THE TRAP OF IDENTITY WORK

Identity work has the potential to trap you. A spiritual trap. A spiritual trap that, from within the journey, can be extremely valuable.

Because to become aware of one’s identity, one’s ego, is in and of itself a transformation. However, at a certain point, the perspective of identity becomes a threshold. A ceiling in the relationship to your communion with Creation.

It’s important to understand that along the journey, things become true. And things that used to be true fall away. Not because those things are no longer true, or they’re wrong, or they’re bad. But because evolution is about birth and death. Every time you are born into more of yourself, aspects of yourself will die.

And those aspects of self can be spiritual teachings that you fully aligned with and fully felt were truth. It doesn’t mean that you were mistaken or that you pursued something incorrectly.

The journey is the value.

The journey is the whole point. So as soon as we judge the journey, we have forsaken ourselves. We have forsaken the vulnerability that the journey requires.

The journey to know ourselves requires identity work, but the paradox is that the very thing that started out as transformational becomes the next bind that holds us captive, limited, and separated.

From a place of identity, you are creating from that identity. And that is a narrow field. No matter what the identity is, even the identity as an embodied, liberated self, a powerful woman or man, it is still an identity.

Because what you truly are cannot be understood by a label, by the mind, or put into words. But in the human life, our egos naturally try to define themselves. Try to label and measure what cannot be labeled and measured.

The ego, and living from the perspective of ego identity, cannot unify fully with creation because it seeks to individuate itself. Again, not wrong, not bad.

A beautiful and necessary part of being human. And as long as we're human, we will have ego identity to some extent.

To transcend the ego completely is to literally evolve out of the human experience, to transition out of the human experience. You can move in and out of full immersion as the I, as Creation, and back into the ego, back and forth. And that is very common.

But to fully live with no ego is not relevant for this reality. This reality is finding where you can be both. It is the experience of duality. And ultimately the Trinity.

Can you embody all of it as Creation, the vast unknown experience?

To embody your wholeness requires you to perceive your reality from that wholeness.

But the ego can only perceive itself from the state of separation. It seeks the comfort of knowing over the discomfort of the unknown. It exists within duality. And duality, by its nature, creates limitation.

If you chase ego, if you chase identity, some future self, some alternate version of you, it will never end. And you will continue to create from some level of limitation.

Even as you might create abundance, the abundance will be incomplete. You might have abundant wealth but not abundant partnership. You might have abundant wealth and partnership, but cannot conceive a child. You might have all of the above and experience intense fluctuations in your emotional stability.

It is never enough.

There is always something that feels like it is missing. Because to create from duality is to create duality. You will always create the opposite force of what you are creating in order to stay in harmonic resonance with creation.

When you learn to let go of the ego, not because it's bad, not because it's wrong, you don't try to kill it, you don't judge it, you don't wish it away, but instead you learn to meet it, seeing it as one expression of creation, an expression that is valuable, but an expression nonetheless.

When you can meet it as the I Am presence, now you, the light of God, shines through, instead of the ego trying to see as the eye of God.

It’s like a cathedral having the sunlight shine from within, as if the sun is sitting inside shining out through the stained glass, fracturing through all those unique representations. Versus the sun being outside of the cathedral and the cathedral trying to draw the light in, trying to fill the darkest corners with that light, trying to warm its stone floors with the heat of the rays.

So recognizing your identity, becoming aware of your identity, becoming aware of how it plays a role in your human experience, that is where its value is. And learning how to meet it from pure existence, the vastness, the changelessness of creation that lives beyond the inhale, exhale, push, pull, positive, negative. That is the ground from which something new becomes possible.

The beautiful irony of this process is that the ego stops fighting Creation. Because for the first time, it feels seen. That is what the ego craves. The ego craves to feel seen, accepted, and loved. We project that onto others. We ask others to see us, love us, accept us, before we have done that for ourselves. Again, not wrong, merely part of the process.

When the ego feels seen, it rejoices. It returns to the innocence of the child. Now it can be playful once again, just like your human self was in your early life. It can be innocent, just like you were as a child. Life once again becomes joy, play, wonder, awe. Not because you have identified as any of those things, but because you let go of needing an identity to define you for a false sense of security.

That is what identity work does. It gives you a false sense of who you are. You cannot know thyself from the perspective of identity. It is always through a narrowed perception, a narrowed field, and a narrowed experience.

The only way to truly know thyself, both as Creation itself and in your humanness, your Unique Genius that is of this life, is from the perspective of existence itself. That requires presence in every moment. It requires breath, connection, vulnerability. But ultimately, it requires surrender.

Surrender into the unknown. Surrender into the discomfort. Surrender into the fullness of all that you are to hold the many finite expressions and experiences of your human self.

From that place, Creation is communion. A communion between all of the different aspects and layers that you are as a being. This communion creates from worth, sovereignty, and aliveness. Here. Now.

A paradigm shift so fundamental it changes the act of creation itself. My book, Awakening Aliveness: The Art of Coherent Creation, is available now.