The Essence of Identity

I have just returned from a six week trip down memory lane. That wasn't exactly my intention, but that is the way it played out. Five years ago we moved thousands of miles from our friends and family in the Northeast to Sedona, and while we have visited, its not been for such an extended period of time. There is something interesting that happens when you return to your past. I felt like many of the new neural pathways that have been created in the past 5 years faded into the background and the old ones started to re-emerge. Eating habits, walking routes, conversations, worries, old voices in my head from decades ago were back again. I can see how some of my new neural pathways are strong, I still found time to meditate daily and practice some yoga regularly because my body was calling for it. But I found myself wondering how much of my daily existence is tied to my environment.

One of my favorite meditations is "Calling Your Own Name". Our names are a trigger for self identification. If I am in a crowded place and hear someone call Marianne, I will turn around because I assume someone is looking for me. It may be a different MaryAnn or MaryAnne or Mariann… but when I hear it I will identify with it. In this meditation you imagine yourself standing at the edge of a forest with an open field in front of you. You begin to identify the different aspects of your self: child, friend, student, alumnae, economist, mathematician, environmentalist, actuary, engineer, professor, project manager, executive, mother, career women, bereaved parent, yogi, business owner, vegetarian, pescatarian, potter, hiker, traveler, reader, writer etc. etc. As you call each aspect of yourself you imagine them coming out of the forest to form a circle around the edge of the field and joining hands. With each breath, you imagine each one taking a step deeper in to the center of the circle, until they finally merge together. That commonality amongst all of them is your essence, your soul. The labels are no longer important, only that common essence is true. The rest is a set of behaviors you find your self acting out in order to meet others expectations of that role.

When we moved to Sedona in 2020 my dominate persona was bereaved parent. Everything that I thought I knew and cared about had crumbled. Here I was able to just be with my husband and son. To hike in awe inspiring nature where I felt close to Hilary's spirit. The corner office, the annual bonus, the double booked meeting calendar held absolutely no meaning for me any longer. When a year later the opportunity to lead Village Yoga Sedona came to me there was no doubt in my mind it was the right thing for me to do. It didn't matter that I had never owned a business like this, or that I hadn't finished my yoga teacher training, it was such a strong calling that I stepped right into that new role.

I remember the first time someone introduced me as a yoga studio owner. We were at a pottery show in Clarkdale at Yavapai College and a fellow potter introduced me to a friend. It sounded so odd to me. Was that how people knew me? What did that mean? What were the expectations associated with that? I was still living in the shadow of my old identities and I wasn't quite sure that this new one fit me yet. I was just trying to keep the doors open and offer a safe community for people as we were navigating coming out of COVID isolation.

When I practice the Calling Your Own Name meditation I can see overlap in many of my personas. It sheds light on the relationships and activities that I feel called to foster and those that no longer fit. There are threads of a common truth connecting the creation of community, nurturing health, supporting clean environments and they are compassion, appreciation, respect, sufficiency and love. What I love about my time as "yoga studio owner" is that it has given me a new lens to view the world. Through the diverse perspectives of all of the people who have come through the doors in the past four years I have gotten to see things differently, and have come to know myself differently. And now its time to shed that identify and continue to find myself in the synthesis.