As a child, you began to unfold to the experiences around you and to interact with the people in your life: your parents and family, and later your friends or others. These are the people with whom you share love and heart. Out of love, you move outwardly and open up to them. You learn through them. You may even allow them to define who you are. You may be willing to shift toward them, in the direction that they want you to be. In a sense, you are willing to be defined by their hearts.

To the degree that you shift toward the significant people in your life, you are also at risk of being drawn away from your own center and your own authenticity, in order to accommodate your relationship to them.

As you adapt to your family and world, you are pulled out of a simpler relationship within yourself and the world, into a more complex relationship that layers your experiences and identifications of who you are in the world. This process can be an unfolding of your potential into the world; a means by which you learn to become a competent and active participant in what life has to offer.

This process can also be a contraction of your experience of the present moment and connection to joy. The way this occurs has great bearing on how you see yourself, how you see others and how you tend to diminish who you really are. . .