Forgetting to Be Yourself

By Jan Crawford

Have you ever had the pleasure of singing or chanting with a large group? If so, I’m wondering if at some point you noticed that your voice had blended into the other voices in such a way that you could no longer distinguish it from that one sound. If you’ve had that experience, you may have noticed that as you rested into that overall sound, there was a feeling of being of one mind with the group. And maybe you felt relief and perhaps even joy.

That blending-into-one might have occurred for you within a choir at a school, house of worship or a Taylor Swift concert, a rock rave, a football game or singing the Hallelujah Chorus with hundreds at Carnegie Hall. Or maybe that blending might have happened when you were standing on the summit of a mountain with a vista so astonishingly wide that your sense of separateness was absorbed in its grandeur and you felt freed from the bounds of yourself.

Such a moment of freedom may have occurred as you gazed into the eyes of a contented infant, especially (but not only) if that infant was yours. Assisting in the birth of his child, a client in therapy with me recently described the experience as “divine” and that he felt a direct connection to the lifeforce in those moments. If you’re an animal lover, you may know how the bond with a beloved pet can let you step past your familiar self. Or you may have experienced such connection in a moment of beginning to trust that you were truly loved by someone whose love you deeply desired.

Though we might not recognize it, in these and many other moments in daily life we relax into our true nature and are freed from the exhausting job of defending or promoting our conditioned self. One might even call this falling effortlessly into the reality of one expansive mind a form of “everyday enlightenment.”

And aspects of this everyday enlightenment may not be exclusively a human capacity. I am, for example, fascinated by bird murmurations. If you have never seen one, you might want to look up a video of murmuration flight. This mesmerizing motion occurs when very large numbers of birds, often starlings, rise and swoop and blanket the sky. The birds move together in seemingly unchoreographed undulating waves, apparently without leaders. If we are curious and open to it, we can participate in that kind of movement in graceful union with each other and with the wind, echoing inside us as an ancient memory of something we know in our own bodies.

Yet we can find it hard in our culture to recognize that union. We have been taught that the iron-cocooned self is the only thing we can trust. We have been conditioned into believing that losing control of the identification with that individual contained self, even for a moment, is a danger to be avoided. We assume that forgetting ourselves would throw us into a lonely emptiness rather than into an expansion of being that we can barely even imagine.

The most recent issue of National Geographic, Your Brain, reinforces that conditioning. “The brain should need no introduction,” it begins, “After all, the brain is what makes you you.” However, based on many years of studying my mind in meditation, I believe National Geographic’s declaration is probably true on one level and sadly reductive on another. What has become clearer to me over time is that swe are not our minds. However, our relationship to our minds is our most important relationship.

If we observe them over time, compassion toward our minds can naturally arise in us, as we begin to appreciate that our minds sincerely want to help us. However, they have had to adopt coping mechanisms developed when we were very young and possessed of few resources, often while facing overwhelming events or conditions. While those coping mechanisms may have even helped at the time, the automatic reactions now are inadequate or even barriers to our happiness. Most significantly, since early childhood our minds have been societally conditioned to believe their job is to promote and defend the separate self ─ no matter the cost.

The good news is that the quieter and less conflicted our minds become, the more at ease and present we will be to the lifeforce within and outside us. For example, I was recently watching a flock of pigeons fly over Carmine Street. I noticed I was subtly experiencing the flock’s movements in my body. I felt the effort of their flight as a subtle contraction in my shoulders and arms. Soaring and diving as they surrendered to the wind, I then noticed both sensations, a deep breath and relaxation of my whole body. I feel that the loosening of my identification with the concept of being human allowed this lovely connection to occur.

Practices like meditation, prayer or some somatic approaches can help quiet the mind so that we can increasingly enjoy many more of the beautiful, ordinary and perhaps even extraordinary experiences of daily life. Those experiences connect us, allowing us to sing a song with others yet in a single voice, and give us moments of being one inclusive flock. And it is within that deepening silence of the mind that what we are becomes clearer and clearer.