Do you know that feeling deep inside that hasn’t changed since you first knew you were separate, alive, aware? Is that knowing, the same or different from who you are?
We learn to know the world through our reactions, and from them we begin to form our idea of who we are, what we can do, where we belong, or don’t.
Remember the wonder of bright colors sailing past your eyes, or the cold astonishment of being outside on a winter morning?
How many different selves have come and gone since then? And each one so true in its moment. Surely this must be who you are:
The first time someone else truly saw you, and you felt known? Or finding the delight in allowing another in, or the bewilderment when others invaded you, unbidden.
Our emotions, too, create a self: elation at the loveliness of the spring daffodils, terror when the ground shifts and balance falters.
We believe in each of these selves as it arises; forgetting what preceded, or that another will surely follow. Each one we take up, hold, only later to discard, unnoticed.
We feel we should know who we are, and that very wanting creates yet another self. You’d think we’d finally ken this, our only too human way of becoming.
Yet in all our years of forming and dissolving, beneath all the selves, isn’t there a deeper, internal sense, without story or reaction, that knows you, as you?
April 2019
Befriend Your Mind 