True Self

 I often use the term, "True Self" in the spiritual journey.  It means finding how to best live life with your gifts and talents.  For a Christian, it would be how best to live the Gospel, as your best self, not as someone else might live it.  If you are in Recovery, it is how to live the 12 Steps, the Traditions and Concepts, as your best self.  You need a spiritual focus for this.  You have to have some meditative life that touches the insides of you to find who you were made to be.  So much teaching is about conforming to some outward program practice.  Do this and do that, as if we are all the same.  The world needs different talents. No one way makes for a whole.  People telling us what to do focus on our exteriors.  Yes, there needs to be some of that especially in the beginning of a formation.  But at some point you have to balance it with an interior practice, learning to listen to an interior voice.  Then the interior influences and adjusts the exterior and you have discovered a "True Self."