I’ve been thinking lately about all the years I’ve spent working with people, and how much of that work has been centered around unraveling our fixed sense of identity. One of my ‘Gift of Presence’ students called it “a joyous unraveling.” There are an infinite number of ways that we can relate to our identity, our ego, our sense of separate self. Some people want to understand their ego, some want to improve it, some want to destroy it. And of course some people just want to dress it up and take it out.

There is a lot of controversy in spiritual circles about all this. What to do? How to proceed? Do I embrace my identity? Do I expand it, do I dissolve it? Is it real? Is it an illusion? Do I need therapy, or coaching, or meditation? Or three years in an ashram? I don’t think so.

The whole conundrum seems so much simpler to me now than it used to. I think that’s because I’ve learned to trust my own experience, and the experience of my students and friends. For me, the simple truth of the matter is this: we all get tired of ourselves! Being a separate person all the time is exhausting. That’s why it’s so hard on people when they can’t sleep. Sleep is a total release from our whole waking-state identity.

Sometimes people who come to me for coaching say, “I really need a break. I just want to get away from everything for a while.” When we look a little deeper, it usually turns out that what they are tired of is themselves. They are tired of the same thought patterns, the same habitual responses, the same conditioning. No matter how you feel about your identity, it’s a profound relief to be able to take a break from it, to rest in that place of ‘I am,’ before you add the qualification: “I am this” or “I am that.”

Somewhere, deep inside, we all know that we are more than this static and separate identity. It’s not even a matter of being spiritual. I was having lunch with a lumberjack once, who had never even heard the word ‘meditation.’ He told me about what happened on his 60th birthday. “I went to the mirror and looked at myself,” he said. “And I knew that I am not 60 years old! No way! I am the same one inside that I was when I was a child. Something has never changed. I just don’t know what to call it.”

“Who cares what you call it,” I said to him. “You’ve recognized it-that’s enough.”

I’m always asking my yoga students about this, in relation to the body. “Okay,” I say to them. “When you look at your body from the outside, it looks like a solid object. But close your eyes and hang out there awhile. What is your inner experience of your body? Does it feel fixed? Does it feel solid? And if not, what happened? Where did the static, separate feeling of your body go?”

No-one has ever answered that question, but everyone agrees that when they open to the immediate experience of the body, something is there that they had not really noticed. A sense of space, openness, aliveness, being. It’s right here, and we miss it, because we get fixated on the sense of our own identity.
That simple sense of spaciousness, of openness, of presence, is so easy to overlook, to pass on by, because our conditioned mind does not know how to value that. It feels too much like nothing, and our human training has convinced us to keep chasing after all the somethings. We sure can pile up a lot of somethings before we start to wonder about doing something different.

Sometimes we think we want so much, and all we really want is a rest from our whole identity. The following Sufi tale about this is one of my favorite teaching stories.

A long time ago there was an Emperor, celebrating a great victory in war with an enormous feast. His attendants were busily preparing the Great Hall as the evening of the feast approached. Suddenly the door of the hall slammed open, and a wild, raggedy fellow walked inside. He was old, and disheveled, and no one recognized him. His face burned with a strange radiance that made everyone there uneasy. They wanted to stop him, right where he was. Instead they just stood and watched as he strolled across the great Hall and sat down in the Emperor’s chair.

The Chief Steward drew himself up to his full height, put one hand on the sword that hung at his side, and approached the strange fellow.

“Welcome good sir,” he bowed low. “By the look of you, you have come from far away. Perhaps you do not know that you are sitting in the Emperor’s chair?”

“My good man,” came the reply. I know perfectly well where I am sitting.”

“But sir,” said the steward, “Why do you sit there? Are you a great lord?”

The old man sat back, and looked up through eyes that were unfathomable. “Not a lord,” he said. “I am greater than that.”

“Greater than a lord?” said the steward, his voice cracking. “Are you a king?”

“Not a king,” came the reply. “I am greater than that.”

“Greater than a king sir? What are you telling me? You must be an emperor!”

“No,” said the strange old man. “I am greater than that.”

“Sir,” said the chief steward. “I cannot make sense of what you are saying. You know, as well as I do, that the only one greater than the Emperor is God Himself!”

“Oh,”  the fellow replied, softly now. “Is that what you think? Well, then, I have to tell you that I am greater even than God.”

“Now sir!” came the steward’s voice, and it was sharp now, like a whip. “You’ll not be playing these games with me any longer. I don’t care what you tell me-nobody, nobody, is greater than God.”

The old man stood up, finally, and the fire in his face and body filled the Hall with a great silence. “Yes,” he said. “I am that nobody.”