How to come out of hiding
Hiding keeps us safe, there’s no doubt about it, but it also keeps us playing small.
Someone recently told me that the bigger I play it, the greater the magic, and nothing could be more true and, at the same time, more scary to face up to.
I admit, I love to hide. I love to stay in. I love to spend time with me, myself and I, shutting the world out and staying safely within my little comfort bubble. I know, when I’m self-reliant on myself, no one can let me down, no one can scare me and no one can judge me.
So, sometimes hiding can be through fear of other people, fear of getting it wrong or fear of judgement, but at the bottom of it all is fear itself.
Fear, that grand old illusion that exists in our minds, wreaking havoc and having a party at our expense. For while fear may keep us safe, it also keeps us small. It shields us from the worst in life, and also from the best. If we hide, we’ll never know what magic could be waiting around the corner for us.
So, how can we come out of hiding once and for all? How can we step out into the unknown, being vulnerable and open about who we truly are? And how can we embrace that unknown and welcome it with open arms instead of shutting ourselves away and hiding?
Let’s see shall we.
Becoming your true authentic self
If you’ve had a Soul Contract Reading you might know that there’s one particular number in peoples’ charts that is all about hiding away, and that is the number 7. What’s more, I have four of them in my birth chart (yes, that’s a lot) making it the dominant energy that’s running through my life.
So I guess I’m an expert, though not by choice, of what it’s like to want to hide and stay safe. The goal for people with 7’s is all about integrating into one person and coming into wholeness, rather than hiding who we are behind different masks.
Hiding is quite literally the essence of 7’s and we can be absolute masters at it.
The goal for us is to come into our true authentic selves, which is the challenge I have been enjoying for the past several years.
I like to see people like diamonds. We all have many faces that we show the world; the part of us we show our work colleagues, the part of us we show our lover and the part of us we show our parents. Yet, the trick is to integrate all of these multiple versions of ourselves into one cohesive and condensed reality.
When we drop the masks and bare our raw and naked selves, we can only be who we are, we have nothing to hide, nothing to lose and nothing to gain. We are just as we are and have no choice but to accept ourselves.
This is the beauty of coming out of hiding and within that is the immeasurable gift of freedom.
When we come out of hiding we are free and it’s this freedom that so many of us are desperately paying for through the material and image-altering add-ons we think give us confidence but in reality takes us further away from loving our true selves.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good and feel good. It’s a form of confidence that we all need. Yet, we only need to remember that we are enough without these things.
They do not add anything to us for we are already whole, we are already enough, we are already perfect.
The roles shame and fear play
Fear might only be the imaginings of the mind but it’s incredibly potent and powerful in deterring us from stepping out of our safety bubble and embracing the deep, dark unknown.
We all know that good things happen outside of our comfort zone, but we rarely want to take the risk that it just might not quite work out in the way we hope. Risk-taking requires trust and trust is something that we can’t taste, touch or feel. And, in a world where everything is so tangible and touchable, putting our faith in something unseen just doesn’t feel safe for us.
This is where we get ourselves in a tangle. Stepping out of hiding requires trust that we fly and not fall on our faces. Yet, and this is where the challenge is, what if we do? If we do fall flat on our face what’s the worst that could happen?
Shame is well known in psychology to be the biggest motivator in human behaviour. We will literally do anything to avoid feeling the dreaded and soul-crushing emotion of shame. Shame keeps people compliant, it keeps people in line and it keeps people playing small.
What’s more, shame and fear are best friends. Fear tells us it will keep us from feeling shame and shame tells us it won’t appear if we just listen to fear.
For most of us, the fear of judgement and the accompanying shame is the major obstacle that keeps us stuck in our comfort cage, unable to let ourselves out.
As human beings we are genetically encoded to stay in communities which have forever kept us safe. We don’t want to stand out, we don’t want to make a scene and we don’t want to get kicked out into the wilderness where we’re vulnerable. So, we colour inside the boxes, we stand in the queues and we don’t step out of line.
Yet fear is just a lack of belief in ourselves that we could handle whatever happened. The core of fear is “what if I can’t handle it?” and that’s all there is to it. Classic self-esteem is at the centre of fear. So the next time you feel scared about coming out of your comfort zone, ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen and if it happened could you handle it?
The answer is yes, you probably could.
Coming out of hiding and showing your true self
To be authentic means to be your complete self, yet, it takes most of us our whole lifetime to truly know who that is.
There’s a huge amount of pressure and expectation that we have to know who we are and project who we are out into the world in a big show of fireworks and pazazz. Yet the reality is a lot more subtle. Like all good things, we need some trial and error.
How do we know whether we like something or not unless we try it? The answer is, we don’t. We have a whole lifetime to try things, to get things wrong, then try them again. There’s no such thing as perfect, there never will be, and the whole point of life is to be in a constant state of evolution so we can discover the absolute wonder and miracle of life.
It’s lovely to speak about letting go of our fear of judgement so we can do wonderful things, but in reality, to tell a shy person that they need to suddenly start speaking in public or running naked down a busy street is quite simply a horrifying concept.
And it doesn’t need to be that extreme.
As I mentioned, discovering your true authentic self takes a lifetime of experimenting, involving trial and error and a delicious cocktail of every single human emotion possible. Hey, this is what it is to be human. But we don’t need to jump onto a stage just to prove we’re not scared of hiding.
Coming out of hiding, and gradually unveiling the layers that are camouflaging our true nature, is a deliciously slow and organic process. It’s speaking to a stranger while standing in a queue. It’s turning up the music in your car and singing out loud. It’s trying something, anything, new.
It happens in a million inconsequential ways that all add up to something far more glorious and magical than we could possibly imagine.
We have to take risks, we have to step into the unknown and we have to allow ourselves to make mistakes. There is something so utterly beautiful when you look back on your life and see all the brilliant and bold choices that led you exactly where you are now.
The world needs you to show up as yourself, it’s why you were born and it’s why there has never been and there will never be another version of you. You are unique by design and it’s time you remembered that and let your soul shine.
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