Who am I?

Is it possible to describe yourself without using the terms I, me or my?

If you are to embark on the journey to clearly understand who you are, one should first have an understanding of what makes you who you are. In the simplest terms, you are the result of many years of programming, or conditioning as some call it.

The conditioning starts from the beliefs of our family, and the other people around us. These beliefs are shaped by culture, gender, which has its own requirements and stigmas, life experiences and traumas, peer influence, national beliefs and ideology, and of course religion, to name a few.

All these influences dictate the direction of our thoughts, and lives. Where does this leave us? When one looks at all the influences that affect our everyday thoughts and decisions, one has to wonder who am I exactly?

So, with all this weighing heavily upon our already struggling minds, we add another straw to the camels back with our ego esteem issues. If one looks at this with any sort of realization, one would certainly see that there is very little room to actually define ones self with any clarity.

The short answer to this question is one must take a little time to think things through. It is the short answer, but there is no short or easy way to go about it. With all the influences that distract our minds, the most logical question is where does one begin?

The place to begin this search, or inquiry into “who am I,” should begin at the root level. The most basic understanding is found in our relationships with others. How are your relationships? Are they based on mutual respect and truth, or are they a mess of dysfunctional, half assed attempts to manipulate others to get what we want?

I know, the truth is often painful, yet it is most likely what is needed to pierce through the clouds of obscurity that usually keep our lives in that perfect place of comfortable procrastination. “I will deal with that later”, is our mantra, as we rush to get our morning coffee, and turn up the tunes to motivate us for the day ahead. We work or concentrate all day at our various endeavors, and then talk, or text our way home, with the tunes in the background as we rush to our next engagement.

Our busy lives leave little room to contemplate who and what we really are. It makes it very easy and convenient to find our value and identity through what we do for work or whatever happens to be our latest pastime.
What happens when these things change? Once again we “shop around” for a new identity, and if we persevere, we may find one that suits us.

This leaves the people in our lives that we have any kind of real relationship with, confused and very often alienated. So when the time comes, and it will, when the bottom falls out of our squirrel cage psychology, and we ask from a place of need, “who am I really”?

The first step is to find out how and why we make the choices and decisions that we do, and where these things come from. They are based most simply on our emotions, desires, agendas and motivations. Once we realize that this is where our decisions and choices come from, then we need to trace this line of thinking back to the things that influenced us the most in our lives, our life experiences, influences and programming.

Once we are able to get to the heart of the matter, we must start over again with our belief system. We are taught to be self centered, and self sufficient, it is the way our western culture programs us. We must recognize, understand and accept where we are coming from, if we are to expect to really begin to change.

The truth lies in community, in social interaction, in selflessness. To find and understand who we really are requires us to start over again with our concept of compassion and human relationships. Once we start to realize that our purpose is to help our neighbor, not in the light of doing something to gain, but to truly assist others in selflessness, one begins to mature and influence others to do the same.

Who am I? One of the many mature guiding lights that are needed to make a positive difference in the lives of others. That’s who you really are.