WHY KNOWING YOURSELF IS ONE OF THE GREATEST CATALYSTS FOR CHANGE

What if one of the greatest catalysts for changing your life isn't trying harder, fixing yourself or becoming someone new, but simply learning to know yourself more deeply?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly through the lens of astrology and the Aries–Libra axis. Aries is the beginning of the zodiac, the energy of the self and the question, “Who am I?” Opposite Aries sits Libra, which brings us into relationships with the people in our lives and asks us to explore who we are when we meet another. There is something so beautifully human about this axis because we spend our entire lives moving between the two. We are learning about ourselves, learning about others, seeing ourselves reflected through our relationships, and then returning to ourselves with perhaps a little more awareness than we had before.

The Aries Full Moon has brought that question of “Who am I?” to the surface for me again. Not necessarily in the sense of needing to find some final answer, but in recognising that knowing ourselves is an ongoing process. Who I was at twenty is not exactly who I was at thirty, forty or fifty. Life has happened in between. I've had experiences, relationships, challenges, joys, losses, insights and changes that have shaped me, and I'm still learning about myself now.

I think sometimes we carry this expectation that at some point we're supposed to have ourselves figured out, as though personal growth is a journey with a finish line and eventually we'll arrive at the completed version of ourselves.

But why would we?

Look at a tree.

A tree doesn't stop growing because it reaches a certain age. It continues to respond to life around it. Its growth is influenced by the quality of the soil beneath it, how much water and sunlight it receives, the weather that moves through, the changing seasons, the strength of its root system and what is happening in the environment around it. Someone may come along and prune its branches. A storm may damage part of it. There may be a season of abundant fruit and another when very little appears to be growing at all.

And yet the tree is still alive. It is still responding. It is still adapting. It is still becoming.

Why would we expect our human lives to be any different?

We are shaped by the conditions in which we grow too. We are influenced by our families, our relationships, the country and culture we grow up in, our schooling, our communities, our beliefs and the experiences we have along the way. I grew up in Canada and later made my life in Australia, and both of those environments form part of my story. Someone else may have grown up in an entirely different culture, in a different family system, with different expectations, opportunities, challenges and ways of seeing the world.

Even something as seemingly simple as our schooling can shape us. Did we attend a public school or a private school? Were we homeschooled? Were we encouraged to question things, or taught to follow the rules? What happened when we made mistakes? What were we praised for? What did we learn we needed to do to belong, to succeed, to be accepted or to feel safe?

Layer upon layer, experience upon experience, we become who we are.

And then life continues to shape us.

Relationships change us. Parenthood changes us. Our work can change us. Grief, ageing and illness can change us. Sometimes a single conversation changes the way we understand something we have believed for decades.

With more than eight billion people living on this planet, think about the extraordinary number of variables that have contributed to creating each person they are today. Nobody has lived your exact combination of experiences. Nobody has inhabited your body, lived your relationships, carried your memories, interpreted your experiences or travelled through life from precisely your perspective.

This is why I believe knowing yourself matters so much.

Knowing yourself isn't simply being able to describe your personality or list the things you like and dislike. It is developing a relationship with what is happening within you. It is beginning to recognise how your body communicates with you, how your mind responds when you feel uncertain, what happens emotionally when you feel hurt or rejected, what drains your energy, what brings you alive, what you value and what you actually need.

It is noticing the patterns that continue to appear in your life and becoming curious about where they came from, rather than immediately criticising yourself for having them.

Because we all have patterns.

We all have beliefs that were formed long before we had the awareness to consciously choose them. We all learned ways of navigating the world through our families, communities and experiences, and many of those patterns were once incredibly useful. They helped us belong. They helped us cope. They helped us feel safe. They helped us make sense of whatever was happening around us at the time.

But something that supported us once may not necessarily support the person we are now.

And this is where self-awareness becomes such a powerful catalyst for change.

We cannot consciously change what we cannot yet see.

If I don't recognise a pattern, I don't have much opportunity to consciously choose something different. If I don't realise that I've spent years putting everybody else's needs ahead of my own, I might interpret my exhaustion as a personal failure and decide that I simply need to become more productive. If I don't recognise that an old belief is influencing the choices I make today, I may continue living through that belief without ever stopping to ask whether it is actually mine anymore.

When we begin to notice what is happening within us, something changes. A little space begins to open between the automatic pattern that we have lived (maybe for many decades!) and what happens next.

Sometimes that moment is incredibly small. We simply notice, “Oh, I do this when I feel overwhelmed,” or “That's interesting, I've had this reaction before.” We may recognise that our body tightened before we said yes to something we didn't really want to do, or notice that our mind immediately created the worst possible outcome when something felt uncertain.

That awareness doesn't mean we instantly change the pattern. It simply means we can see it.

And once we can see something, we have somewhere to begin.

This is also why I don't believe personal growth is linear.

We often imagine growth as though we should be steadily travelling upwards, becoming wiser, healthier, calmer and more evolved with every passing year. Then an old pattern returns, something triggers us that we thought we'd dealt with years ago, or we find ourselves standing in what feels like familiar territory and wonder why we're back here again.

But perhaps we're not actually back in the same place.

Growth can be more like a spiral than a straight line. We may return to familiar themes throughout our lives, but we meet them with different experiences, different resources and a different level of awareness. The situation may look familiar, but we are not necessarily the same person standing inside it.

Again, nature shows us this everywhere.

A tree doesn't grow in one straight, uninterrupted line. It bends toward the light. It strengthens in response to wind. It sends roots deeper into the earth. It loses leaves and grows new ones. It flowers, fruits, releases and rests. Some seasons are visibly abundant, while during others much of what is happening cannot be seen from the outside at all.

A dormant tree is not failing.

And neither are we.

There are seasons in our lives when we have enormous energy for creating, expanding and moving forward, and there are other seasons when our attention naturally turns inward. There are seasons for building and seasons for releasing, seasons for knowing exactly where we're heading and seasons when we're being asked to listen more deeply before deciding what comes next.

Part of knowing ourselves is learning to recognise the season we're actually in rather than continually demanding that we behave as though we're in another one.

This is where the relationship between Aries and Libra becomes particularly interesting to me. Aries asks us to explore the self, while Libra brings us into relationship with others, and we need both. Other people can become some of our greatest mirrors. Relationships can show us where our boundaries are unclear, where we abandon ourselves to keep the peace, where we become defensive, where we feel safe enough to soften, and where old wounds or patterns are still asking for our attention.

We learn about ourselves through relationships, but underneath every relationship we will ever have is the one that accompanies us for our entire lives: our relationship with ourselves.

And yet we can spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to understand everybody else.

Why did they do that? What do they think of me? Why won't they change? What do they need? What should I say so they understand me?

Meanwhile, there may be an entire inner world within us that we haven't stopped long enough to hear.

This is one of the reasons practices such as meditation, journalling, walking in nature, mindful movement or simply creating quiet space can be so valuable. They aren't necessarily about finding an immediate answer or fixing anything. Sometimes their greatest value is simply that they create enough space for us to notice ourselves again.

What is happening in my body?

What am I feeling beneath all this thinking?

What do I need?

What matters to me now?

What am I ready to let go of?

What do I want?

Not what should I want. Not what would make everybody else comfortable. Not what I thought I wanted ten years ago.

What do I want now?

These aren't questions we need to interrogate ourselves with or turn into another personal-development assignment. They are invitations. We can hold them lightly and allow the answers to change as we grow & change.

Because perhaps knowing yourself isn't something you accomplish.

Perhaps it is a relationship you cultivate.

A relationship in which you learn to notice, listen, understand and eventually trust yourself more deeply. A relationship that allows you to recognise the influences that have shaped you without believing they must define the rest of your life.

We cannot control every condition around us any more than a tree can control the weather. There will always be experiences we didn't choose, other people's decisions we cannot change, and seasons we would rather not have walked through.

But we can become increasingly conscious of what is happening within us.

And within that awareness lies possibility.

We can notice the pattern.

We can question the belief.

We can listen to the body.

We can acknowledge the emotion.

We can recognise what belongs to us and what doesn't.

We can begin to understand what we need.

And from there, little by little, we can choose how we want to respond.

Perhaps that is one of the real gifts of knowing ourselves. It doesn't give us control over life. It gives us a deeper relationship with the person who is living it.

And just like the tree, we will continue to be shaped by the soil, the seasons, the nourishment, the storms and everything else that life brings.

We will grow new branches.

We will lose old ones.

There will be seasons of flowering and seasons of rest.

There will be times when we can see our growth clearly and others when it is happening quietly beneath the surface.

We are not here to arrive at some final, finished version of ourselves.

We are here to keep discovering who we are.

And perhaps the more deeply we know ourselves, the more consciously we can participate in who we are becoming.

A SPACE TO COME BACK TO YOURSELF

If this has resonated with you and you would like to create more space to slow down, reconnect and listen inward, my weekly online meditation classes offer a gentle place to begin.

I also work one-to-one with women through holistic wellbeing, herbal and naturopathic support, energetic healing and astrology, bringing together different pathways to help you understand and support yourself more deeply.

You can explore my meditation classes and one-to-one sessions here!

I look forward to walking beside you along your healing journey!

Abundant blessings, Sheryl

Holistic Wellbeing Practitioner | Herbalist | Reiki Master Teacher | Meditation Teacher | Astrologer | Spiritual Mentor

Port Stephens, NSW & Online