Giving Yourself Permission to Be Who You Are

I have done the work. Decades of it.

Meditation, coaching, shadow work, the long slow practice of looking at the parts of myself I would rather not see. If you had asked me, I would have said I knew myself well by now. At 60, you would hope so.

And then, a few weeks ago, I found a rule still running underneath all of it. One I was given when I was about five. One I never agreed to, and never noticed I was still obeying.

At its heart, it was a rule about giving yourself permission to be who you are. I had never quite given it to myself.

When I was small, I could see things. Colour moving in the air. Patterns, geometric and alive, unfolding and folding again, glowing softly in the dark. They were breathtaking. I would lie in bed and watch them play, these luminous shapes flowing across my room. In the dark they were the most vivid thing I could see, more real to me than anything the daylight showed. Every night they were there, and every night they enchanted me.

I tried to show them to my parents. Not once. Two or three times I pointed at the air and told them what I could see, and they really did try to look. But after a few times, I could see it scared them.

“Darling, there’s nothing there.”

It was said kindly, but it was final. There was nothing there, and there was to be no more talk of it. Any further mention was firmly closed down.

I understand it now. They were frightened. Frightened that their child was going mad. Frightened that I would be picked on, bullied, marked out as strange. They were protecting me the only way they knew. But I was five, and what I learned was simpler than any of that.

The most real and most beautiful thing in my world was not allowed out loud.

I developed a stutter around that time. To this day, when I try to speak about anything spiritual, the words still come out haltingly. My body remembers that it was once not safe.

Hiding your spiritual self in plain sight

I have always known that the shadow is the wound. That was never the mystery to me.

The thing that undid me was seeing that I still live by that rule. At 60. After all the work.

Spirituality is the most important thing in my life. It is the part of me I honour most, the part I most deeply am. And yet, if you met me, you might not know it. I have kept it quiet in a hundred small ways I never once examined.

The way I dress. The way I speak to people I don’t know well. I share what I actually see and believe with only a handful of close friends, ones I know will understand, and I stay careful with everyone else. For years I called myself a life coach, not a spiritual life coach, because that first word felt like too much to claim. And when clients came to me who were not on a spiritual path, I felt I was not allowed to bring the spiritual in at all. Then I would sit there, oddly emptied, wondering what on earth I had left to offer them.

None of this felt like fear. That is what hid it from me for so long. It felt like discretion. Like good judgement. Like reading the room and knowing my audience. Really it was a five-year-old, still being careful, still keeping the most beautiful thing out of sight.

I had never given myself permission to be spiritual out loud. Inwardly and outwardly, all the time, with whoever happens to be in front of me. Which is to say, I had never quite given myself permission to be myself.

Giving yourself permission to be who you are

I thought the healing would come from finally announcing it all, brave and unguarded. And that is partly true. But another part was quieter, and it went backward.

It was turning to that little girl, the one pointing at the air, and giving her what she needed then. Not a bigger audience. Just one person who could look where she was pointing and say:

Yes. I see it too. It’s beautiful. There is nothing wrong with you.

She could never give herself that. She was five. But I am not five anymore. I can give it to her now. That is the one thing an adult can do that the child never could. You go back, and you become the person you needed.

And then, slowly, you let yourself be that person out in the world too. You stop deciding in advance that people will not want your true self. You simply are it, and if it troubles someone, you let that be theirs to carry, not yours to prevent.

I am still learning. The rule does not vanish because you found it. My voice might still tighten. But then I consciously decide to loosen it, and drop back into my truth, into myself. The rule has less of me now.