Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about the importance of discovering who you are.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so the process of discovering who you are. This can take a lot of different shapes and can mean different things.

For instance, in a certain context, let's say like a meditative context, the one aspect of discovering who you are involves seeing

that you're bigger than your sense of self, the thoughts in your mind, the emotions it might be experiencing.

And you could say in that context, discovering your true nature is more about going beyond your personality structure, your ego structure,

and all of the other things that kind of make up aspects of you.

And so that could be one way of looking at discovering who you are on a bigger level, on a spiritual level.

But there's also another way that we can discover who we are, which is what I want to speak to here.

And that's more discovering our nature in this human form, discovering our particular personality tendencies, our inclinations,

the habits and patterns that make up us that seem to have been there from a very early age.

It's not something that was maybe developed through conditioning or a certain habit that we picked up.

It's like, no, this is actually something that I could trace back to myself from when I was very young,

or when I drop into the felt sense of me, the essence of me, this feels more aligned with who I am.

So for instance, some people might identify as more of an extrovert.

They really get recharged by being around other people, they could go to a big event, and then just want to go to another event after that.

And that just is a true expression of who they are.

And another person might actually feel very resistant to that, and may instead be recharged by being alone.

It needs a lot more alone time, and actually gets a lot of joy by being in their own mind and thinking and being in thoughts and ideas and imagination.

And what often happens is we have a certain expression of ourselves that might not match up with the context that we're in, the setting that we're in,

the family that we're in, the community that we're in, the world we're in, and it can create a sense of conflict internally.

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