situations that previously provoked fear or avoidance a surprising thing can happen: you can find yourself becoming more social, more outgoing than your emotional self is prepared for.  This is especially true of socially anxious folks who lean toward the introverted end of the spectrum.  Suddenly there's a new, rather bombastic voice in the mix that wants to go on all those fabulous adventures the fearful self had been so good at talking you out of.  And before you know it, you're burned out with trying to keep up with this newly-freed sense of creative living. 

As I started driving again - contentedly, for the first time in my life - I found myself at a stopping point at my therapist's office, the farthest I'd yet driven.  I didn't have an appointment, or any commitments; it was just for practice.  Yet, as I sat in the parking lot, exuberant at the achievement and my comfort level with it, my adrenaline started to kick in, and I found myself antsy to go to the next destination - whatever whim might make it to be.  I asked myself: can I just rest in this space for a minute?  The answer, frankly, proved to be no.  I couldn't.

Sometimes rest doesn't happen on command, and sometimes the treasured tools become obsolete.  The affirmations are simply words once again, the resonance of your truth is frail, and your experience is imperfectly uncomfortable.  But the achievement in that moment is that you can sit amid rising anxiety and just observe it.  In moments like these it's frustrating, truly, because this big life outside of the comfort zone isn't as flawless or peaceful as you'd hoped.  The illusion of living without anxiety fizzles into the reality of living with anxiety.  But there's the living, and that's cause for a celebration even if it doesn't feel as comfortable as you expected.

There's a place between rest and action.  I call it allowing.  In our best-is-better world it's hard to be content with something so mediocre as acceptance, but mediocrity is the result of comparison, and comparison is, as they say, the thief of joy; comparison is an act of aggression against presence.

Can you make a home for yourself in acceptance, in allowing yourself to be valiantly imperfect?  Can you stop comparing your experience with what could have been, even just for a moment?  And can you finally, amid the noise and even the sorrow of this flawed place, give yourself permission to rest in the knowledge that this, too, is an achievement?  That this, too, is a manifestation of peace?  As the luminous Sue Monk Kidd once said, "Just to be is holy, and just to live is a gift."