Personal Discovery: Defining our Self through our Relationship to Faith

For everyone, our relationship to our faith in a higher power plays a large part in our life. Even if you are an Atheist, not believing in the existence of a higher power, or an Agnostic, not sure whether there is a higher power or not, this particular belief of yours still plays a large part in your life. To look at the way our beliefs influence us, we need to look at it in three different ways.

We begin by looking at the present in both an inward and outward way. Faith can be focused inward on how it shapes and defines the person that we are. What faith and beliefs do we have currently? Is it a deep personal faith or something that just forms part of your identity? When you think of your faith, what emotions does it evoke? Is it encouraging or defeating you? How satisfied are you? If you aren’t satisfied, why not? What kind of person is it making you? How do you identify yourself with it and form your identity through it? Depending on the level of integration into our daily lives, they may heavily influence who we believe ourselves to be. Beliefs are a personal choice, sometimes more personal than many of the factors that influence us because they are something that dwells within us of our own will, not to be touched by others and only influenced if we specifically allow it to be. It is something that lives wholly within us but at the same time becomes greater than us connecting us to the world and other believers, both tangible and intangible. This unique hold it has on us can profoundly shape us.

Faith can also be focused outward on how we use that faith to affect our life and the lives of the people around us. How much does this faith connect to our daily life? What priority are we making to have it integrated into our lives? How do we show or hide our faith from others? Why? How does our faith change the way we interact with others and how we treat them? We often use our beliefs as a guide, a moral compass of which personal choices to make as well as how to act towards others. These choices and actions affect our future, opening certain doors and closing others. They are a physical and public representation of our beliefs, proclaiming them out loud to others. What message are we sending? Is it the same message we believe in? Often, the way others react to our expressions of faith can lead us to change the way we view ourselves, depending on the level that our identity is based on our beliefs. Public reaction may propel us into making choices but are we making these choices because we believe it is the right thing to do or because we want to go along with others? Again, it comes down to coming to a true understanding of our own interactions with our faith and to consciously choose what we are going to do with that understanding.

Of course, we must have been previously introduced to our beliefs at some point in our life. So, in taking a look at the past, we can start to understand how this belief became intertwined with the way we think. How did you come to this belief? Who introduced it to you and why did you accept it? What made this belief real to you? Or if it isn’t real to you, why do you still believe it? Whether or not our history with our own particular belief system is convoluted or not, there is always a process we follow: the initial introduction, the moment where we take that belief to be the truth, and a period of discovery in which we become better versed in our beliefs. Each of these makes a unique impact on the person we are, often changing our own identity and our patterns of behavior, even the course by which we live our lives. So it is imperative to understand our history with our beliefs. Even past beliefs have made indelible changes in our unique history and make-up.

Faith is an incredibly personal thing, expressed and repressed in so many different ways, with a unique impact on our self. That is why there is no activity for this section. The best way to focus on this section is to go through the questions and spend time in deep self-reflection. In this way, we come to a better understanding of a major part of our self.