Being yourself

Filed under Notes on 22. March 2007 »

Have you ever felt exhausted from just being yourself? And by yourself, in this case, I mean the mind made personal self, the story based me. Some people have more capacity for role playing than others, but in my case, as with many others that have come to the spiritual path, I can’t keep it up for long without becoming literally exhausted. It takes so much effort for me to play along in the usually surface driven, banter infested world of the mind made self, that I’ve been forced to find a way out of it.

And I’m going to guess that since you are reading this, you are being forced to find a way out of this as well. Maybe not in the exact same way, but a common element in those that seek spiritual teaching is that their mind made selves have become too heavy for them to carry. It’s like you’re wearing a metal exoskeleton, something like a knight’s suit of armor, that you keep adding to by picking up bits of scrap and gluing them on — an ego is nothing more than a pile of concepts that you identify with, and the bigger and more complicated that pile gets the heavier it is to carry.

Good metaphor? I’m picturing everyone walking around like fully clad knights, all *clank clonk* and rusty as they drag themselves around all day long. Very much an external manifestation of what it feels like when you have a heavy sense of self, stuck in your own story and unable to move freely. Which is why it is such an amazing relief to be free of it, even if only for a moment.

When you experience a glimpse of freedom from that heavy personal self, one word to describe it is that you feel a sudden lightness. A sense of freedom that is even felt in a physical sense; in fact, it feels a lot like shedding a clunky old metal suit. All of a sudden being able to move and breathe with ease, much like a cat, or a bird, neither of which live life through a conceptual sense of self. Or like a child, which is something we can all relate to. I’ve even experienced this strange sense of feeling like I was seeing the world through the eyes of myself as a child, if that makes any sense. Almost like a flashback to a time when everything seemed new.

And although it may sound like fairy tale talk, we really can live and experience life as we did when we were children (or as if we were cats), a life in which being yourself is easy. And the key to this, or at least one way of putting it, is to become free of identification with the mind made sense of self. When you believe that your self is that bundle of thoughts in the mind, being yourself becomes hard work. But when your self is realized as the one self, God, life, source, emptiness, stillness, then being yourself is as simple as breathing.