The True Self in Yoga

In yoga philosophy, there's this concept that your true self, your authentic nature, has always been there. It's not something you need to create or achieve. It's already present, buried beneath years of conditioning, expectations, and the stories you've told yourself about who you're supposed to be.

The Sanskrit term for this true self is Atman. It's described as unchanging, eternal, and fundamentally peaceful. It's the part of you that remains constant while everything else in your life shifts and changes. Your body ages, your circumstances alter, your thoughts come and go, but this core essence stays the same.

The problem is that we've covered it over. Think of it like a mirror that's been gathering dust for decades. The mirror itself is perfect and whole, but you can't see your reflection clearly through all that grime. Yoga practice, whether physical postures, breathwork, or meditation, is essentially about wiping away those layers so you can see clearly again.

When you're on your mat, holding a challenging pose, you start to notice the habitual patterns. The voice that says you're not flexible enough, not strong enough, not good enough. Where did that voice come from? Usually, it's an echo of someone else's judgement that you internalised years ago. Maybe a parent who was never satisfied, a teacher who compared you to others, or a culture that told you your body should look a certain way.

This is where therapy and yoga meet on common ground. Both are fundamentally about the same thing: helping you distinguish between your authentic self and all the conditioning you've absorbed.

In therapy, you examine those patterns more directly. You talk about where they came from, what purpose they served, and whether they're still serving you now. You shine a light on the unconscious beliefs that drive your behaviour. "I'm not lovable." "I have to be perfect to be accepted." "It's not safe to speak up." These aren't truths about who you are. They're conclusions you drew from early experiences, often before you had the capacity to question them.

A good therapist helps you trace these patterns back to their origins. You start to see that the anxiety you feel isn't a fundamental part of your nature. It's a learned response, possibly from growing up in an unpredictable environment where you never quite felt safe. The people-pleasing isn't who you are. It's a strategy you developed to keep the peace in a household where conflict felt dangerous.

Once you can see these patterns for what they are, learned behaviours rather than fixed truths, you create space to choose differently. You realise you're not broken or flawed. You're just carrying programming that made sense once but doesn't fit who you want to be now.

Here's a question worth sitting with: who are you when nobody's watching? When there's no one to impress, no expectations to meet, no role to play? What emerges in those rare moments of complete solitude and honesty?

That's the self worth knowing. Not the version of you that performs for others, not the identity you constructed to survive your particular childhood, but the quiet presence that remains when all of that falls away.

Most of us are terrified of that question because we genuinely don't know the answer. We've been so busy being what others needed us to be that we never stopped to ask what we actually want, what we genuinely feel, what brings us alive.

Yoga and therapy both provide a container for that exploration. They create space where it's safe to let the masks slip, to stop performing, to simply be. In that space, your true self has room to breathe, to stretch, to reveal itself.

It won't happen all at once. Years of conditioning don't dissolve overnight. But gradually, through practice and patience, you start to recognise yourself. Not the self you were told to be, but the one that was there all along, waiting quietly beneath the surface.