Redefining Self

After a meditation session that left me with an epiphany this morning, I find myself examining the very things that define Me.

In retrospect, the epiphany feels a bit like a “duh” moment: I very suddenly realized that a core belief, for lack of a better word, that has always been a part of me (but I knew wasn’t normal, or at least, common) was due to something that happened in my childhood.  It seems obvious now to link the two together, but I just had never done it before.  It was a very simple thing; a very essential thing.  It kind of turned my concept of self over on its side for me to get a good, long look at the undercarriage.

When such a basic thing is examined thusly, you begin to question everything else.  If this central item can be changed, what can’t be changed?

That’s the “rabbit hole” I find myself in this morning.  Taking a good, long look at seemingly fixed aspects and seeing if they, too, can’t be shifted around and examined, and if warranted, changed.  I’m not even sure that I’m going to change the original concept that was the subject of the epiphany this morning, but now I at least know it’s possible.

As a general rule, I like to think of myself as open to change, discussion, and debate.  I have in the past changed my stance on say, political issues or even religious issues.  I’ve never understood why it was bad for a politician to be branded a “flip-flopper”: I would rather have someone who could, when presented with new information, change their mind and/or admit they were wrong, where warranted.  Being a stubborn idiot in the face of contrasting evidence, to me, is not a leadership skill.

But like anyone, I guess, there were certain things central to my definition of Self that I had always just accepted, and not really inspected closely.  They always felt like immovable objects, unchangeable facts.  They felt as unquestionable as, say, my race or the fact that my first language is English.  I can learn all the other languages I want to, but my native tongue will always be English: that’s just the way it is.

To discover that these assumptions about Self aren’t always as immoveable as they may seem is rather… weight-lifting.  In the sense that, I needn’t burden myself with them anymore if I don’t want to.  I’m purging on so many levels in my life, it’s ridiculous (in a wonderful way); I had no idea it could go even deeper than it already had.  But of course, it makes perfect sense now that it did: I find myself opening up to the idea that we are more than the sum total of our experiences here on Earth in this lifetime.  We are Spirit.  We are so much bigger and greater and more amazing than we can possibly frame in terms we can relate to.  It’s like mathematicians trying to explain to the rest of us the idea of some insane number like 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  What frame of reference can we possibly use to understand the scope of a quantity that large?

I have been limiting myself by thinking of myself in such small terms.  We all do.  I, the wild-imagination, über-verbose writer chick do not have sufficient vocabulary to describe what we are.  No language on Earth has the capacity to do so.  When we open our minds to the larger existence, we are still only seeing a sliver of the true potential of life.

So, join me.  Reexamine the very basic tenets of Who You Are.  Question the ones that seem unquestionable.  Turn over the ones that seem immoveable.  And maybe we’ll begin to understand, at least a tiny bit, what Self truly Is.