So who are you? Who do you think you are?

Who do you think you are?

Before you continue reading this, you might find it interesting to stop, grab a piece of paper and pen, and make some notes on who you think you are. If someone asks you now, as I am, "who are you?" what would you answer?

Then cover it up and read this further. Just for fun. :)

So we left off last week with the knowledge that most of our stress comes from our mind being in the “wrong place” – i.e. fretting about the future, which are just thoughts about the future, or floating back to the past, which is just as insubstantial as a dream. We pick up most of our stress worrying about things that are not actually happening right now. This is why it is so useful to learn to bring our mind back into the present moment. And breathe.

Besides our mind being in the wrong place, we also pick up a lot of stress from working very hard at being who we think we are and trying to maintain the status quo. I know, that sounds a bit out there, right? But stay with me on this one :)

A lot of our stress and anxiety is caused by who we believe ourselves to be. Who we think we are. Caused by us trying to maintain our image of our Self: in meditation we call this our EGO. And when we cling to this idea of who we think we are, we are said to be “clinging to our ego”. In mediation, to stop this clinging to our ego is what people mean when they say “ let go of your ego”. It doesn’t mean we should not have an ego, but it means we should not cling to the idea we have of ourself as being concrete and permanent and the only truth because it is this which causes us to suffer.

(More about this next week, because it is a complex subject, but meanwhile a quick explanation of what our ego is.)

What is ego then?

The way we see ego in mindfulness is slightly different to psychology.

We work from the premise that no one is born with an ego. Instead, our ego, our sense of identity, the person we feel we are, is made up over time. It ends up around us like layers of an onion. And we believe this to be the truth, the only truth and nothing but the truth.

But is it really?

We feel our self as being very concrete thing, very permanent, very substantial, very real. Our opinions, our likes, dislikes and what we call our personality is very solid to us. If I ask you who you think you are, you will most likely immediately think of your name, your personality and some kind of public and private image of yourself. This is what you think of when you think of “ME”.

Or you might label yourself as a mum, a sister, a best friend. Or a job might describe you better. Or you might have a very definite personality traits that you think defines you. You might look at yourself and think I am like this. I am like that.

You might even have a condition that you carry around with you, which has become so part of you, it’s difficult to separate yourself from the condition.

We work hard on a subconscious level to maintain what we think we are in order to be happy. To maintain our ego. We surround ourselves with what we believe are things we need, good things, because we believe that feeling good makes us happy and feeling bad makes us unhappy. But if we look closely at that logic we quickly realise that this type of happiness is not lasting. And it is very subject to what's happening around us.

What’s more, when this identity or this entity called “ME” is challenged or threatened, we get uncomfortable, unhappy, even angry. Definitely stressed out.

In meditation we learn to recognize that this way of seeing ourselves as true, is not always true. And we learn to see that much of our stress comes from working hard to trying to maintain this false sense of self. So I guess we could say in meditation we learn to be ourself. To be more "me".

So in a nutshell again: Much of our problems come from our mind being in the wrong place - either being in the past or in the future, and our mindfulness practice teaches us to get back into the present.

And we also learn to recognize - really experience this in our heart - that much of the stress we experience in our mind, comes up because of what we believe our self to be.

So looking forward to sitting with you again next week.

Metta

_/\_