Dear Readers,
Last week, I was sitting in a train car watching the city pass before my eyes when suddenly, I felt a spiritual download come into my awareness. It felt like the universe was talking to me—a felt sense of words more than words themselves.
What those words said to me was:
“Don’t be such a show-off.”
I hadn’t thought of that pejorative in a long time. A “show-off” was what we called someone in middle school who liked to talk about themselves and flaunt their material stuff. I don’t think of myself as one, not particularly.
And yet, over the next few hours, it felt as if I were being internally worked by some kind of force—an invisible teacher.
When I spoke, I could hear the show-off in my words.
When I walked, I could feel the show-off in the way I moved my body.
When I went to pay for an iced tea, I saw the ring on my finger showing off as I swiped my card.
Even deeper, I could see the way my mind was constantly looking for ways to be seen and recognized and valued.
We move through life accumulating identities through our experiences. The mind is in charge of this process.
We go to a store to buy a Gucci purse and feel more Gucci after we buy it. Then the mind thinks to itself, “I am a Gucci type of person.”
We suffer a tragedy, and the mind forms an identity around being a broken person, which is one of the hardest identities to shed because there are a lot of rewards to being the broken one.
What I hadn’t seen until that afternoon was how deeply I had attached to this particular identity.
As it began to illuminate, I could see all the way back to a very young version of myself who wanted to be seen. I think most of us have some lost, little, young parts of ourselves that are hungering to be seen.
Left unattended, they sprout defense mechanisms—in my case, being a show-off.
It’s called growing up. This process of growing up is one of investigating each of the young, disenfranchised parts of ourselves with adult eyes.
As the little girl who wants to be seen dissolves into the light of my heart, she no longer needs to show off. Instead, she can turn her attention to seeing others—and letting them show off.
How beautiful to take a need to be seen and turn it into a superpower: to see.
We are moving through space and time, accumulating more and more layers of identity until we wake up. You know you are seeing through the eyes of one of your accumulated identities by the way you feel in your body.
If you are feeling anxious or angry or hopeless, you are most definitely inside of an identity. If you are raging against something that happened to you that you wish didn’t, you are inside of an identity.
It is when we accept that all things that come to us are for us—when we accept all outcomes—then we can taste peace.
As we let the layers of identity melt like ice cubes in summer heat, something ineffable remains.
Enjoy the quench of spirit that remains.
In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia
