The Chains of Identity

The greatest prisons are not made of stone, steel, and sharp wire.

Our sense of “I am” and the web weaves into how we identify ourselves and our lives, can be a prison, a war room, and our keys to freedom.

How we know ourselves can be our great source of struggle, strife, and suffering.

How we know ourselves can be our great source of peace, freedom, and experience of aliveness.

This isn’t a message of devoting decades to ‘know thyself’.

It’s an invitation to see how you know yourself to be today.

And how thick and wide does the web of “I am this” weave in a way that limits/supports your life and the lives around you?

Whether looking at the identity label of…

“I am a father”

“I am a mother”

To….

“I am worthless/worthy”

Each offers a specific entry point to see and feel how the quality of those statements influences your life.

Each offers an entry point to see the qualities of those labels for yourself, their associations, and the emotions that keep them bound (fear, guilt, anger, love, joy, acceptance).

It seems that, in life, we limit ourselves to the identity we wear called ‘me’. Each label, perception, and association bound together is what we call ‘our life’.

Even though the identity weaves into the fabric of what we call ‘me’, real, true, false, right, wrong, good, bad, possible, impossible, and more…. the view is not offering a lens into some objective reality.

At best, chosen labels and associations support a life lived well for yourself and others. At worst, they create your ongoing experience of a nightmare that never seems to end.

Whether you experience extremes of what one might call ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the labels and associations that create a sense of ‘me’, are there.

The primary question is do you see how you create your own experience of what you are and what life is?

Thank you for reading.

Be well,

Matthew