We can’t definitively find ourselves because life is constantly moving.
When I help others with personal development, we start from the idea that we can’t bring out something that isn’t already there.
Michelangelo saw the living sculpture in stone and his own achievement in removing dead weight from the true ideal that was already there, hidden beneath layers of excess stone.
An ideal is an idea that has taken form in our consciousness—an apprehension of what we want to achieve.
In my role as a therapist, I see people as both body and consciousness.
It is usually the body that we think of when we think of sculpting ourselves.
The body has—like Michelangelo’s stone—an inherent ideal consisting of original movement patterns that we have repeated for centuries: Walking, running, climbing, bending, stretching, crawling, etc.
Form follows function.
The body is like a favorite pet. We have to accept that it has its own needs and wills.
A pet needs to move in its original way. We don’t force cats to sit on chairs and we let them climb, run and jump.
Our bodies also need primordial movements in order to maintain mobility and not create unnecessary limitations and pains.
To keep the body healthy doesn’t require much work, just a few minutes of whole body movements every day.
Consciousness—our experience of ourselves and the world—is even more malleable than our body.
There are body ideals and consciousness ideals.
When people used to look at the night sky, they projected their dreams onto it. They saw constellations in the form of archetypes—heroes with their own stories and adventures.
We do the same thing today with our screens. Without thinking about it, we have role models, ideas of who we want to be, how we want to think and feel.
We carry an inner ideal that we constantly compare ourselves to.
Not being happy with one’s life is a common problem that most people experience from time to time.
The emotional discomfort that arises when we are not happy is what I call constructive anxiety.
Often we need to learn to accept a situation and the thoughts and feelings it brings.
But anxiety can also be a signal that we should change the situation we are in.
As you know, it is not always easy to distinguish between what we should change and what we must accept.
Psychological treatment for constructive anxiety involves less acceptance and exposure training and more helping the person understand who they want to be.
Like Michelangelo who quietly distinguishes stone from stone—we can distinguish between our ideal and our social programming:
Between who we are and the roles we play.
