A Spiritual Master's One Question for Living Your Best Life

It sounds so simple, but it runs incredibly deep.

I recently heard a question that stopped me mid-scroll. The kind you can’t un-hear.

Someone asked a spiritual master for the one piece of advice that could help any human live their best life. His answer was a single question, the one he said we should all be asking ourselves:

Why am I choosing to be who I am not?

Read that again. Slower this time. Why am I choosing to be who I am not?

I don’t know a single person who isn’t wearing at least one mask. Personality tweaks we adopted so long ago to seem more acceptable, more impressive, more safe, that we forgot we ever put them on. We think they’re just... us. We build them so early - in a classroom, at a dinner table, in a moment we don’t even remember - that unmasking feels less like growth and more like loss…. or terror.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the entire point of life is to take the masks off, one by one, until what’s left is your weird, specific, uncopyable frequency. Your true essence in all its glory. Your unique genius.

So what if that’s the whole assignment: to become undeniably, unapologetically yourself?

Here’s the mechanism I keep coming back to: excitement is the compass. The more you act on what genuinely lights you up, the more you’re tuned in to your actual self.

That tuned-in state is where the better ideas live, the sharper insights, the stuff that feels like it arrived from somewhere bigger than your to-do list. It’s when the cool synchronicities show up and where magic is felt. Follow that thread long enough and life starts feeling like you are living your life in joyful fulfillment and purpose.

Excitement is our soul’s natural frequency. So when we act on our excitement, we are more in alignment with our true self.

Most of the unhappiness I see in my work comes from an ongoing mismatch, a life built slightly out of alignment with who someone actually is. The musician who became a doctor because it was “safer.” The founder with huge vision who dreads managing people. The spouse who stays for the finances instead of the heart. The teenager who plays a sport to be liked, when she’d rather be doing something else entirely.

Zoom out on any of these and you find the same trade: I’ll give up a piece of myself for a piece of safety.

That’s what “Why am I choosing to be who I am not?” is really asking. Where have you made that trade? And what did you tell yourself to make it feel reasonable?

Today’s newsletter topic was inspired by a guy who called me this week before booking a “What’s My Genius” session with me. He barely got a sentence out before I could feel it. He’s a genuinely gifted musician who isn’t making music. He’s building a business instead, because business pays and art, he’s decided, doesn’t. Except the business isn’t working either. Because he isn’t in it. He’s creating a version of safety, and safety isn’t buying what he’s selling.

Underneath almost every story like his is the same fear: if people see the real me, they won’t accept it. So we hide, often without noticing we’re doing it, and call the hiding “being realistic.”

Here’s the paradox, though: it’s the real you that people fall in love with. Nobody has ever felt closer to you because of the mask.

You are too unique, too strange in the best way, too full of something only you have, to keep editing yourself down. The world isn’t overstocked on you. There’s exactly one.

So sit with the question. And let a mask fall.

xx, Taryn

P.S. If any of this stirred something loose, and I hope it did, book a private “What’s My Genius” session with me. Think of it as ten years of therapy and coaching compressed into a single sitting, aimed directly at the exact spot where you’ve been choosing safety over your heart. Results are guaranteed.