Meditation: Who Am I?

There are some spiritual and meditation teachers who guide almost entirely from the place of encouraging students to pose the question, "Who am I?"—or as one of my teachers Adyashanti puts it, "What am I?"—as a means of spiritual inquiry in our practice.

The question can generate a long series of spontaneous answers that can potentially peel away the layers of illusion and false identification to reveal our true nature beyond what we’ve been conditioned to believe we are.

I Am My Body

Is that so? Is the essence of who you really are different now as an adult than when you had a tiny body at birth? If you were to lose a leg or an eye, are you any less of a person? Is there any meaningful difference in your self when your body is sick and you when your body is well? Yet how many of us identify with how our body looks, how much it weighs, how old it is, which symptoms are present today?

I Am My Circumstances

By circumstances, I am referring to degrees, positions, bank balance, marital status, possessions etc. Of course, when we look at these answers closely it’s clear that even as these have an impact on our perception of satisfaction and happiness, these too are not reliable reflections of who we fully are. As our circumstances change, our underlying true nature is untouched. However, most of us continue to let our sense of self be affected by outside details.

I Am My Thoughts

Really? If we were very attentive we would see that the mind generates an endless number of thoughts, some of which are polar opposites of each other from one moment to the next. How many of our beliefs have changed over the course of our lives through experience and education? Most of our thoughts are being generated from a field of conditioning impacted by outside influences like parents, family, society, teachers, and in many cases do not hold up to honest questioning.

I Am My Emotions

By the way we get swept away and enmeshed by them, it’s clear that most of us strongly identify with the emotional undertone at any given moment. Over the course of the day, we may experience any number of emotions. Like waves on an ocean, they don’t change who we are essentially beneath the surface energetic stirrings.

So what are we? What is left when all is stripped away? Who are we without our stories and our reactions to them? Beneath the details of circumstances, thoughts and interpretations, emotions, sensations and physical state is ‘something’ that is unchanging, a presence that is unaffected by these details. This presence is pure awareness in which all moments are unfolding out of and into. This is where we rest in meditation practice.

Just for now, for this short time, can we let go of identifying with the details of the physical world and our conditioned perceptions, and choose to rest instead in spacious and free awareness to taste what we really are?

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