About I‑am-ness — 12 Ideas

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I‑am-ness — One par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing way to look at our­selves as human beings is to explore our free-flow­ing-ness ver­sus our rigidity.

My “I‑am-ness” is lim­it­ed only as I choose to lim­it myself. If I iden­ti­fy with “good/bad,” right/wrong lists, or with what oth­ers think or what oth­ers want, my “I‑am-ness” becomes a small, tight box. I must real­ize that I am not a noun. I am a verb. The ques­tion, then, is this: how much of my “I‑am-ing” will I bring into con­scious­ness, and how much will I choose to live?

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One par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing way to look at our­selves as human beings is to explore our free-flow­ing-ness ver­sus our rigidity.

As with every­thing else we’ve talked about, where you are on this scale is total­ly your choice. In oth­er words, we choose between rigid­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty.

And, equal­ly impor­tant, who I am is absolute­ly and total­ly demon­strat­ed by what I do.

There is often a vast difference between who I am and how I identify myself (who I say I am.)

While there’s no doubt that infants are born as blank slates, it’s also true that each infant has has a vast array of inborn tal­ents and abil­i­ties. Much of this mate­r­i­al is like­ly repressed, so most of us cart around piles of sub­con­scious and uncon­scious material. 

This “stuff” might be unex­plored, but it has its ways of get­ting our atten­tion. Dreams, strange inspi­ra­tions, unex­plained desires — these things have their roots in the unknown material.

Most of you know that Dar­bel­la taught grades sev­en and eight in what could be described as a mid­dle school — a school just for sev­enth and eighth-graders. Dur­ing her 30+ years at the school, two things remained the same — the kids entered as imma­ture chil­dren and exit­ed as some­what mature t(w)eens.

Even more impor­tant, all but the strongest were forced into com­pli­ance with the “teen val­ues” of the day through peer pres­sure.

It’s quite ironic. 

It’s pre­dictable that teens think they are stretch­ing their wings, rebelling against parental norms, and stand­ing on their own two feet, when all that’s real­ly hap­pen­ing is that they are exchang­ing parental rules for the stan­dards of their peers.

When you think about it, this is actually the process of all aspects of our socialization.

We get the first of it from our par­ents, the next part from our tribes (reli­gious groups, neigh­bors, rel­a­tives, etc.) and the third part from our peers. 

One researcher, Steven Pinker, sug­gests that, as far as influ­ence goes, the ratio is 10% genet­ics, 40% par­ents, and 50% peers. 

What hap­pens, and it only dif­fers in degree, is that more or less of our free­dom, our “I‑am-ness,” is locked away behind the prison walls of soci­etal norms.

The walls, the defens­es, serve a twofold pur­pose: to keep the world at bay, and to keep our­selves in check. We feel threat­ened by “the great out there,” and fear­ful of the pow­er of our own passion.

It thus seems safer to hide behind the rigid walls of our own making.

This often comes out when clients blame oth­ers for their reluc­tance to make changes. Many are the excus­es, the eva­sions, the equiv­o­ca­tions — all of which add up to a death­ly fear of liv­ing life fully.

For most, self responsible living is entirely too self responsible.

The resis­tance is twofold:

1) peo­ple resist by over-think­ing — over-ana­lyz­ing — as opposed to act­ing, and

2) peo­ple resist by tight­en­ing up their bod­ies, and through shal­low breathing. 

They thus cre­ate a per­son locked inside their own walls, some­thing Wil­helm Reich called char­ac­ter armor.

Our approach, in a sense, is to knock loud­ly on the walls. 

I’m sort of like a con­sul­tant on your home ren­o­va­tion project. I can tell you how to do it, and I will like­ly pick up the ham­mer and give you a demon­stra­tion, but the rest of the job, the hard slog­ging part, is up to you.

My refusal to do the job for you is a real problem — until you become self responsible.

For all your life, some­one has done the hard slog­ging for you. Or more like­ly, peo­ple have left you because you demand­ed that they do your work for you, and you’re still run­ning around look­ing for some­one to save you. 

At the end of the day, how­ev­er, you built the walls — and you con­formed. It does not mat­ter that you did­n’t know what you were doing.

The way through the walls is to pay attention — to your dreams, to your hopes, to your aspirations — to the things that arise from inside.

Open the door to the full pos­si­bil­i­ties of you. Explore your grow­ing edges, your pas­sions, your block­ages, the hid­den recess­es that con­tain the things you real­ly want to do and be. 

Find your­self a Body­work­er or a deep tis­sue mas­sage ther­a­pist to help you break through the char­ac­ter armor.

It’s the work of a lifetime to dismantle the walls that you have built up since you were born.

This work requires con­stant vig­i­lance, a sense of humor, and a will­ing­ness to get your hands dirty. It also requires enact­ing, in the real world, what you learn about yourself. 

It may require dras­ti­cal­ly chang­ing or leav­ing rela­tion­ships, chang­ing careers, or even mov­ing to a new loca­tion or find­ing a new com­mu­ni­ty. There is noth­ing sim­ple, easy, or quick about any of this.

What you gain in self knowing, in “I‑am-ness,” is decidedly worth the effort.

After all, walk­ing around encased in armor, bear­ing the bur­den of the walls soci­ety and you have wrapped around you, means that being in the world is very hard indeed.

With ded­i­cat­ed effort, with focus, and with the help of the com­mu­ni­ty of fel­low walk­ers, true free­dom, true relax­ation, and true depth can be yours.

It’s what the world cries for.

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Series Nav­i­ga­tion

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