The Joy of Beginning to Know Who and What We Really Are

By Jan Crawford

If you happen to see me in my red bowler hat, sitting next to my walker at a bench in St. Luke’s Sanctuary Garden, you might very well perceive me as old and infirm. You might even assume I’m sad about it. But I actually feel that age is a privilege, opportunity, and accomplishment.

What follows is an elaboration of a practice I encountered many decades ago in the work of spiritual teacher Ram Dass. It has helped me to get a glimpse of a more essential, benevolent, and fundamental reality that underlies who we think or fear we are. And if we find we resist that glimpse, the practice can help us understand and work with the obstacles that arise.

To begin, give yourself a few minutes to read through the following paragraphs several times and then let your conventional mind rest as much as it can.

Then choose one of your positive, negative, or neutral identities you might be curious about. Imagine a full-body costume that you can associate with that identity. It may even be your typical everyday dress for the performance of that identity, or a cartoonish caricature of it.

Bringing your awareness to your sensations, begin to notice where your body is supported as you sit. Allow that support for your back, buttocks and legs. Take a few nice breaths. Let your eyes gently close and take a few more breaths. If your mind has difficulty allowing you to shift your awareness to your sensations, just reassure it with words like, “It’s safe just to be curious for a few minutes—I promise I’ll return to your concerns soon.”

Notice now that the costume you have chosen has a zipper that starts at the top of your skull and runs down the front of your body to the floor. When you are ready, virtually reach to the top of your head, slowly unzip, and let the costume fall gently to your feet.

While you are sensing what this feels like, notice the feeling of space inside or around you, your breath, what even a slight virtual movement is like, or whatever else is coming up for you. (You can remind yourself your costume won’t go away. You can put it right back on after a glimpse of what feelings, thoughts or sensations arise.)

In your own time, open your eyes and let yourself return to the world around you,

Everyone has a unique experience of this work. Ella, a 36-year-old woman known for her generosity, chose to explore her identity of being “A Good Person.” The costume she saw was a pair of big white angel’s wings. To her surprise, she found that they were very heavy, “a burden.” Later, laughing, she said that when she let them drop to the floor, she felt “an amazing relief” through her shoulders. Months later, Ella reported that she sensed herself lighter and no longer felt connected to some “Good Girl” identity.

Ella has clearly continued to be a generous person. However, recently she said her generosity seems to arise out of a natural place of freedom rather than via the role she felt she had to assume to survive in her early life.

Matteo, a 36-year-old man from South America, wanted to explore the sexual insecurity he named “The Frightened Boy.” This, he said, was the 12-year-old part of him that had tried so hard to cope with his parents’ divorce and with what he feared was delayed puberty.

His costume was the school uniform he wore when he was 12. Obviously emotionally moved at the end of the practice, he said, “I usually feel shame about this boy, but I felt his confusion and pain. I wanted to reassure him he would have many wonderful intimate experiences ahead of him.” And as Matteo was walking out of the session, he turned and said, “I feel lighter and taller.”

Irene is a 62-year-old woman of poise and keen intellect. Her mother died when she was quite young, leaving her with a father who was bitter and who denigrated her throughout her life. She was deeply identified with the identity that she was “The Woman Who Would Always Be Cruelly Rejected.”

In a period of silence after she had let her costume—a drab outfit she had worn in college—slip to the floor, she opened her eyes and with a lovely smile said, “I feel fresh and reborn, like a new shoot.”

I am inspired by stories like those of Ella, Matteo and Irene. I know the bravery it takes to suspend old, rigidified “knowing” for a moment and allow something utterly new to emerge. Such stories continue to show the limitless opportunities for us to learn how to allow our constructed selves to blend naturally into, and be carried by, the lifeforce.

As my personal practices evolve, I have been drawn toward meditatively inquiring into the unquestionable reality of such concepts as the separate self, happiness, time, emptiness, value and love. But that is for another time—and another level of freedom.

So if you happen to see a little old lady sitting in St. Luke’s Sanctuary Garden, don’t be surprised if she has a subtle sparkle in her eye. She may even be smiling at you.

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Jan Crawford, LCSW, SEP, is a Trauma Specialist and author of The Disorderly Soul: Aligning with the Movement of Love. She is longtime Village resident.