There Is More to You Than What People Can See

Take a look at the diagram above.

At first glance, it looked complicated. Circles inside circles, each one labeled with words like physical, emotional, spiritual. I remember feeling a little overwhelmed by it, the way you do when something is trying to explain too much at once.

It comes from the work of William A. Tiller, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University, described in his books Science and Human Transformation (1997) and Conscious Acts of Creation (2001).

He called the entire system the BioBodySuit, and the idea behind it is simple, even though the diagram looks anything but. We are much more than our physical bodies. The body is the vehicle we move through life in, but who we actually are extends well beyond what shows up in a mirror.

The longer I sat with it, the more I realised it wasn’t describing anything unfamiliar. It was just naming something most of us already feel but rarely put into words. That we are not one thing. We are several layers stacked on top of each other, and most of us spend our whole lives living in only the outer ones.

The outermost layer is the one the world interacts with. Your body, your career, your house, the things you’ve achieved, and the things you’re still chasing. It’s the part of you that’s visible, measurable, and easy to talk about at a dinner party.

Most of us spend the bulk of our energy here. Looking outside ourselves for validation, security, the sense that we’ve finally arrived somewhere. There’s nothing wrong with caring about this layer. It’s just incomplete. You can do everything right by its standards and still feel a quiet hollowness underneath it all.

Just beneath the visible self is something harder to name. Call it energy, atmosphere, presence, whatever word fits for you. You already know it exists, even if you’ve never called it anything.

You’ve walked into a room and felt tension before anyone said a word. You’ve sat with someone whose calm presence settled something in you without either of you speaking. You’ve noticed how one anxious person can shift the mood of an entire group.

We affect each other in ways that go beyond what we say or do. That’s not a mystical claim. It’s just something most people recognise the moment they’re reminded of it.

Moving further in, you reach the layers where your mind and your emotions live. This is where your beliefs sit. Your fears. Your memories. The story you’ve quietly been telling yourself about what love is supposed to look like, and why it does or doesn’t show up for you.

This is also where your ability to trust, to forgive, to let someone close, or to keep someone at a careful distance, actually originates. I think a lot of people spend years trying to fix their relationships from the outside, changing partners, changing circumstances, without realising that the patterns driving all of it are running much deeper than anything visible.

You can rearrange the outer layer as many times as you want. If you never touch this one, the same pattern tends to find its way back.

Further in still is the part of you that isn’t concerned with achievement or appearance at all. The part that asks why you’re here. What actually matters. How you might be useful to something bigger than your own life.

It’s the part of you that feels real compassion when someone else is hurting, even a stranger. The part that wants to grow, to contribute, to love and be loved without an agenda attached to it. Most people touch this layer occasionally, usually during something significant. A birth. A loss. A moment that strips away the noise long enough for something quieter to surface.

At the very center is something I think of as the essential self. The part of you that exists underneath your accomplishments, your fears, your disappointments, and even your emotions.

When you’re anxious, this part notices the anxiety without being consumed by it. When you’re grieving, it witnesses the grief without needing it to resolve on any schedule. When you’re celebrating, it experiences the joy fully. It is present through all of it without needing any of it to prove something about who you are.

This part doesn’t need approval. It isn’t interested in comparison or status. It simply is the way a window lets light through without becoming the light itself.

I think the reason this kind of framework stays with people is that it explains something a lot of us have felt but couldn’t quite articulate. Why does success on the outer layer so often fail to produce the relief we expected from it?

You can get the promotion, lose the weight, buy the house, find the relationship, and still feel like something underneath all of it hasn’t moved. That’s not a flaw in you. It’s just evidence that fulfillment doesn’t live exclusively in the outer layer, no matter how convincingly our culture insists that it does.

Real fulfillment seems to require all the layers working together. Your actions are lining up with what you actually value. Your mind and your emotions are working with you instead of against you. A felt sense of connection to something larger than your own circumstances. And underneath all of that, a willingness to actually listen to the quieter parts of yourself instead of only the loud, urgent ones.

I find myself thinking about this model differently than I did when I first encountered it, because grief has a way of stripping the outer layers down, whether you’re ready or not.

The things you spent years worrying about can suddenly feel almost irrelevant. The identity you built, the plans you made, the way you used to define yourself, all of it can shift or fall away entirely. What’s left, underneath the rubble of all that, is an invitation. Not a gentle one, usually. But an invitation nonetheless, to go deeper than you’ve gone before.

For me, grief has mostly been a long, uneven journey inward. It pushed me past the physical world, past the stories my mind kept retelling, past emotions that sometimes felt too big to survive. And eventually it brought me into a different kind of relationship with the part of myself that could witness all of it. Not fix it. Not explain it away. Just witness it, with something close to compassion.

I’m curious which layer you’ve been living in lately.

Whether you’ve been caught up in the outer one, chasing something that keeps almost satisfying you, or whether something in your life has pulled you further in than you expected to go.

If you’re navigating grief, loss, or some major shift right now and you’re looking for support on that journey inward, the Grief Healing Collective is a community built around exactly that. Connection, real healing, and the understanding that none of us were meant to carry this alone.

Which layer have you been living in lately, the outer one or something further in? I’d genuinely love to know.