Coming Home to Your Authentic Self
- May 16
- 2 min read
Updated: 16 hours ago
Living Authentically : The Journey Home
Life gets busy. Without meaning to, we can spend our days in our heads - pushing through, ticking boxes, and rarely pausing to notice what we feel or need. Over time, we stop listening to our body and intuition and let our thoughts run the show.
A simple way to understand this is through the relationship between the heart and the mind.
I once heard the heart described as the 'Captain of the Ship' and the mind as the 'First Mate'. The heart points to what matters; the mind helps make it practical. If your heart wants to learn to paint, the mind can find a class and put it in your diary. Its job isn’t to sabotage you with 'you’re not creative' or 'you don’t have time'. When the mind supports the heart, life feels aligned. When it takes over, we drift from ourselves.
We often call this deeper, truer part of us the soul. To me, the soul is the essence of who we are - our authentic self, underneath roles, fears, and conditioning.
So much changes as we age, but something in us stays steady : the part that notices. It’s the same quiet awareness that was there when we were very young.
I believe we’re born as pure awareness, before the thinking mind becomes dominant. Young children naturally live in the moment; they don’t usually replay every mistake or worry about what others think. Then, slowly, judgement, regret, and 'what ifs' appear - and we start to treat them as truth. The mind grows louder, emotions become more reactive, and we feel further from our natural ease. In many ways, spiritual growth is a return: letting the heart lead again, and living from the soul rather than the ego.
Mindfulness is one of the simplest ways to reconnect - notice when the mind has taken the wheel, then gently return to the present moment.
I will leave this quote by Jack Kornfield with you. “In the end these things matter most. How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you learn to let go”.
