New beginnings… We all need one every now and again.

And there’s no better place to start renovating your life than by turning towards your inner being.

It holds the entire blueprint of you. It is the all and everything of who you are, so getting to know it is just about one of the best things you can do for yourself.

Turning over a new leaf doesn’t need to be a drastic revolution where you throw away everything of the old, and tear up all your long-held ideals – it can be if you want.

But change can be an evolution – of honouring your past while looking towards the future.

As the great American psychic Edgar Cayce once said, “You have to know yourself to become yourself.”

The Inner Being: Your Ego, Shadow, Inner Child, Mental Self & Higher Self

Your inner being is not an individuated part of yourself.

It’s the collective noun for the multiple aspects of your consciousness that work together and sometimes against one another. It can provide both challenge and comfort and on your spiritual journey.

Each of these facets require your attention in their own particular way, and the first stage of understanding the nature of your inner being is by becoming aware of exactly how it functions.

The Ego

Your ego comes in for a lot of flak within spiritual and psychology circles, but it’s greatly misunderstood by many those who work with it. That’s not to say that it can’t be a source of weakness if you don’t have it under control.

But the ego has far less to answer for than you might think.

When people say they need to destroy the ego or exile it from their thought-process, I can’t help but shake my head. The ego might responsible for many of our more indulgent tendencies and inflated sense of self, but try living your life without a sense of ego.

You’d be a blank slate; completely lost.

You’d lose all sense of objectivity and would barely be able to make a decision.

What’s needed isn’t the destruction of the ego, but the integration of it into your personality. You don’t want to live without it. The idea is you can move effortlessly in and out of an objective point of view without becoming polarise when people challenge your opinions

All you really want is to cease being triggered, not to surrender your identity.

Your Shadow

The shadow is the part of is us that is often confused with and thought of as the ego.

But they are two very separate entities from one another.

Whereas your ego does serve a wider purpose in your daily life, the shadow self is the saboteur whose only goal is to derail you at every turn.

Your shadow self is the voice inside your head that harbours all kinds of grudges, resentment, perverted fantasies, revenge, anger and fear. Everything your shadow expresses towards you as the conscious observer is the culmination of what you’ve suppressed and repressed over many years.

Your shadow self is simply trying to rid itself of the pain it has experienced. But since you can resolve the emotions of hate, anger and fear with more of the same, it becomes a feedback loop negativity.

You will have no doubt heard your shadow various points telling you exactly how you’re going to deal with a particular person only be all smiles and laughter when you next encounter them.

It can feel like you’re going crazy, and leave you wondering why this is happening to you.

You’re not crazy; it happens to all of us. All it means is you have some inner work to do.

You have nothing to worry about.

The Inner Child

Your inner child is the part of you that represents your innocence.

The concept is derived from Carl Jung’s personality archetypes, and ties in with the functioning of your subconscious mind.

It is the connection you maintain to your formative years, and can often be the source of unresolved emotional traumas.

During childhood, you take on the thoughts and ideas that imprinted upon you by your parental figures. And as you develop into an adult, much of that information remains intact as the subtle programming that becomes known as your inner child.

Working with your inner child is all about establishing the needs that went unmet that include: issues of abandonment, emotional neglect and overt physical abuse.

The aim of this work is to let go of your past and cultivate a sense of self-esteem.

Your Mental Self

The mental self is your sense of logic.

It is the thinking mind and conscious part of you that you’re most familiar with – also not be confused with the ego. 

This is the surface part of your being, and although it is the part of you you’re most cognizant of, it isn’t the high command centre. You can think of your mental self more like the boots on the ground – the infantry assigned to do the grunt work.

All of your rational thought processes, reasoning, emotions and decision-making, take place on the mental level of your awareness.

It is the analytical mind that forms responses to language, math and other problems.

It is how you ingest and internalise materials, new skills and insights before they become automatic responses.

Your Higher Self

Your Higher Self is the eternal aspect of your consciousness that has been a part of every lifetime you have experienced on your soul’s journey.

In terms of the hierarchy of power, your Higher Self sits high up on top of the all other parts of you, and for that reason has sometimes been referred to as the oversoul.

What that doesn’t mean is it isn’t going to step in and complete your shadow work or integrate your ego. Those are tasks that you must complete using your conscious awareness.

What the Higher Self is and does provide is a blueprint for your journey throughout this life and beyond.

It is your intuition and ringing bell of knowingness that guides you in synchronistic fashion from one growth experience to the next.

Again, this doesn’t run on autopilot.

You have to become mindful of how certain choices make you feel, and then act on them accordingly.

But for most people, this comes naturally and is no more complicated than just doing what feels good in the moment.

Why Your Inner Being Can’t be Ignored for (Very Long)

Your inner being is the totality of you.

And even with your best efforts, it can’t be denied.

To not have the awareness of your needs is something we have all been guilty of at some point. You can only act on the knowledge you have at any one given time. But to ignore the calls for attention from within, and not provide self-love and self-nurture will only create problems the longer it goes on.

Your inner being is what makes you tick.

The body may be the vehicle for your experience, but it’s those aspects of your consciousness that take the wheel, which should be more of a concern to you. Regardless of whether you’re physically battered and bruised, you’ll always arrive at your destination, but if you’re not careful it might not be the one you’re expecting.

Failing to get on board with your inner self leads to the repetition of negative behavioural patterns. You continue to fall prey to the same bad decisions over and over, never quite learning your lessons.

And if this continues into later life, you’ll eventually have a rude awakening in the form of a mid-life crisis – which aren’t the acts of self-indulgence that most people think.

When you enter this life, you arrive with a plan detailing the things you want to accomplish to progress on your soul’s journey. And if you’ve repeatedly missed the cues, veering down the wrong path, eventually your Higher Self is going to step in and set you straight.

Why is it that so many people quit unfulfilling corporate jobs in their 40s and 50s to pursue their passion?

Because it’s what they should have been doing all along.

Your Inner Being Holds the Key Your Happiness

Happiness isn’t a destination.

It’s a path you must walk, and the only way to navigate it is by getting in touch with all parts of your inner being. Each aspect knows certain backstreets better than any of the others.

Some of those are gatekeepers while others are your helpers.

This is where the real inner work takes place. This is the real spirituality – the work you do on yourself. Not the books you read, the opinions you offer or the regard you hold yourself in.

Showing up consistently and doing the inner work on yourself daily is where the rubber hits the road. It’s only by taking responsibility for yourself that you can start to truly shape your reality. And means connecting the with your Heart-Space and embodying your I “AM” Presence.

Because as we touched on at the beginning of this post, there is no true embodiment of yourself until you understand yourself.

But once you do commit to the path, and engage with each aspect of your beingness, it opens up a whole new world for you to explore.

There is a famous passage from the Bible in which Jesus says, ‘and the kingdom of heaven is found within you,’ which has a direct parallel with what we’re talking about, here.

Heaven isn’t a place that you find just as much as happiness isn’t a physical destination. Heaven is a state of being, which only comes to you by making your peace and integrating all part of the whole that is your inner being.

Your inner aspects of being are the gatekeepers and guides to your own inner kingdom – to the heaven that is within you.

It is only by getting to know them that you will know heaven.