A lot of people talk about finding themselves, or going on a “finding oneself” project. Think the novel “ Eat, Pray, Love,” just perhaps the not traveling all the way to India version.

Yet what if you don’t know where to start? Or what if you feel like you’ve already been found? Or what if you feel so lost you simply would never know where to begin?

My answer: gravitate towards the things that make you feel like you’re coming home to yourself. Always liked the color pink, but you never have the courage to wear it anymore? Buy a new pink blouse. Feel like you could find yourself better in Bali? Maybe plan a trip to a tropical island.

It’s important, when finding yourself, to not listen to who and what other people tell you should do and believe, and instead listen to yourself!

Listening to that quiet inner knowing, even if you’re in a state of total dismal heartbreak, can lead you back to truth and wholeness. Sometimes the world can feel bleak and you can feel like you’re all alone. Pay attention to the things that make you feel like you’re alive. Even if the only thing that you can think of is your own breath.

When I was going through my second real heartbreak in high school, I noticed that I didn’t like to avidly shop for new fall clothes as much as I used to before. Everything looked the same to me, and the only color that stood out to me in terms of being appealing was the color tan. The world was bleak to me. My closest friends didn’t even seem to have their same effervescence; their auras seemed diminished and not as colorful, as well as my own. I couldn’t write as colorfully as I used to, which was devastating as I was an avid writer. I felt like I had lost my neon soul.

It took years to feel like me again. I went on a finding myself journey, almost like the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” does when she travels to India on a self healing pilgrimage. I was truly on sabbatical in more ways than one, yet in America — I dropped out of college eventually after three years, became estranged for many years from the people I knew and loved during a major nervous breakdown, and met many new influential people and teachers during my healing process. To put it very lightly, and succinctly. Oh, the perils of heartbreak for an HSP, or highly sensitive person, such as myself.

But one lesson I learned late in the game was to always gravitate towards things, anything, that makes you feel more like yourself. My junior year of high school, the year after my older ex boyfriend left me for college and a new life in Delaware, a seven hour drive away, I noticed that nature popped up in color to me; almost like the Autumn trees had healing properties as I drove to school each day. I wish I had appreciated nature more that year, as I just wrote the experience off as just another great fall season. Yet perhaps if I had embraced the trees and their vivid colors, and meditated on them, I would have been able to get over my ex boyfriend sooner, and with much less effort. There were many other examples like this, that I recognize looking back, now much more found as a person, standing on my own two feet, gently, at thirty four years of age.

So, try new things that appeal to you. Focus on what matters to the unique person that makes you, you!

Not needing to find yourself after a break up, just feel like finding yourself in general? Finding yourself is like becoming whole, perhaps like a process of healing strife and heartbreak between yourself and you only. The process of finding oneself is never ending, if you just commit to growing as a person.

So, do those things that call to you from the very centers of your being-ness. Don’t be afraid to listen to that quiet voice within that beckons you to be who you are. And that can of course change over time.

Travel to find yourself, whether physically or within. Pack the suitcase of your innermost desires, and then enjoy coming home to yourself, over and over again.