—Enabling True Reflections so people can see, know and love themselves more productively–
This post is about how useful the True Mirror is, how it enables productive communication with ourselves. There is so much value with the whole idea of knowing yourself. It is at the core of almost any teaching that is tuned in to the way of the world, even as we learn so many new things. Every teaching seems to say the same thing: Knowing yourself, knowing the world, knowing about you within the world – each are important keys to creating exceptional outcomes. Who are you and how you are are not single, static, nouns, they are verbs. You are a human being, not a human thing.
The True Mirror: Opening a door to you like you have never seen before. Within its crystal clear optics, the “you” that you “are” looks back, in real time and in 3D no less!
The reversing mirror? A close look-alike, acceptable for most purposes, but with a filter and transformation that is ever present, shifting you in real time from the true you to an “altered you”. What your mirrored face looks like and how much different it is from your actual face is completely dependent on how much you engage with yourself, how much use your face to communicate emotionally and non-verbally with yourself. The usual pattern isnt to engage, I believe, because the your face just doesnt fully work in a mirror, so long ago, you stopped using it that way, and like most people most of the time, you look and speak to yourself with a highly reduced set of expressions.
The Opportunity: However, if you do engage with yourself in the True Mirror, it’s possible to see a huge difference, and often in a incredibly positive and dynamic way. So many vital elements of your personality can be present and reflected correctly back to you for the first time: Things like your charm, your presence, your compassion and empathy, your self-love. That last one is one of the amazing things you can confirm in the True Mirror…your self-love emotion looks really beautiful! It’s a productive reflection too, because loving yourself is a pretty complex task. So now when its real, where you truly are happy with yourself, being able to see and interpret it in your expression becomes hugely validating.So if it’s true for so many, it has to be true for all of us. Not everyone sees what I’m talking about, and often it’s our perception and what we do in front of the true mirror that matters. Stare and it’s not that much different. But express? Be yourself? Be your real self? Dig deep within you to show up to yourself? That’s something else entirely.
Productive True Mirrors: This became part of our mission statement recently, and it speaks so much to why I continue to believe the True Mirror needs to be out there. So many things become more possible if you can see, know and love yourself accurately. For many people, it’s been a huge challenge to love themselves in mirrors, and by extension, to love themselves, because most think what we are seeing is our Self, even though it really is not. For me, I feel fake and strained, separated from the flow. What’s to love? Many have agreed with me, literally crying when they see how lovable they truly are, when “they” are present in their true reflection.
Unproductive mirrors: I believe there is a core of inauthenticity that comes from interacting with your mirrored self that becomes an anchor over your whole life, an anchor that may be the source of some of the difficulty we have with self-awareness and self-love. It’s been that way for all of us for our whole lives, long before we knew what was going on. A constant just like air and gravity. We have completely assumed that the mirrored self is who we are, no one has told us otherwise. Can it be just the mirror that is making it so hard to know ourselves? Where else do we experience ourselves as not-real?
So regardless of how real and true, i.e authentic, you strive to be with the world, there’s still a different being showing up in the mirror every time you make eye contact with yourself. You can love this person, but it’s so much more challenging, more convoluted, because it is filled with non-real expressions that you interpret and process as only you can. Those mirror expressions, and whatever they say and emote, simply don’t exist in real life with everyone else. Because of left/right brain asymmetry, the messages on either side are going to be different, and flipping the face changes the message. What has this alteration meant in the context of your whole life…it’s always been that way!
The Dynamic Real You: In contrast, who and what looks back from the True Mirror is so much more of what is really there within and without, and so dynamic too. Whatever you are saying, and not just with thoughts, but with emotional and meaningful expressions, comes back to you unaltered, in real time, as they are occuring. What you can say to yourself can be mind-blowingly more accurate and ultimately more productive than what you can try to say to yourself with reduced expressions. Your smile for instance – an awesome communication tool that conveys humor, compassion, understanding, depth, connection, happiness and so much more – in the True Mirror it actually works, feels and looks genuine, with the full nuance of what you are saying and emoting behind the smile. It’s incredibly easy to smile back at yourself this way, and yet almost impossible in mirrors because the smile simply doesn’t look and feel the same way it really is. The True Mirror reflects how you are thinking and feeling, your mirrored-face has a constant transformation going on, one that often shifts our face to a mask.
Can you see how much easier it is to love this true, vibrant, smiling and present human being? Seeing is believing, and I’ve seen thousands of people see it in their own eyes and absolutely fall in love with this new version. It happened to me the very first time I saw myself non-reversed…
My Story:Way back in 1982, I had an incredible satori when I first made eye contact in a non-reversed mirror. It was just two mirrors at right angles, with a big line down the middle (gone within the True Mirror), and there was no question that I recognized myself. I literally said “there you are!”, and within seconds I realized the import of what I had discovered… What I saw in my own eyes was really me – as I was being, as I was feeling, as I was existing. It didn’t go away either while i gazed. The feeling was pure joy and happiness – I was at a fantastic beach party in California, just 22, and for the first time, the person looking back was 100% happy at the life I was experiencing. I became instantly ok with this person, something that has stayed with me to this day. The backwards mirror I had seen 5 seconds beforehand? Ugh, it was an instant buzz-kill, the “me” in the mirror was really on my case for being so fake and partying too much. But I was 22! Of course I should be out having fun on the beach! The validation that i instantly got from my true reflection was deep and comforting.
And today, more than 38 years later? Loving myself? Well, that’s still a nifty trick for me as it is for anyone. It’s still a big challenge, because there’s still so many lessons. And self-love is an ever changing target, as we navigate the trials and tribulations of life.
But the person looking back from the True Mirror is my Ally, and I’m can be very productive in whatever I tell myself. When I’m feeling the love, I see the love, and I know it’s been there for years. But all the other messages as well – they can be just as clear. Who I am, who I am still developing into, is definitely someone I can love, someone I can trust, someone I can grow with. Also, the person I know matches what others are seeing, what is real. So much less confusion!
Fin: We all have a long path in front of us to truly get to where our higher destinies want to take us. The True Mirror is there to support you and all of us on our paths. To see, know and love yourself more productively: Check off those boxes and focus on the next great thing!