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THE MODERN HEALTH LETTER
WHO ARE YOU?
(How to become yourself.)
Most people are lost.
They don’t know what they need.
They don’t know what they want.
Because they don’t know who they are.
It’s not really our fault because we have all been born into a system that only exposed us to one way to live life:
The only purpose and motivation to do what everyone else does is to survive the identity we have built through all these years of conditioning.
Very early on, in your childhood, you learn that you can’t have the world and have yourself too.
You teach yourself to repress, deny and disown the parts of you that your parents, family, teacher, and environment don’t want to accept and highlight and develop the parts of you that your environment needs and values.
In our Western society, most of us have been pushed, motivated, rewarded and pressured by our parents to make the best grades possible at school because this would guarantee that we would be able to secure and do a job in society.
If you have been practising the skill of observation (read this letter if you don’t know what I am talking about.) then you can start to see that there is nothing wrong with working for society, but it isn’t the path to a good and fulfilling life.
The reason why most people are lost is because they have made:
But where are you in all of this?
What about your identity?
Your needs?
Your goals?
This is why when you ask someone who they are, they tell you about their name, their job and what they do outside of work.
But you are not your name. It has been given to you, and it is just a word.
You are also not your job, it is just something you spend most of your time doing and that allows you to pay your bills.
And no, you aren’t just your body either. It belongs to you and it is a physical representation of the daily actions you take and decisions you make, but it is not all of you.
So what is left?
You are right, not much because you haven’t spent any time getting to know who you are.
You don’t know what you don’t know
The standards and expectations of society have created the character most of us are playing.
This doesn’t make you much different from Sarah or John.
We all dress the same.
Act the same.
Have the same problems and complaints.
Follow the same routines.
Live the same life.
Our identities are very much alike because we all have been put through the same conditioning process.
And since this is all we are surrounded by we have a hard time opening our minds up to the idea that there is an infinite amount of ways to do things.
I had a very interesting discussion with someone I train every week (no, I do not only write newsletters, I also work as a Personal Trainer).
She asked me how comes that I have been doing what I am doing.
I replied that I realised quite early on that I do not enjoy having someone else control what I do with my time, when I have to work and when I am allowed to go on holidays or have time off, so I decided to find another way to live.
She looked at me completely shocked because she just realised that there isn’t only one way to use your time and earn an income to pay your bills.
Society has presented you with the option that will benefit society the most.
Not the individual.
This is how we all ended up playing the same character fueled by the same identity traits:
The goal of my newsletter is not to convince you to do what I do or to believe what I believe.
It is to present you with another perspective than the one society has been feeding you with.
If there is society’s perspective and my perspective, there are a million other ones out there.
Including the ones that have not been created yet.
But you don’t know that they exist because you haven’t opened your mind up to them.
You haven’t questioned if the perspective and path of society is the right one for you.
And you won’t be able to know that until you find out who you are without attaching that to your name, your body or your everyday job.
How to become yourself.
Getting to know who you are is a lifetime journey and it requires choosing yourself over the endless distractions that are stealing your focus, attention and time away every day.
The reason why only a few people are able to leave the path of society to create their own is because they have learned and mastered to shift their focus from the outside to the inside.
They explore the depths of their being and then find ways to align the external world to their internal needs, values and desires.
You don’t know what you want and need because you do not know who you are.
So to find out what you need and want for your life, you have to make getting to know who you are your absolute main priority.
I help you on your self-discovery journey through my Modern Health Cohort-based course starting on the 11th of May 2024. Enrollment starts next week so if you want to access my approach and systems to kick start this journey towards your own path, you can pre-register here.
What you will find out is that the biggest part of you is not physical.
It hidden.
And like everything that is hidden, if you want to find it, you have to look for it.
1) Become an observer
One of the best ways to approach who you are is to detach from the first-view perspective and slip into an observer role / third-view perspective.
Imagine there is a camera following around and filming you throughout your day.
The camera is your observer’s perspective. It is completely objective. It doesn’t judge or criticize.
It films everything you do, the conversations and interactions you have, it catches the different thoughts that rise, the emotions you feel and actions you take.
As you progress into your day, the story of you unravels.
At the end of the day, take the time to sit and rewind the movie of your daily story.
Observe without judgment everything that happened that day.
2) Become a researcher
Once you have gathered enough information about yourself through observation, it’s time to slip into the researcher role.
We have the data, now it is time to understand and learn from it.
This should become your main focus for the next couple of months.
The main question that will be leading your research and self-discovery process is:
Why?
Researcher: Why does the main character of the movie snooze their alarm every morning?
Observer: Because he or she spends 1 hour on social media every night before going to sleep and has a hard time getting up due to the lack of sleep.
Researcher: Why does the main character arrive at work stressed and grumpy every morning?
Observer: Because he or she snoozed the alarm and ended up not having enough time for breakfast, had to rush to get to work on time to do a job he/she doesn’t really enjoy.
Researcher: Why did the main character get very excited about tonight’s dinner?
Observer: Because they got to spend time with their family. They really appreciated and enjoyed the relationship they have with their parents.
It is also a way for them to relax and share how they feel because they trust them to listen and be there for them.
Notice how the answer we get from the observer is non-judgmental.
This is a crucial part of this process because we can’t give ourselves understanding and awareness when there are expectations and judgments.
With time this will become easier and very natural to do.
You will slowly be able to come back to the first-view perspective while simultaneously and effortlessly keeping that habit of questioning:
3) Feel
Your emotions are information too. And hold tremendous value.
They rise and come to the surface with a precious message about something that is important to you.
Your emotions are always valid and communicate an accurate reflection of a perspective you hold.
We have learned how to start feeling and creating space for our emotions in this letter.
We want to keep that non-judgmental approach and allow ourselves to fully surrender to the experience of that emotion.
At the start, phrases like “I shouldn’t feel that way” or “I am wrong for feeling this way” might rise up and hold you back to welcome the emotion fully.
See if you can swap back to the observer’s perspective and just allow the character of the story to take the time they need to feel that emotion.
4) You have to become your main priority.
If you haven’t committed to the journey of discovering yourself, chances are that you have been living most of your life according to the identity and expectations of the external world.
You have made everything external of you, your main priority.
Your education.
Your work.
Other people’s opinions of you.
Other people’s expectations of you.
The shift from the external to the real internal version of you will be met with a lot of resistance.
Both coming from the outside world that might have a hard time adjusting to your change of opinions, habits, beliefs and actions.
But also from the internal world that can be full of emotions, memories and parts of you, you might have a hard time feeling, looking at and accepting.
Choosing yourself over the rest of the world (and I literally mean the rest of the world) requires the ultimate level of courage.
But it is also the ultimate act of self-love.
Because you are going against the typical path everyone is on to choose the path that leads towards yourself.
Getting to know yourself is also not something you do from time to time.
It’s a decision that becomes a lifetime practice and commitment.
So do not expect to understand and know everything about yourself in the timeframe of a week or a couple of months.
Especially not if you have been playing society’s character for 20,30 or 40 years.
With time you will gather more and more information and insights about how you act, why you feel the way you feel, what you like, what is important to you, what you dislike and why, what you need, what you value, what motivates you, what you fear and what you want out of life.
Kind of like the pieces of a puzzle you encounter as you undo the layers of yourself, that you can put together to start seeing the beautiful image that represents the real reflection of who you are.
As this reflection unravels you can’t help but hold more love, understanding and compassion for all of the experiences, decisions and versions of you.
This will be the start of you being able to give yourself what you truly deserve.
I will see you in next week’s letter.
Until then, take care.
Oli
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