The cornerstones of self actualization and self fulfillment
how to become your best self in 2023
Self actualization is akin to self fulfillment.
One cannot exist without so too embodying the other.
The question always becomes, “well how do I get there?
In a culture predominantly absent-minded of the true potential stored in the self, it is understandable that no amount of achievements, climbing up somebody else’s dream, will actually cultivating lasting fulfillment.
In fact, the majority of humans in western culture report to be living life unfilled hoping one day to fulfill their desires.
And truly, I certainly hope that they do. But riddle me this, have you ever heard from someone that went out to that one day and came back to the now so as to tell you all about it?
The best anyone can do is to pull in the future closer to today. Check out this post to learn the tools you need to do this.
Nobody can physically live in the future.
It’s silly to even inscribe this idea into a conversation but nonetheless, it is an extremely revolutionary distinction to make.
You will never live in tomorrow, because by the time tomorrow comes around it will be today. And so, does your dream stay into tomorrow or do you finally choose to adopt it into today?
The choice is entirely yours and I am going to teach you exactly how to embody the qualities of yourself that you truly desire right here, right now. This is all going to be shaped through the lens of our innate need to self-actualize, you can learn all about self actualization here.
By the end of this article you will learn how to cultivate your own well of fulfillment and fool proof your mindset and soul purpose.
self actualization and resilience
All of this is really quite simple. This of course does not mean that sculpting the perception necessary to live your highest timeline is easy. Because it is not.
Becoming your best self is a continual choice, it is a never ending succession of free will just as life is a never ending succession of the present.
To become your best self is the physical expression of intention meeting the threshold of whom you believe you are.
Who you believe that you are will be tested in every single moment. Whether through adversity or through abundance, you will be continually shaping and choosing whom you wish to become through who you choose to be in this moment. And so thus the next moment, and the next moment, and so on.
This is why resilience is an unfathomably important ideal, and luckily to us it is programmed into our biology. But again, we need to understand that this does not make our journey any easier, it simply means we have certain capabilities within our being that can be used to actualize should we choose to awaken to those capabilities.
But nonetheless.
Whether you believe it or not, this process of actualizing, or de-actualizing, is innate. It is programmed within us. Inescapable is actualization to the human, but it manifests in two directions.
There is evolution and devolution of the self.
Both of which belong to the same overarching need to actualize, they simply manifest to different degrees.
With the dimension of time there is no standing still in this spectrum. It is dynamic, and dynamic equilibrium can only be found through evolution, through moving forward towards actualization as opposed to away from it.
Whichever path you follow, the realization is this… You are consciously creating the path that you are on, even if you are unconsciously acting within it.
Let me explain.
We can live much of our lives unconsciously, yet we are faced with decision regularly. The decision that we choose to embody have our agency within them on some level. For many, it may appear mostly unconscious, and for others it may be completely conscious, but here is my argument.
You choose to continue as you are every single day. That is conscious choice. Though many of us are stuck in survival mode and are operating more so from the primal reptilian part of our brain, the idea of other possibilities is presented to us through our imagination, media, and storytelling.
The presence of possibility equates to the awareness of choice. For there to exist a possibility in your mind, whether or not you deem it feasible or not, there must exist an awareness that along some point a choice can be made, or in the example of viewing vicariously someone else’s life, a choice has been made to bring the possibility into reality.
We are completely subjected to endless possibilities on a daily basis, and to continue on the status quo is a conscious choice on your behalf in opposition to the possibilities that you may deem are impossible for you.
You are using your resilience to resist using your capacity to choose in a different light.
That same resiliency can be used to propel you through the doorway of sculpting new conscious decisions in your life.
It is no longer acceptable that many of us in western culture are unconscious to self-actualization or unconscious to the fact that we can choose to create a new life for ourselves. Please do not interpret this as bad, it simply just is. If you are inspired by someone, a conscious part of you becomes aware of a possibility, however; an unconscious part of you operating on auto pilot may shut down that possibility immediately.
That unconscious part of you is damn resilient. And imagine if you can couple that resiliency with the conscious stewarding of your life.
Imagine becoming conscious of how resilient you are and how much more amplified your resiliency would be with your focus, attention and gratitude placed upon it.
So here is the full truth.
When you become conscious, you become a creator.
Therefore you take agency over your life. This immediately changes the polarity of your devolution towards evolution. Read this post on becoming a creator of your reality.
When you become a creator, you cannot un-see what you experience from this perception.
Life is not about what you are looking at, but from where are you looking.
Becoming conscious changes from where you are looking, and from that place you access the resiliency within you to choose how you can be.
self actualization and self esteem
With the awareness to choose how you can be, you unlock new dimensions of yourself.
One becomes aware that if I choose how to be, then I have always chosen how to be on some level. We often look to where we arrived in this moment to examine how those choices, semi-conscious and semi-unconscious, got us to where we are today
Have I been choosing to embody the essence of me that makes me feel like I am the best that I can be?
Of course, your life could literally have been no other way because it factually did not happen any other way and to think that it could have happened any other way means that you perceive God to have fucked up, and therefore you are not ready to understand the potential of what is here for you now.
To not accept your past is to live in radical distrust with yourself and the one who gives you life.
You would not be here reading this if life led you any another direction, so I would say that’s pretty darn divine and perfect if you ask me.
In any case, with the awareness of our choice we gain the awareness of our power.
If I want to be more confident, I can choose to feel a little more confident each day because there is literally nothing stopping you from being more confident other than the fears that you are choosing to continue to give power to.
It is not about repressing the fears that stand in your own way; it simply is dissolving by choosing more of the opposite.
The best way to begin to choose the opposite of your fears is to acknowledge the reality of your fears. (read this for overcoming your fears)
Observe how much of those fears are based upon hypothetical stories of what could happen.
Is it then safe to ask yourself, “Do I know for certain that if I try this then this fear will happen.”
Sit with that for as long as you need.
The key here is building your self-esteem.
We know you are resilient. Damn resilient in-fact. And now the next step is to use that innate resiliency to build yourself up, as opposed to break yourself down so to speak.
Build up the part of your being-ness that you wish to bring up and as you focus your attention on building up, the tendency to break down becomes marginalized because you have redirected the energy, focus, and intention away from separation into togetherness within your own self.
Here again, you dissolve devolution and invigorate actualization.
Building your self-worth, your self-esteem, your confidence, is a crucial part in becoming a conscious creator of your reality. Building your self-worth is translating the expression of your biological resiliency into your mental constructs of who you know you truly are, not merely who you think you.
self-actualization and creativity
Even if you believe that you don’t have one creative bone in your body, you are extremely creative.
There is a multitude of expressions that are uniquely yours. They may not be as culturally noteworthy as an exemplary piece of music or otherwise, but you possess creatively just as innately as you possess the drive to survive.
This is because survival is inherently based on creativity. Survival rewards resiliency and creativity, and to exercise creativity in this modern age is to be rewarded in other ways.
The process of channeling self-worth from no other source but your own self is extremely creative.
Sit with that.
Consequently, there is much much more creativity to be unlocked in your consciousness.
Here is the most simple most pragmatic way to understand how to best utilize your creativity.
Do more of what feels good to you.
We are talking good not just in pleasure, but good in the sense of what makes you feel complete, what makes you feel alive, what makes you more aware of your emotions and of your spirit.
A layman’s way of saying this is do what is authentic for you.
The more you bring into alignment your everydayness with you authenticity, the greater levels of creativity you are revealing to yourself. The process is a learn as you go approach.
It is impossible to sit and hypothesize about your creative approach and actually understand the expression of your authentic self. It must be thrust into expression into order to observe it’s experience.
The level of creativity you embody is congruent to the amount that you allow yourself to be within your authentic expression.
Creativity is the ethereal manifestation of mind, body, and spirit harmonizing in this dimension. It is designed into our being so as to be utilized as one of the main tools for our becoming.
Creativity is inextricably linked to self-actualization. One cannot actualize without expressing one’s authentic self. Creativity is a corner stone of self-actualization, and it is accessed the conscious choice to remember who you are through action, presence, and authenticity.
self actualization and happiness
So its all a choice. But that doesn’t mean that we will always choose the same today as we did yesterday.
Happiness gets an extremely bad (good?) wrap.
Happiness is everyone’s goal, but paradoxically happiness is not a place fixed in time. Happiness is a dynamic expression of your alignment in who you are becoming.
It is foolish to believe that you will always be within happiness. And if you ever actually experienced that, you would likely be begging to experience some contrast.
We live in an intimate universe. Intimacy craves contrast because it gives meaning to the union. All thing are one yet manifest on opposing poles to observe its true joy of becoming one at an undefinable threshold.
Where does left become right?
When does up become down?
When does happy become sad?
The threshold is undefinable and contrast is the magical law that allows color, texture, flavor, sound, and sight to become manifest.
You don’t want to be happy, you simply want to be.
One may choose a journey more so inclined to joy, while another chooses frustration. Who is to say that it is not for the perfection of each ones process of becoming in both circumstances? If you like to be happy, fuck yeah welcome to the club, but do not choose to be happy at the cost of repressing your sadness.
What you resist persists, and what persist through resistance often is shaping your identity more than you might be aware of.
Happiness is a choice. You can choose to be happy every morning should you like regardless of any circumstances, and I personally think this is an incredible way to live. However, without contrast intimacy diminishes.
So if you wish you baseline human experience to be one that is of happiness, choose happiness. Yet choose this state of happiness knowing that happiness requires you to also choose sadness so that happiness can reveal more of it’s depths to you.
If you limit your sadness, you also limit your happiness.
Actualization is amplification. To amplify your life is embrace what arrives in your life. You cannot control your reality, but you can create within it. If life greets you with something that demands an emotion outside of happiness, the truly liberated one embraces that feeling knowing that happiness goes nowhere.
To actualize is to experience the fullness of what your circumstances and your unique potential birth.
After all, if you are a conscious creator of your reality, wouldn’t you sprinkle in a few surprises just for hoots and giggles.