I read Meagan's lastest post with admiration and understanding. The questions she is posing to herself are, in my opinion, essential to experiencing the maximum possible benefit of our human experience. It seems to me that many people never reach a point in their existance where they question who they are and what is the point of it all. Or if they do, they quickly divert their attention from these thoughts which can have an extremelty tumultuous effect on our psyche. Further, when confronting these questions it is not unusal for one to initially feel lost, confused, and insufficient. I believe this is because we are awakening to a deeper, more substantial and ultimately uplifting, reality than the surface materiality of everyday trivialites that can be so hypnotic as to cause the masses to sleepwalk through their very existance.

Most of us go through the early years of our lives trying on one mask after another in an effort to present the world with an image that we hope will cause others to respond to us in some desired fashion whether that be admiration, fear, revulsion or whatever we think we want. This is true whether we are the quintessential smart kid, dutifully regurgitating all the thinking of the men and women who went before us, or the rebel thinking we are somehow different from the endless generations of rebels who went before us, now we wear baggy pants instead of tight pants so obviously we are different. None of this is surprising.

Society, culture, and media combine and conspire to tell us who we should be, what it means to be a man or a woman, to be successful, to win at the game of life. These forces are much stronger than I would have ever imagined until I attempted to step outside of them and decide for myself the answers to these questions. In the last several years I have attempted to look inward to answer these questions instead of outward. To live a life that springs from inside of me instead of one that is imposed upon me from external forces. It began for me by attempting to be a sincere person, to say what I mean and mean what I say and align my actions with my words. Not to just talk a good game but to attempt to live what I talk. In the past two years I have attempted to take this a step further by not just living a sincere life but to live an authentic life. To look inward and attempt to align my life with my own internal guidance system, which I believe to be in everyone, no matter how buried under ego, delusion, rationalization, and justification.

I think the greatest benefit to myself of this approach has been that I feel like I am finally beginning to understand exactly who I am and more importantly to be okay with exactly who I am. It all began for me very much as meagan described, with "a slap in the face and a big cereal bowl full of humility". It is because of this experience that I have learned to try not to curse these seemingly negative experiences because, if I am listening, there is much I can learn.