Who are you, to YOU?
One of the reasons change is so hard is that we don’t realize how attached we are to our identity, or an idea of ourselves.
In Ayurveda, this concept is referred to as ahamkara, the ego or the separate self. It’s a word I LOVE.
For example, if I say “I’m just a person who needs to stay busy. I can’t sit still,” AND I also want to cultivate more peace and stillness in my life (both can be true), my ahamkara is going to fight to prove me right: I am much too busy for peace.
This is often the resistance you feel when you know a practice could be really nourishing to you, but you just don’t wanna.
GAH! What is a sane person to do? You really mean it when you say you want less stress in your life, but can’t seem to stop saying yes to more calendar fillers.
The first step is to cultivate awareness. This is what grows the moments to slow down before making choices, and start (tiny step by tiny step) to choose differently.
Notice: how do you refer to yourself? What do you say to yourself throughout the day about your choices? Who are YOU, to you?
This is being the witness to the mind’s machinations. It’s exactly what is practiced in meditation, and helps us to begin to understand ourselves, and create gaps between reactivity and new choices.
The second step is to reframe our own identity to ourselves. Going back to my “I’m much too busy for peace,” what if instead I started to think of myself as someone who chooses to pack my calendar, instead of “a person who needs to stay busy?”
WHEW. If I’m now a person who chooses to pack my calendar, that means I’m now a person who can take back the power. It’s no longer my identity to be a busy person, but a way of life I’m creating.
I can become someone who chooses to place moments of peace into my calendar, even if there are certain obligations I need to meet.
You can take this even further and reframe to believe yourself to be an identity before you’ve fully realized it.
When my mind goes off on how “I can’t find peace, I’m a person who can’t sit still,” I can replace the thought with, “At my core, I’m a peaceful person who is learning how to sit still.”
I want to mention one more thing about identity. These are all illusions we put on ourselves (again, ahamkara). At the spirit level, you are none of these things. However, we need to work with the aspects of our physical world here…
As always, I hope you relate to yourselves with love.