Who Am I?

Philosophers have been pondering the question of who I am for a long time. And if you don’t know, you will have a hard time loving and being loved, feeling a sense of belonging, and feeling that your life has meaning. You may suffer from imposter syndrome and die without every having lived.

And ultimately, I think that’s what we all came here to do - live. We’re born perfect, connected, whole, and the society begins conditioning us to fall asleep- and before we know it, we’ve lost all sense of identity.

Well, I’m going to tell you who I think you are today and how to rediscover that for yourself. I am not saying this is the only answer or the only way, but it’s the path that I am following, and if it resonates with you, I invite you to join me.

And on that note, if you like the podcast, please review and subscribe it as that’s a way you can give me a virtual high five and say thanks. Thank you!

Alright, I just made a pretty big claim. Smarter people than me have made a life of contemplating who they are, but I think the reason why they might not ever get there is that they just overdid the thinking thing. Most of us want the big questions to have big answers, and I think most things in life are really simple and easy. They are so simple and easy that we can’t accept them.

In fact, that’s been a huge problem that I’ve had my whole life. I will tell someone something, and they dismiss it because it’s too easy and simple. I’m like Cassandra, so I am learning how to complicate it up so that people can follow me. 

But let me give you the easy version first. The answer to who are you is the same for who am I? I am the universe expressing itself in this body, at this time, in this place. That’s it. You, too.

Now let’s make that more complicated, alright? Here are just a couple of examples. If you look at the calendar and the earth’s rotation around the Sun, we have 12 months. We also have 12 major energy channels in the human body. We have 365 days in a year, and in the original, Yellow Emperor style of Chinese medicine, there are 365 acupuncture points in the body as well. The body is a miniature of the universe, so basically I am that. That is me.

Whatever is inside is outside. The outside impacts the inside and the inside impacts the outside. If you think about it that way, your life is incredibly important. You play a vital role in the creation of reality and impact the future in ways you may be very unaware of, right? So, it’s vitally important that you not fall asleep so you can live your wildly authentic and vibrant life.

So, let’s get super simple again. If you want to know who you are, just let go of all the things you are not. If you want to do that, you have to learn how to be super honest and embrace radical integrity. 

You knew who you were the day you were born. Thoreau expressed this beautifully when he said in Walden Pond, "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”

Return to your childlike innocence before you were put under the obligation to think, feel, and behave a certain way, before advertising taught you to want certain things and to look a certain way. You were perfect the day you were born, just like the many trees in my back yard. Mama tree doesn’t say to baby tree, “You have to grow up to look like this.” Mama squirrel doesn’t say to baby squirrel, “Puff up your tail. I don’t want the other squirrels laughing at you.” The only animals with self-esteem issues are those who live with humans.

So, what I am saying is let go of the things you think you are supposed to be. This kind of stuff happens because humans live in societies and our parents want us to belong, so they teach us ways to conform. That’s actually adaptive and helpful, but only to a point. When society is so judgmental that we lose face if we don’t look a certain way or perform to a certain standard, you can get the high levels of shame, perfectionism, plastic surgery, youth-obsession, and suicide that you see in some societies. That’s no longer connecting and helpful. It’s become pathological.

So, things like being polite to your host and practicing reciprocity are pro-social ways of conforming, but judgment and obligation are not. If you are looking for things to let go of, judgment and obligation are at my top. I didn’t come in with that and don’t want to carry that. 

Other things to let go of are roles. I can take on roles and put down roles. These do not define me, and yet for some people, that’s not true. I used to be a dancer and in the dance community, lots of people were dancers. They were not people who danced. So, if they got a bad review or didn’t get a job, they were devastated. They took it personally. It was a rejection of them as a person. So, I’d be careful of how you define yourself. 

A squirrel isn't a hut hoarder. He’s a squirrel.

Another thing to let go of are the things that happened to you. How many people do you know who say they are rape survivors or adult children of alcoholics? That’s not who you are. It’s what happened to you. I get it. Labels help us to communicate a lot of information in a tiny little word or phrase. They are convenient, but they are also limiting and usually diminishing because they cloak us in shame.

If I survived sex trafficking or fleeing a war zone, that isn’t my identity. The things that happen around me or to me aren’t me. This is a really important thing to understand because so much of learned helplessness happens in this way. Something horrible happens to us. We feel powerless, and then we learn that we have no power, so we stop trying. We stop having thoughts, feelings, desires, and goals because we feel that outside forces control us. We have no agency.

It’s like the baby circus elephant. The trainers stake it to the ground. It struggles and tries this way and that to free itself, but it can’t. So it does what any smart animal would do. It stops trying. When it grows up and is big and strong enough to break through the toughest stake, all it takes is a tiny peg to keep it secured because it believes it has no power and can’t make a difference.

This is the plight of many people who have suffered abuse, criticism, and lived through harrowing circumstances. It’s such an easy thing to crush a person in this way. It almost happened to me.

I was taking some kind of intelligence test or personality test. I was shown these objects or numbers. They all had some logical pattern, and I had to pick the thing that was next in the sequence. Well, the first couple were easy. Then I hit a patch that had no rhyme or reason to them. I found myself getting frustrated, and I just picked anything. I was tempted to hit random answers and just skip that whole section, but then the easier ones popped up again. Had I not been paying attention, it would have been easy to call myself a dunce and call it a day.

So be careful of setbacks like this. They aren’t a reflection of you. You aren’t what happened to you. 

Another thing to let go of is diagnoses. We don’t tend to say I am cancer. We say “I have cancer” but how many people with a mental illness say, “I am depressed?” or “I am bipolar?” You’re not depressed or bipolar. You have depression or bipolar. This is really important because it’s easy to let go of a condition. It’s not easy to let go of our identity.

I have had many clients over the years who could not heal because their diagnosis was their identity. It wasn’t that they couldn’t heal. It was that they didn’t know who they’d be without that label as their identity. One lady was doing great. She’d met all her therapeutic goals. She didn’t have any symptoms anymore. This was a huge deal because she had been in counseling for most of her life, but the moment I started talking about discharging her, she relapsed. 

She had no concept of who she would be if she was not on disability, not the victim, and not besieged by doctor's appointments and ailments. She just had no self-concept that would support that. So be careful of your “I am” statements. 

Another thing to let go of are your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. I am surprised by how many people don’t know this. Your thoughts are a reflection of your life so far. They are limited by your experiences, so they are far smaller than you are. Your thoughts are also a reflection of what you have seen and heard, so they are absolutely subjective. 

If you find yourself stumbling over your word as you talk to a pretty girl, you might say, “I’m a loser.” AH! Remember I said to watch out for that. That’s an “I am” statement and can become your identity, but really, it’s just a thought. It’s not reality. 

The same is true if my “I am” statement is super positive. I could ace a test and think “I am hot!” and that’s just as bogus as I’m a loser. I’m neither one of those things. In the first instance, I wasn’t as articulate as I had hoped to be. In the second, I did a great job on a test. Neither has anything to do with who I am. I am the universe. In the big scheme of things, I am far more amazing than I have given myself credit for.

If I am not my thoughts, I am certainly not other people’s thoughts. I someone breaks up with me and tells me I am the worst partner ever, whether they meant it or not, I don’t have to own that. I may want to look at the details to see if there is any truth to how my behaviors negatively impacted that person or myself. I want to improve, so I’m not saying dismiss the words out of hand. I am saying don’t let it be the way that I define myself.

The same is true about positive things. How many famous singers or actors do you know who are so adored that they move from being a normal person to someone who loses all touch with reality? They are demanding a private jet and rooms for their twelve person entourage, including a chef and hair dresser. I don’t really know what kinds of things that divas ask for, but you get the idea. I don’t begrudge anyone anything that they want that they can afford. I’m just saying if you are so far out of touch with the average man, you’re not all that connected with reality.

I mean, that was the call to adventure that set the Buddha upon his life path that led to him becoming the Buddha. He was brought up in wealth and comfort and shielded from religious teachings and human suffering to prepare him to be king. Then one day when he was 29, he wanted to see his people and left the palace. He saw an old man for the first time, and his charioteer explained that all people get old. 

This was a revelation. He was curious and wanted to know more, so he went out again to see more people. He saw a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and an ascetic. He was inspired to overcome aging, sickness, and death by living the life of an ascetic. 

So he left his wife, son, and the palace life behind him and studied with two yogis. He learned all he could from them. Both asked him to succeed them, and both were refused. He was not satisfied, and went to study with another teacher. This time he went more austere and renounced worldly goods, food, and practiced mortification of the flesh. When he was nearly starved, he collapsed and almost drowned. A village girl gave him some rice pudding and helped him get back on his feet. 

Then he began to reconsider his path. He remembered as a child watching his father plow. He was in such a mindful state that he felt blissful and refreshed. He realized that extremes are not the way to bliss or to discover his true nature. It was through mindfulness. In the practice of mindfulness, he saw that birth, life, death, and decay are cycles. They cannot be eradicated. Everything creates cause and effect. Everything from the sun to the smallest speck of dust is connected. And after 49 days of meditation, he experienced the Oneness of all things, experienced the past, present, and future all at the same time, and the ultimate truth of “I am” and became awake.

I’m not a Buddhist, but this is what I’m talking about. Truth is truth no matter whether we find it in a Buddhist story, whether it comes from Chinese medicine, animism or Hermeticism. It’s in all those places because truth is observed by all people throughout time.

Now another thing that you are not is your emotions. Lots of people are confused about this as well because they think that their emotions are a reflection of the truth. So, if I feel guilty, I must have done something wrong. If I feel afraid, then you must be terrifying or bad. If I am embarrassed, I must be a laughingstock or something like that.

No. Emotions are a reflection of our thoughts, and our thoughts could be so wrong for so many reasons. Let’s walk through this. Okay, let’s say that I am out at the grocery store and my car doesn’t start. If my next thought is, “I’m stranded, helpless, and I don’t know what to do!” My emotion is probably going to be something like panic, right? And maybe I will have a break down. If my next thought is, “My brother will know what to do” I might feel some anxiety, but panic is a long way off. Lots of things would have to go wrong before I go there. 

If my car doesn’t start and my next thought is, “Oh, jeez. I knew my battery was going bad. I thought I had more time. Good thing I have some jumper cables. Let me see if someone will give me a jump.” I probably am not feeling particularly emotional at all, right. I’m handling it. There is nothing to be emotional about.

So, our emotions are definitely not a reflection of the truth. They totally depend upon our intellectual interpretation of events, and are highly suspect. 

But what do we do? Lots of us have learned that feeling anything that isn’t joyous- and sometimes that too if we are too demonstrative- is not a good thing. So we learn to push it down, ignore it, deny it, and do whatever we have to do to feel it. That’s not true. That’s not living. 

Pushing it away is denying this moment. It’s not allowing this moment to be as it is. So the more effective thing to do is to learn how to effectively process emotions so they can be felt in a way that is tolerable. Another thing you may want to learn is what emotions mean. They are all signals for your internal environment, and if you know what an emotion is saying, you can respond in a healthy, useful way.

For example, if I’m experiencing fear and it means “Watch out” then I probably need to back up and get out of that situation, right? If I turn off my warning light, I could be in big danger. That’s an easy one, but all emotions are trying to communicate something useful. 

So, if you are not what you are supposed to be, not your diagnoses, not what happened to you, your thoughts, other people’s thoughts, and not your emotions, what are you? Let’s pause for a second and see how that feels in your body. Listen to how your body responds when we take all those crutches away. Are you feeling a little nervous? That’s what stripping away all the garbage feels like. It feels a bit naked, doesn’t it?

I hope you are interpreting that as a little excitement at getting closer to what it feels like to be all that. I mean, the mini reflection of the universe is no small thing.

Your job while you are here is to have fun. Why? Let’s take it back to nature. In Chinese medicine, the heart is the energy of joy. It is the master control or Emperor of all the other systems. If the heart is happy, you’re happy, healthy, and in balance. If you have mania, which is excessive joy, depression, anxiety, sensory disorders, or processing issues, your heart is out of balance.

The way to become balanced is through eating the right foods, practicing healthy habits, living in alignment with nature, and being in alignment with your true self because you, of course, are nature. I think a lot of people think that happiness and health is just about finding out who they are and then doing that thing or being that person. No, you are the universe! 

And the universe has to follow natural laws just like you do. A bear who decides she’s unique and doesn’t want to hibernate is going to die because there is nothing to eat in the winter. Hibernation is a survival strategy. When people light up the night for our safety and convenience, we mess with nocturnal animals’ ability to self regulate. For instance, if you have an electric light at a cave entrance that is occupied by nocturnal bats, they will move away from it and may not enter the cave. They do this because light makes them easier to see, so they are prey for owls and other animals. 

Back in the day, people had to pay attention to the Moon cycles and the seasons because life depended upon it. Life is so convenient now for humans that we can override these things. Our survival doesn’t depend on connection to other humans or nature, so we tune nature out. We hide what is not convenient or comfortable and shove all kinds of things in the basement in shadow. 

Meanwhile, life is truth. And the truth of what’s in the basement can’t be denied. It is us. So it screams at inopportune times or creates roadblocks for us that stymie us. We get into arguments and say things that we don’t mean, meanwhile there is a little devil sitting on our shoulder who does mean it. Or we are putting all our efforts into getting into physical shape, or getting that job, or getting that long term partner, but we’re spinning our wheels.

That’s Shadow stuff at work. There is something there, that is not our true selves, that is jamming us up and making our heart not happy.

Don’t forget who you are! You are the universe expressing itself in this body, in this time, and in this place. That means you are everything. Everything is you. There is nothing that is not you. If you can love, you can feel indifference. If there is good, there must be bad. If there is peace, there must be war. It’s all inside. It doesn’t have to express itself, but it’s in there.

Denying it is denying yourself. so the best thing you can do is accept it. Come to grips with it, and learn to wield the power you have responsibly. All emotions have a positive purpose. Anger, fear, disgust, and sadness are protectors. It would be hard to survive without them. If all you felt was peace and love, you’re probably going to make a tasty morsel for someone who is rough and tough. 

So get to know your nature. Get in tune with the seasons. Follow the seasons. Don’t plant seeds in poor soil or in the wrong season or they won’t grow! Investing your love in someone who doesn’t have the time, interest, compatibility, or emotional stability to return it isn’t a great use of your time. 

Everyone is worthy and lovable, but for everything there is a season, and it’s not their season.

When it’s time to die, let go completely. And part of letting go is forgiving. It’s about letting go of everything - your expectations, disappointments, hopes that it could be different, resentment, all of it. Too many people leave relationships, but they are still emotionally attached through their resentments.

I was in a high conflict relationship once, and I thought it was all him. I am a pretty easy to get along with, and couldn’t possibly believe that I had any part in maintaining the conflict. I was blaming it all on him. He was making unreasonable requests. He kept reaching out to me, but once I clued into the fact that it takes two to tango and that I was holding up my own healing by engaging with his nonsense and then being resentful about it, I just let go. Winning, being right, being heard, or being fair wasn’t worth my peace of mind. I let him have all that in exchange for my peace. I do not regret that and would make that choice a thousand times. What I gained was worth far more than I could have gained fighting for being right. 

Too many people want to hold on to something because they think that growth happens in a straight line. It doesn’t. Dying is part of the process. You can’t make a beeline straight to the top because life moves in a circle. Failure, decline, and setbacks are part of the process.

So when it’s time to die, die completely. If there is anything but joy left, you’re not there yet.

When it’s time to renew and rebirth, don’t sit it out on the sidelines because you’re too hurt to try again. That’s just you getting stuck in the death spiral.

As your wonderful universe, powerful self, you are beholden to nature’s cycles. When it’s time to go, you have to go. Birth is a struggle. Making it to maturity is a struggle. Accept it. We’re all going to peak and decline. You can’t stay young forever, but if you look forward to a new phase of life, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

And you can still be a healthy, spunky, sexy older person. You don’t have to be anyone’s version of older that isn’t authentic to you.

Aging is only one aspect of the wheel of life and natural law. If you are familiar with it, you will always have a way to guide you no matter where you are. But there is something you should be aware of that might hang you up.

That is that our eyes focus outward. We can’t see ourselves. We can only see reflections, so we look for visions of ourselves in tangible things like awards and money, and whether someone likes us. If those reflections are joyous, we can feel good about who we are. We might think that we are kind, funny, and connected, but that might be an illusion.

Have you ever felt at the top of your game only to feel super empty inside? I haven’t had that experience exactly, but I was in a place once where I had all I could ask for and more. All around every day was beauty. Every day was sunny, bright, and the perfect temperature. My surroundings were comfortable and lovely. I had everything I needed, and it was awesome at first, and then I started to get bored. I wanted it to be different.

I didn’t want anything bad to happen, but I wanted to feel challenged. I wanted to feel like I had something to do that mattered and to feel I had a purpose. 

That’s why we have cycles. They keep us entertained and fighting fit. There are only so many bon bons one can eat without becoming sick and only so many times you can ride a rollercoaster without becoming bored. The world is full of lovely and really ugly things, light and dark, and to be whole is to engage with it all. And if you don’t choose your own adventure, one will find you.

So look to the wheel of life. Let it inform your footsteps. Look to see what stage of life you are in and ask yourself what’s appropriate for that time. Or look to the seasons, the lunar cycle, the aspects of mind, body, spirit, emotion, and spirit. Perhaps that can help you find a challenge or balance. Look outside your window. What’s happening outside is happening inside. How? How can you engage with that? 

You are all that. The night sky, the ocean, the acorns that have fallen to the ground, and the wind that you can’t see. How can you express that? 

If you’re feeling trapped in a job or a relationship or feeling that you’re not enough, you’re not thinking big enough. You’re thinking within the limitations of your human existence. Humans stand between heaven and earth. We are both. The demands of our physical existence are real, but don’t forget your amazing divinity, your power as a co-creator of reality.

Does it sound like living up to that is a daunting task? Don’t worry. That’s what the Let It Go Now community is about. I’m here to help you create that firm foundation so it’s safe to let go, explore the sassy little super human inside of you, and give you opportunities to let it come out and play so you can rehearse what it’s ‘like to live in your amazing fullness before you bring that side of you into the real world where others can enjoy it.

You’re here to have an adventure. If you are your most intoxicating self, and I am my most radiant self, imagine how we can light up the world. Since we’re all going to leave a legacy of some sort, wouldn’t you prefer it to be that rather than more intergenerational garbage? Yeah, me too. So join me in the Let It Go Now community and let’s play our way to greatness and make our hearts happy. We’re at letitgonow.org. Hope to see you over there. 

Oh, and if you just want a sneak peek at what the whole let it go thing can be like, I offer a free monthly meetup where you can check it out. Sometimes I work with a couple of people, sometimes I help the whole group, but it’s much easier to explain what I do by seeing than using words. My techniques are body based and emotion based, so they don’t translate well into words. Symbol and metaphor are the language of spirit and energy, so it’s easier to just experience it. If you sign up for my newsletter, you will get notified about all events or just go to my website at lauragiles.org and click the events tab to see what’s coming.

One more thing about the whole eyes looking outward thing and who you are. I only exist because you see me. You only exist because I see you. It’s that Yin and Yang thing again. We see this idea expressed in the Zulu language. It’s the concept of Ubuntu. Instead of saying something like hello or good morning, they say, “I am here to be seen” and the other person replies, “I see you.” Then the one who said “I see you” says, “I am here to be seen” and the other replies, “I see you.”

We cannot and do not exist without each other. We have no identity without each other.  You are not you without me. I am not me without you. “I am here to be seen” is a way of throwing off the mask, declaring that you’re going to show up in this moment and be real and true.

“I see you” is a way of saying that I am willing to let go of the past and be here with you  now. I release any preconceived notions and meet you with the respect of an equal. That’s the place we are striving to occupy every day at the Let It Go Now community and I hope you will join us there. 

Thanks for being with me today! I see you next week. Ciao.