Know Thyself – Tools for Transformation Part 4
by Kathy Gardarian
Only once we can answer our own deepest questions can we walk with strength and lead with love.
“Go where the love is. Everyone deserves accolades and acceptance. We are all born in light, and worthy of love. Seek loving mentors—they are waiting to be found.”
Like many young adults, while in college I sampled classes, jobs, and suitors as a way of learning about and finding myself. I was drawn to psychology as a means of understanding how the mind worked and where one’s soul might fit in. No one else I knew was haunted by the need to connect the spiritual with the practical.
Throughout a series of relationships, I developed a pattern of losing myself and setting aside my own wants and needs. My boyfriend’s interests became my interests, his friends my friends, his football team my football team.
I fell in love when I was barely seventeen and married at the tender age of twenty. At that time I didn’t know myself, I didn’t know my husband and I certainly didn’t know life. How could I choose my perfect match when I didn’t know myself enough to know whom it matched with?
You can’t choose what you don’t know! My marriage was based on an illusion of what my immature mind thought love, union and life were. For me, “loving” seemed always to morph into “deferring.”
I had to look inside, to explore and accept my own deepest needs and beliefs in order to meet others on equal ground.
And you? In what ways have you had to expand your knowledge of yourself?
How has that journey to greater self-awareness affected your world and your work?
Only once we can answer our own deepest questions can we walk with strength and lead with love.
