reclaim your nature

on doing, being and becoming + Mind Mine update!

Ariane by Sofia Bonati, 2021

I asked my parents what I was like when I was a child and they told me: I was driven, I naturally enjoyed structure, I was high energy, I never enjoyed lying around, I was always doing and I always wanted to do more.

All of this resonated. And yet, when I look back, I don’t remember feeling like I was doing much at all. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t forcing myself to do anything—the constant doing was just my way of being. Who I was (am) is someone who likes action. I enjoy learning, growing, exploring. But hearing it reflected back to me by my family was the first time it ever occurred to me that this way of being looks like “work” to others, because it always felt so natural to me.

routine and structure don’t have to hurt

My family’s remarks on how disciplined I was landed like a joke with me, because discipline feels like my primary struggle these days. But I am coming to realize that ‘discipline’ is entirely subjective—that we perceive discipline as doing what is counter to our nature. And I now see that much of what comes naturally to me is counter to most people’s nature (just as what comes naturally to you is counter to most people’s nature, because each person’s nature is unique!). I am realizing that instead of forcing myself to change my nature or reject it, perhaps all I need to do is embrace who I am fully, without judging what is or is not present in my being. Perhaps my task is simply to accept, not force (or rather: expect) anything that isn’t there to be there, but to simply recognize where I require discipline and implement it. To acknowledge that doing what I feel naturally inclined towards still “counts” as work, even if it doesn’t feel like work. That prioritizing my nature is a structure—that being myself is a routine. That routine does not need to be painful, hard, or strenuous to be valid. That perhaps the ultimate path of self-actualization is finding what feels natural to us, what feels so easy that it feels like we are hardly doing anything at all, while the people closest to us peer in at our lives and say: how are you doing so much? Maybe the ultimate structure is allowing our nature to express itself without judgement. A structure we do not need to impose upon ourselves—but one that emerges when we simply allow ourselves exist.

effortlessness as a sign of freedom

The true sign of self-mastery (to me) is a life that feels effortless—a life where you feel free! Where you are getting a lot done, but it doesn’t feel like you are trying very hard. Ultimate self-mastery is syncing your current self up with your nature—aligning your mature self with what felt easy/natural/fun to you before you could point yourself towards what felt wrong to you but appeared right to others. Before you began to equate suffering with self-worth and importance. Because this is what the world communicates to us: that if you’re not trying so hard that it HURTS, you are not doing enough. But true liberation is learning that you can be doing a lot without feeling like you are doing much at all and that is where you can do the most, because you will always feel like you are just being. You will feel like life is an expression of yourself.

structure, nature & surrender

“What made the hours pass like minutes when you were a child? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” — Carl Jung

Reclaiming our nature is the ultimate path to self-actualization. And yet, this is not usually communicated to us as we mature. In fact, we are taught the inverse: we think that we are being lazy unless we are pursuing something correlated with prestige, status, or that is otherwise “high-value.” That trains our inner eye—the lens we perceive ourselves through—to look for pain, suffering and effort as a marker for success, achievement and worth. This inner eye tells us we are “doing nothing” unless we are moving towards one of those metrics. This inner eye loves to squint and scrutinize when things are going well but seem to lack concerted effort. It doesn’t like allowing us to do what comes naturally to us, because then it doesn’t feel like we are doing enough. This inner eye is always looking for the “more” we can do, the ways that effort can be invented, applied, increased.

In many ways, this is a loving effort to protect us. Because this part of ourselves might have grown up believing that if you are not always doing, you are falling behind, that there is always more to be done until you cannot do anymore, and even then: maybe you can do a little more, right? Un-conditioning this engine requires intention—it is always looking for new ways to create effort where it is not needed, to perpetuate this feeling that we are always behind.

feeling behind

Because this inner eye is always looking for more ways of doing (rather than ways of being), its efforts can show up as endless ramblings about all of the ways that you are behind: you could be doing more, waking up earlier, working out harder, achieving more, more, more! This inner dialogue preys off of any feeling that resembles ease—it gets activated when you are suspended in the feeling of just being, in the feeling of effortlessness that, somewhat paradoxically, represents the freedom we desire! This sense of effortlessness is a sign that you are getting close to “becoming” in a direction that is truly aligned with you. Because when you look like you are trying hard to others, but you don’t feel like you are doing anything at all—that is you living from your gift. But this inner eye is trained to think that there is no such thing as arriving, that there is no time to enjoy, to simply BE, that we must always be finding new ways to DO. The inner eye does not want you to feel free. That threatens its existence, its utility. Because above all: this inner eye wants to be useful. It wants to feel needed, it wants to play this role it has trained its whole life for. It wants control.

It wants you to abide by what it believes to be true: that you need to do more to be worthy. But when you recognize that you are worthy by just being, instead of believing that you need to DO to earn your worthiness (which drives the feeling that you are always behind), you liberate yourself to be in your nature without the need to make it feel ‘painful’ just to prove something.

reclaiming your nature is a threat to your ego

It makes a lot of sense that rediscovering your natural way of being would be the ultimate threat to the ego, because the ego was developed to take us away from our childlike nature. Our ego ripens during puberty, when we first become conscious of ourselves, when we first begin to look at ourselves from the outside in, perceiving everything we do from the eyes of others, becoming our own voyeur. The ego then begins to mute the parts of us that may inhibit us from fitting in and ascending in whatever dominance hierarchy we find ourselves in. In other words, the ego helps us become a creature that is better at performing than existing, that detects the role it is supposed to play in any given situation and convincingly plays it (instead of allowing us to be as we are).

To reverse this process—to soften our ego, to sedate the part of us that wants to distort our nature—we need to tell ourselves that we are safe. We need to affirm to ourselves that the way we are when we are not trying to be anything at all, is perfectly sufficient. But this is hard to do! Because our conditioning has trained us to optimize for better perception, instead of for bringing us closer to our true nature.

rediscovering your essence

When you learn to accept that your being—your mere ESSENCE—is worthy, you are free to live a life that aligns with your true nature. Allowing this way of being to emerge requires you to rewire your mind, retrain your conditioning, and act in opposition to what that doing-focused inner eye tells you to do because “you are behind.” If you continue to listen to that voice, you will just start doing things that are not taking you anywhere meaningful (see forward momentum for more on speed vs. velocity) just to quiet it down. Actions that soothe the voice telling you that you are behind, but exhaust you in the process, spending your precious energy on what takes you away from your nature. You would be making choices to satisfy a vestigial part of you that doesn’t know what is best for you anymore, that only knows how to optimize the metric for success that it was developed to aim at: more doing.

being in your nature is listening to yourself

I recently watched this clip of Miley Cyrus talking about her Grammy’s performance. In it, the interviewer asks her: Miley, why are you performing at the grammy’s? She replies: Why am I performing at the Grammy’s? So I can lay in bed on February 5th and watch myself perform at the Grammy’s. That is actually the most honest answer I could give you. I thought about this morning—as I was rehearsing for the Grammy’s. I thought: why am I doing this? And then I was like: oh yeah, for me.

Her cheeky response landed squarely with me—this sense of doing something for yourself. I think people often mistake “surrendering to your nature” as this dissolution of ambition, but in my experience that couldn’t be less true. Instead, your behaviour gets redirected towards your genuine ambition, your sincere desires (i.e. Miley performing at the Grammy’s because she wants to, not to impress anyone else). You begin doing what you feel genuinely called to do (which does take some ‘being’ to figure out), and even though the net amount of doing you end up engaging in might be less, it is WAY higher impact because everything you do is aligned. You are becoming yourself, walking along the path uniquely meant for and carved out by you.

So, while it might appear to those who are endlessly doing that those who do less are ‘less ambitious’, it is very possible that they are just more clear, effective, high agency, aligned, and less attached to optics, which allows them to do less but get more out of what they do (of course, this is not always true: doing less does not guarantee you are being more effective—that would be very convenient!—I am merely pointing out that doing more also does not guarantee that you are more effective (or ambitious!)). This can be a hard truth to swallow when you are a doing-focused, high-achieving-but-lacking-a-strong-internal-compass-type-being. It can be hard to accept that the person doing much less than you might actually be doing more when you zoom out and look at both of your trajectories. But it is a truth we must accept if we want to move towards a more aligned, integrated, and conscious way of being. We must surrender the metrics our ego so desperately clings to (prestige, status, total amount of ‘doing’), for the metric that measures our own unique process of becoming: doing in the right direction, which often requires a lot of being to orient ourselves towards!

rewiring your mind

A somewhat counterintuitive way to soothe the voice in your head that tells you that you are behind is to simply ignore it. To allow yourself to be. To sit with the discomfort of not doing, and wait for that voice to quiet down as you refuse to listen to it. I find that one of the easiest ways to do this is to go on a long morning walk with no aim—the ultimate vote against the urge to rush into the day and buy into the feeling of being behind. It is a reminder to self that you don’t need to do anything to justify your existence. Because if you keep obeying the voice always telling you to do more, you will send yourself in circles: tiring yourself out but not heading anywhere meaningful.

your nature is the script to follow

The inner eye that is always trying to align you towards more doing and less being is subtly, cleverly robbing you of the opportunity to discover your true nature: the way of being that feels easy to you but looks hard to others.

Jerry Seinfeld says that the key to life is to “find the torture you enjoy” — a line I adore. It elegantly highlights this idea that finding your way of ‘being’ does not mean spending all day on the couch—it means doing the thing that is fun and thrilling for you to get better at! The thing that might look like torture to others but feels fun to you. The thing you feel naturally inclined to do, even though no one is asking, forcing or praising you for doing it. The thing you’ll do even though it is a challenge—because it’s fun. The thing that GIVES YOU ENERGY to get better at. If people come up to you, confused by how you are doing so much and your response is “what am I doing?”, you have found yourself at the intersection of doing and being:

an artistic talent, aren’t i?

your gift = when you are doing but it feels like you are being

Life shouldn’t feel painful. It also shouldn’t feel empty or meaningless. It should feel rich, exciting, thrilling and relaxing. At its best, life should feel effortless: even when you are doing, you should feel deeply present, activated, relaxed. You should feel like you are where you are meant to be, that you are not behind, that you are on time. To be at the intersection of doing and being is to do what you love to do without feeling guilty. It is to feel free to be as you are, to follow your nature without inhibition.

But no one can solve the part of you that is addicted to doing more. Maybe it started from a place of conditioning, of trying to please others, but now it is a habit. It is what your physiology expects. And to retrain that, you need to be willing to let go of the part of your identity that derives its worth and validity from what you are doing and accept and prioritize the part of you that knows how to just be. The intuitive part of you that pulls you towards what feels right, even when it doesn’t “make sense” to others (or you!). The part of you that knows from a deeper place than anything your conscious mind can access. The part of you that has always been there, that is underneath the conditioning and the expectations and the cues you placed upon yourself and weaved into who you show up as. There is a much deeper part of you beneath all of that—the part of you that just is and always was. The part of you that feels FREE and wild and untamed—just as you did when you could occupy your nature as a child, without self-consciousness. Without any awareness of how you were being perceived.

This part of us underneath everything we pick up on the way to adulthood is still untouched. It is whole, complete and alive, but we need to nurse it to full health by giving it the sunlight and water it needs. By pulling it out of the dark closet of our mind where it was shoved away as we got dressed up and put on our persona every day. We need to be willing to take the mask off (‘persona’ = ‘mask’ in latin!) and return to our essence: to the child self that existed without any awareness about what others expected. We need to pick that version of ourselves up and reunite with it. To look into its eyes and give it permission to lead the way. To say: I will follow you. I will make space for you to play, exist, create. You know something I don’t. Follow what you feel called to.

As Charles Baudelaire so wisely reminded us:

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

To reclaim your nature, you must honour it. You must trust it. And perhaps most importantly: you must surrender to it. To find yourself at the intersection of doing and being is to surrender to what feels natural, to allow yourself to do what looks hard to others but feels easy to you, and to meet yourself there—in your nature—with love.

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Ideas I’m exploring with this new tier (also open to requests + feedback on what you want to see from me—feel free to share in the comments!)

• more frequent posts

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• trying out different formats (i.e. advice column, shorter form writing, bite-sized thought compilations, content I’m consuming… basically just experimenting with more ways of exploring my mind — especially ones that feel particularly candid)

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Related essays you might enjoy: the masks we wear, becoming yourself is a process of reduction, on being selective, comfort, embodying over appearing

Find my daily thoughts on Twitter + a side note: my tweet below was featured in James Clear’s newsletter (author of Atomic Habits) this week, and while this essay was already in motion, that mention was a part of what inspired me to finish it!

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