Pieces of Me

It’s getting harder and harder to have an identity these days.

I say this as someone who has been steeped in so many expansive understandings of who we really are as human beings, someone who marvels on a daily basis how we exist at all. It blows my mind that we are very literally made of stardust1, that our bodies come to life through the light of the Sun2, that the physical matter of our bodies is in fact 99.9999999% empty space on the atomic level.

And just consider the sheer improbability of your parents getting together, much less the extreme unlikelihood of a very particular egg and very particular sperm uniting at just the right time in just the right way to create you. Of course the same thing is true for your grandparents, for your great-grand parents, and for every single one of your ancestors who somehow came into being from this limitless sea of possibility all around us just to make you possible.

When I get up to this level of thinking, the whole idea of having a personality - much less something more banal like a job title - feels completely absurd. I know it probably wouldn’t land me an interview to describe myself as a “spark of light swimming in a soup of consciousness”, but it also somehow doesn’t cut it to limit my description of myself to something more solid and static like “Coach” or “Writer” or “Children’s Rights Policy & Advocacy Specialist.”

So maybe it’s time - just for now, while we grow and change - to drop the labels. Maybe it’s time to let ourselves forget who we think we are, because who we think we are is inevitably far more limited than who we really are.

Who we think we are is laced with ideas about who we think we should be in order to be successful, who we think we need to be in order for people to like us, who we think we want to be in order to feel happy. Who we think we are is shaped by every piece of feedback we have ever received from every environment we’ve ever been in, every person we’ve ever met, every experience we’ve ever had. We are open to influence in even the smallest of moments - if I were to stop you as a total stranger on the street and tell you that you looked good in red, you would very likely smile and start thinking of yourself as someone who looks good in red.

But as smashing as you look in red, what you wear and how you look ultimately have nothing to do with who you are. Nor does the music you like, the food you eat, the place you live, the people you date, or the work you do define you. All of these things have almost certainly changed over the course of your lifetime, and any of them could change again with a simple choice to live differently.

So you are more than the information you have absorbed about yourself from the reflecting pool, and you are more than the sum total of decisions you have made to bring you to this place. You are born from a highly unusual choice to exist at all, and this gives you extraordinary power. It is, in fact, how you can reconnect with the true essence of who you are: you are who you choose to be right now.

And in the shadow of next week’s Solar Eclipse in Leo - which marks a thrilling new chapter of how we un-understand3 ourselves - I encourage you to loosen the reins on your identity. Silence the echoes of who you thought you were and give yourself permission to be something lighter. Be open to where it takes you. Wear blue, order off-menu, stay in a hotel, use an alias.4

If you’re looking for where to let go, just notice whenever you utter the magic words “I am” and detach from whatever comes next. You can, of course, still be those things, but you don’t need to hold them so tightly that they become constraints. So instead of taking thoughts about your possible identity as true, play with letting yourself be feelings and see where that takes you. Be joyful, be kind, be abundant, be open.

For my part, I have released weight I did not even realize I was carrying. These past few years I have invested so much of myself in my spiritual development; it has been my guiding compass, my source of meaning, my identity. It has brought me challenges I never could have foreseen, and it has offered me gifts I never could have imagined. It has been wild and wonderful, and I have every faith that it was exactly what I needed to get me where I am. But it seems this quest is now - much like me - totally and completely exhausted.

It’s strange to describe how this feels, how it’s like I am waking up back into being myself in a remarkable new way. I’m remembering what I loved learning in college, what drove me to law school, what pulled me into the UN. And it feels good to reconnect with these parts of myself, to see how I am so much more than the person I have been imagining myself to be. I do not need to be an astrologer, an intuitive, an energy healer or a life coach to be me, and continuing to believe that would only take me away from being myself.

So I can only assume that what I have learned on this spiritual path is true, that it is only ever us getting in the way of being ourselves. Let’s get out of the way.

Love,

Patrick