Blueprint of the Authentic You: Self Help, #1

Blueprint of the Authentic You

A Road Map for Self-Esteem, Well-Being, and Success

Jasrin Singh

Contents

A Discovery

Introduction

PART I

Discovering Your Authentic Self

1

Self-Esteem and the Authentic Self

2

Vulnerability

3

The Role of Suffering

4

A Clean Slate—Undoing Our Conditioning

5

Decoding Consiousness and Evolution

6

Values

7

Talents and Strengths

8

Personality and Genetics

9

The Inner Child

PART II

Aligning with Your Authentic Self

10

Emotional Purification

11

Unconditional Responsibility and Effective Decision-Making

12

Discipline vs Habit and Resistance

13

Forgiveness and Resolution

14

Overcoming Self-Doubt

15

Loving Ourselves Unconditionally

16

Desire, Aim, and Purpose

17

As We Go Deeper

Afterword

Acknowledgments

To

my spiritual masters and teachers . . .

Thank you for awakening me to the blueprint of my authentic self and being the inspiration behind this book.

Discovery

‘Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.’

—Howard Thurman

Are you alive? Are you thinking for yourself? Do you know what you were born to do? Are you free? Do you live an authentic life? Do you have a healthy self-esteem? Do you love yourself? Are you making conscious decisions for yourself?

These are the questions that began to consume me at a turning point in my life. In seeking and finding answers to these questions, I became so wonderfully alive that I felt it was my duty to share my experiences and learning. It is my attempt, through this book, to create a road map for us, the everyday people, to have a chance to live the life that was previously a luxury and enjoyed only by the sages and the elite.

The Blueprint of the Authentic You: A Foolproof Road Map to Self-Esteem, Success, and Happiness is a book based on the premise that each of us is born with a unique set of attributes, which, if discovered, embraced, and utilised, promise us a life of purpose and meaning. Our singular, most worthy goal as human beings is to understand the makings of this blueprint.

When we own who we are and do what we are naturally best at, it leads us to our larger purpose, our raison d’être. This raison d’être gently leads us to an inner peace and elevates us to the happiness levels that are sustainable and constant.

Our blueprint is like an unsolved jigsaw puzzle that resides within us. Although, we might not know it, we have all the pieces but are unable to put them together. In this book, I bring you the required insights and tools that will help you understand where those pieces are, how to identify their myriad forms, and finally, how to put them together.

Happiness is the single most sought-after state we all pursue. We strive, we struggle, we fight, we love, we work, we marry, we have children . . . all in the pursuit of this thing called happiness. Yet, no one can define what true happiness really is.

‘Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north.’

—Tibetan Proverb

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My Story

On my personal quest for happiness, I have been through some very dark moments in life. At the start of this quest, I could not fathom why I was so unhappy. I was born into an upper-middle-class family, blessed with reasonable physical attributes, and an above-average intelligence. I had left my unhealthy and claustrophobic marriage. I had attended some of the best schools and earned an MBA. I was a mother of three healthy children, I was in love with my soulmate, and I had my dream corporate job. All the boxes were ticked, yet there I was, thirty-two years of age, feeling completely empty, sad, and devoid of joy in my life.

What was going on with me . . . within me? Why did I feel like there was still something wrong?

As it is said, hindsight is always 20/20! Looking back, there was a realisation that things had actually not started too well for me in life. At twenty, I had buckled under pressure from my family, agreeing to an arranged marriage. I trusted my father and wanted to believe that, under his guidance, this would all work out just fine. After all, arranged marriages were common in India, and most of the people I knew had been married that way. I also did want to get married and have children. I just wasn’t quite ready when it actually happened. I had never really learned to stand up for myself, and not knowing any other way out of the pressure my family was putting on me, I entered what would be the most difficult decade of my life. Before I could recover from the shock of being married, I learnt I was already pregnant with my first child. I was young, naïve, and pregnant with the child of a man I barely knew.

Leaving the details of that story out for now, I ended up in a deeply stifling marriage that lasted ten years, which also gave me three young children before I turned twenty-seven. There was immense social, familial, and financial pressure on me to remain married. I had no support system, no independent income or status in a foreign country, which made me completely dependent on my husband financially. After years of making the most of the cards I was dealt and trying to fit in my surroundings, which every part of my being knew was wrong for me, I had finally found the courage to take action. I realised that no one was going to rescue me, and if I had to change something, it would have to be my own willpower and action. I needed every ounce of courage and resilience to step out of my marriage and find the freedom I knew was my birthright. This freedom was the space where I could be truly and completely me. It was difficult, and the road was full of sharp twists and turns. But, today, here I stand, writing to you about how you, too, can find the freedom to be unabashedly you.

Despite all the challenges and blocks along the way, I made my way to garner work experience and then an MBA. This prized degree accelerated my, up until then, stifled career and earning capability. Post MBA, I had separated from my husband, found a somewhat fulfilling career, and was financially independent. I was finally free. I had always had a deep knowing about the presence of a soulmate since my early childhood, but the possibility seemed remote when I was struggling to get out of my marriage. But this knowing came true when, unexpectedly, I met someone and fell deeply in love. It was the kind of love that I had been yearning for all this while.

So, here I was, in possession of the three things that I thought would make me happy forever—a life where I could make my own decisions, financial independence, and a loving relationship. I finally had all the pieces of my happiness puzzle, or so I thought.

I still remember the exact moment when I had—what I call—my ‘awakening’. I was standing on the little terrace at the back of the kitchen of my newly bought apartment in Singapore. The apartment was yet another one of those accomplishments I thought would make me happy forever. After putting my children to sleep, I stood on the tiny kitchen balcony, basking in some me time. As I stared at the stars, two questions ran through my mind.

First, who am I beyond the roles that I play—of a mother, an employee, a partner, and a daughter? These were just the roles I played in the drama of life, so, who was Jasrin without the trappings, roles, and definitions?

The second question that plagued my mind was, what is my purpose for being here? Was it simply to eat, sleep, procreate, earn money, fall in love, marry, bring up children, and eventually die? Animals could do almost all of that to a large extent, so what makes us different? We must have a higher purpose, I pondered. But the answer to that question felt so elusive and alien to my world and its paradigms.

I had no clue where to seek answers to those questions. I had been to some of the most intellectually rigorous schools in the world, surrounded by high-performing overachievers, yet the question of ‘Who Am I?’ had never been raised, nor discussed in these surroundings of academia. I knew that the answers to my questions would not come from traditional sources of knowledge such as schools, professors, or the books I had been exposed to. So, where could I turn to . . . or to whom?

The Thought of God Entered My Mind

Who was this God anyway? And would she or he really have the answers to my existential questions? What did she/he want me to do with my life? And where was this God while I was suffering? And most importantly, why, despite all my efforts and hard work, was I still suffering?

My relationship with God till that moment had been rocky—life had not really been a bed of roses for me in the last ten years. It had been mostly harsh, disappointing, unsupportive . . . interspersed with momentary vignettes of love and joy with the birth of each of my three children. I had to work tremendously hard to get to where I was now, and I had done it all on my own. And to find myself feeling totally at a loss about this thing called life was shocking. Then, I reached my ‘pit point’ when the doctor said to me that I may be clinically depressed.

It came as a shock to me as I thought that I was far too strong a woman to be depressed. This was just not possible. But I knew that it all made sense—this feeling of emptiness inside of me, a deep dread of waking up each morning and going to work, a complete inability to have fun or laugh in moments that should have brought extraordinary joy to me. The signs were telling.

Depression—A Call from My Soul

Being diagnosed with depression was the final wake-up call for me; it was a sign that something fundamentally had to shift within me. Changing my circumstances was not enough. It was also possible that my awakening caused me to fall into depression. Depression, it is said, is the call of the soul to be nurtured. It arises from being disconnected with your authentic self for far too long. It is the way for our spirit, our essence, to give us an ultimatum. As if it were telling us, ‘Take care of me or you will die.’ Depression forces you to sit and really look at what is going on in your life. I had suffered some deeply traumatic experiences in my life by then. There had been an amalgamation of toxic emotions—anger, self-hatred, guilt, jealousy, grief, and sadness—that were stored in my energy body. You name it, and it was all there.

Once I started to be aware of all that was in my being, I set out on course to transmute these negative emotions—more of which we will talk about in this book. If rebirth is a reality—I believe it is—I am certain that the pain, anger, grief, and sadness in my heart was not from this lifetime alone. I had probably been carrying these negative emotions for many lifetimes.

Being clinically depressed was my defining moment; I had to get to the bottom of this. I had some difficult times, but so do many people and that should not lead us to depression. I wanted to find out the root cause of my depression. Along with all my weaknesses, I had the strengths of determination and willpower to set upon a journey that was unknown to me at the time. But this voyage would lead me to the most interesting and eye-opening time of my life.

What Can You Expect from This Book?

Here, I attempt to capture the most important discoveries of my journey and provide you with a framework for understanding yourself and working towards your personal happiness. This book is my offering to the world, an act of service, that may, in some way, impact your life.

Each of us has had our own journey of nature and nurture, and we possess our own God-given or natural talents. The work that we need to do on ourselves is to figure out what is it that is uniquely us? Yes, we may have commonalities—we are both humans. Maybe, you, too, are a woman; maybe, we even share the same blood type or ethnicity. But deep inside, we are startlingly unique. We each have our own divine blueprint. The purpose of this book is to help you understand why it is our primary responsibility to discover our unique blueprint, and how we can make the best use of it. When we are working in alignment with our unique and personal blueprint, we are accelerating the arrival of that very intangible thing called true happiness.

As an individual who has been searching for utopia since birth and having worked with so many clients in the search of the same thing, one of my most compelling discoveries has been—the blueprint of the authentic self.

Serve the World by Being Yourself

Through all my searching and seeking, I know that what I want most is to be useful—useful to the people around me and the world at large. I am happy when I feel helpful, and this is the innate desire that is locked into each one of us, even though, often, it is less than apparent. But there is more to it than just being useful. True fulfilment comes from being valuable in the way that you were born to be, not in a way that X, Y, or Z is.

This brings me to one of the integral themes of this book. Our self-esteem is so deeply related to us feeling and