Discovering Yourself
The greatest gift you can give yourself is to allow YOU to be YOU. Fears of all kinds stop one from acting or talking freely. Sometimes you want to please everyone but this is not possible. It will be good if you allow yourself to be spontaneous and daring. When you allow your actions to be conditioned always by what others think or say, you risk losing your personality and values.
One thing that you have to do always is to be aware of your feelings and acknowledge them. It is good for you to develop an interior peace that helps you to be confortable wit your emotions whether positive or negative. For example, emotions such as love and hate, courage and fear, discouragement and anger and so on are part of you. If you do not accept your emotions it means you are denying them. When you do this, the emotion manifests itself in destructive ways such as outbursts of anger or even physical illness eg. Headache, backache, lack of sleep, e.t.c. on the other hand if you accept your emotions positively you will be able to express them freely.
Getting to know oneself is not one day’s job. Sometimes you discover something about yourself that you do not like. Real and genuine self-knowledge can at times be disturbing, frightening and humiliating. It is possible for you to be discouraged and not want to discover this aspect of YOU, but you will be living with a false concept about yourself. You need to see yourself as you really are and accept your strengths and weaknesses, your gifts and talents.
Who you are goes beyond your name, your dreams, your career, your academic achievements and your friends. You are that irreplaceable gift that God has blessed this world with, so you have to discover yourself in order to be a gift to all. You might say, I am my body, mind, will and heart, abilities and talents, qualities, virtues, defects, character, ambition, effort, past, present and future, my relationships, attitudes and approaches, what I want to make of myself, my aims and goals. I am a being who is ever becoming. I can conclude by saying..What I am is God’s gift to me; what I make of myself is my gift to God and you society! (Dr. George Kaitholil, SSP)
