“Today truth is so much more than the subjectivity of this thing I call ‘me.’
Today the truth will set me free.
I have no idea who I really am, and probably never will.
And this realization, this truth, is so beautiful.
Ultimate truth goes beyond these words. What I am can never be spoken.
The light is a sword that cuts to the heart, and that heart can never be broken.”
~ Me
I’ve written many, many bios in my professional life. When I arrived here at the Hridaya Yoga Center on the Pacific coast of Mexico, I would have quickly answered this question, Who am I? by prattling off a long list of random labels.
It goes something like this.
“I’m Bex: spirit worker, energy healer, tantric yogini, sacred sexual seeker, traveling adventurer, and homebody with wanderlust. I am also a lifestyle blogger, a spooky ghost (writer), an erotica author, a sex-positive feminist, a pantheistic pagan Zen ritual priestess and a meat-eating permaculture enthusiast crunchy granola hippie with big wild dreams.”
That massive mouthful, they are all the things that I do. And I love doing them! They make up a large part of the body smashing away at this keyboard and I hope that many, if not all of them, will continue to shape my passions and aspirations throughout this lifetime. But more and more through the challenges I am facing here, through meditation and purification and the simple act of building foundational practices, I begin to realize that these things, these titles, these actions aren’t who I am at the core of my being.
Because all these things could change in an instant. Because I love this body, even though I am not defined by this body. Because I can be it and it can be me only in the fleeting moments that I am in possession of this flesh.
Tricky Questions
I started this journey into heart-centered meditation with a ten-day silent retreat. It was kind of like jumping off a diving board into a shoreless sea. (Where did that diving board come from?!?) I was confounded by the question.
I am this and I am that and I am hungry and tired and hot and sweaty. It occurred to me one afternoon as we spoke about identifying with our sensations that this is a strange construct of the English language. In the Spanish language, which I am still struggling to learn, I know enough to recognize that hunger and heat aren’t something a person is, but something a person has, a possession of the sensation.
Remembering the first time I learned about this linguistic idiosyncrasy, it occurred to me then as well how strange it is to identify one’s being, the core of who we are, with such a fleeting feeling like the rumbling of a belly or the sweat on a brow.
“I am not my hunger,” I would tell myself, as I began a slow journey several years ago to retrain my stomach and teach my body how to live well on healthy foods. Now that journey goes even further. I am not my job. I am not my passion. I am not my relationships and my desires and my hopes and my dreams.
Because I am so much more than these things. So very much more.
What Is the Answer?
Who Am I? The answer was simple. “I am.” That’s it. No labels. No definitions. No quantifications or qualifications, no separation. Simply, I am. The ways I choose to be, the ways the world shapes me, these things change and shift as time goes by, existing in a constant state of flux and flow.
But nothing can change the simple fact that somewhere in the depths of existence, there is a me that simply is. Here, in the heart of me, in the ever-present primordial muck of the Universe, I am.
~By Bex van Koot
