Re-conceiving our Self, Re-creating our World

 “ Who am I?” This is one of the ultimate questions, one which we humans love to ponder. It is a question that can lead us down many winding paths, into many different costumes and roles, onto many different answers. I think of myself and my peers as teenagers, trying out new looks, new words, new attitudes, to find one that feels like it fits. Our sense of self can limit us immensely, or set us free to fly high and joyfully far. The human tendency to ask the question “ who am I ?” has, over the past few decades, fueled our media driven consumer society, pushed us down the path of hyper-individuality, and in turn consumed us and blinded us to more pressing matters (such as our ability to survive on this planet). This is one of those distracting cultural stories I spoke of earlier, in a recent post.We have become enraptured by all the answers given to us by consumer society, and we often forget to seek a deeper answer. When we ask the question “who am I?” truly of ourselves, and refuse to take someone else’s answer as truth, we may find powers available to us that we didn’t know we had. How we answer this question can determine our actions, and how we treat the world we live in. So clearly this question of identity can help us on our quest of creating a better world for ourselves.

What is your identity? Who are you? What part of you is the “ you”? We can look to answer this question via culture, biology, religion, spirituality, psychology, quantum physics, philosophy, and so on. One answer may actually be that we are many selves. We are our careers.We are our bodies, our finger nails, our eyes, our smile.We are the personality– the “small s” self– and also the “Higher Self” We are atoms. We are light. But are we only these things? Where do we end? This is a concept that stirs me. Where do we define our limits? Do I stop at the water I just drank? If the water is now me, is the well also me? Is my skin my boundary, or do I draw the boundary to include the food I eat, the air I breath, the land that harbors me, the hand that holds mine, the mother that birthed me, the child I birthed in turn? Buddhists recognize the concept of self as a human construct-they just see through it. It is a metaphor.We can put lines around our “self” and say that “ I end here”, but where we start and end is just a concept for us to understand ourselves by; it is a tool of perception. “ We can define it however we want, the definitions are arbitrary.” (Macy) If we want to live in a better world we need to look beyond the answer to the question of identity given to us by our culture.We need to find deeper answers. We need to re-conceive our “self”. We can do so with our very own eyes and minds and hearts, and the help of a couple of concepts.



“We are our relationships.”
You are your relationships. You are nothing without relationships. Literally. Everything about you is in relationship to something or someone else. Your atoms cannot make up your cells alone. They need friends. And your cells cannot make up your muscles without other cells. You would not be you without your mother or father. That relationship, or lack of it, created who you are today. Same with your friends. Everything you have come in to contact with–had relationship with on any level, however small– shaped you. You cannot separate yourself from your relationships. And thus, “ As you do unto others, so you therefore, do unto yourself. ( Thank you to Charles Eisenstein for smoothly articulating this resonant concept!)



The Ecological self
Growing up, I never really got the whole “we are One” stuff. Not only did it seem a little hokey to my adolescent self, I also just really couldn’t understand it. No small momentary glimpses of understanding penetrated, not through studying Buddhism and Hinduism in college, nor later meditating in groups or solo.The idea sounded good, but I just felt like me. I didn’t feel like I was everyone else, everything else outside my skin. But it began to click in when I truly comprehended the direness of our planet’s ecological state. It wasn’t a dramatic moment, rather a slow revealing from the world, and a growing willingness to look on my part. It was when I really allowed myself to understand the truth of our predicament– only then was I able to begin to feel that I was truly one with all life. Because when the earth that feeds me flounders and fails, than I , undoubtably, flounder and fail. There is no way around it. I’m in the earth and the earth’s in me. I am the earth and the earth is me. I know this not as some hypothetical woo-woo idea. It is more literal than most anything I can think of. Arne Naess, the father of the Deep Ecology movement, coined the term “ecological self” for this very knowing. My own self-interest lead me to understand, in my bones, that I am not just me. There is a larger me, a whole world of me–a whole universe, even, of me. Talk about Deep ( or broad).When you draw the boundaries of your identity to include the planet that is your very life, that is your “ecological self”. And it really is your “self” I am talking about here. It is in your self-interest that there is clean air to breath and clean water to drink. Naess talked about a natural process of maturation leading to wider and wider circles of identification, from ego to social self, metaphysical self, and ecological self. This is what I began to feel, and have continued to deepen into, as I grow to understand– both intellectually and emotionally/spiritually– the fragility and magic of life.This is a deepening process, and a broadening one. John Seed, an Australian activist, writes about this shift in sense of self as a spiritual one: “ ‘I am protecting the rainforest’ develops into ‘I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking.” (Thinking Like a Mountain, pg 36)

The above concepts are myth-busters for the powerful paralyzing western cultural assumption of “We are separate.” As Derrick Jensen says," We identify more readily as ' civilized' than we do as ' living being'. " This is a misunderstanding that prevents us from knowing our true selves, and keeps us from creating a better world.  But when we begin to grasp the ideas and feelings of “ I am my relationships” and the “ ecological self” healing and empowerment occurs. As John Seed writes: “Alienation subsides. The human is no longer a stranger, apart. Your humanness is recognized as merely the most recent stage of your existence. . .As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and your commitment to them.” (Beyond Anthropocentrism,TLM, pg 35-36) Out of this comes more joy, more meaning. I know this to be true. My desire to be of service to the world grew tenfold, or more, as these concepts penetrated and worked their magic on my consciousness. As Arne Naess put it:



“ What humankind is capable of loving from mere moral duty or moral exhortation is, unfortunately, very limited. . . The extensive moralizing within the ecological movement has given the public the false impression that they are primarily asked to sacrifice, to show more responsibility, more concern, and better morals....[But] the requisite care flows naturally if the self is widened and deepened so that protection of free nature is felt and conceived of as protection of our very selves.” (Coming back to Life, Macy and Brown, pg 47)

Not only are we more motivated and energized to work for the benefit of life on earth, but we also enjoy a depth to our love of life that is surprising. No longer are we easily blinded and distracted by the hyper-individualistic desire to buy more, preen more, and waste our energy on the impossible striving for perfection. For we sense we are perfect already, as nature is perfect and awe-inspiring and miraculously powerful. And we realize, as our larger self is able, our own ability to weave life into new and more suitable forms.

Gratitude with Attitude: the Radical Act of Being Thankful

These early October days I keep looking around me at the colors, the vividness of life just out my doorstep. I wake up each day to color, to green, red, orange, yellow. To swaying limb and sailing cloud. To sunrise, and blue jay call. I see it all, and for a brief moment I am alive with the feeling of joy and thankfulness for all that I am and see and feel. And then, from downstairs, I hear my 4 year old yell, my toddler cry, my husband saying, “Stop!” in a loud voice. And I am brought back to the rigors of my day. My gratitude is replaced by more mundane or difficult feelings. And life goes on.But I am better for that moment of thanks, for it sustains me, helps me move a little more fluidly through the whining, the spills, the chaos of life as the mother of two young, loud boys.


I have been working to include a feeling of thanks into every day. Though it doesn’t necessarily last throughout the rest of the day, I try to notice what I am grateful for each morning. Gratitude works like a strong medicine. It is like firm ground. The energy that it brings with it can carry us through our more challenging days. Immediately, when I consciously evoke it, or it spontaneously arises, it brings me present, into this moment on this spot on earth. It shows me what I have, not what I am missing. It is so easy to focus on what it is we lack–money, quiet, time, a big house, a healthy planet. But doing so can lead us into despair, can regurgitate anger and inertia. When we recognize what we do have– beauty around us, quiet evenings, good friends, playful children– we feel a surge of joy (however small a surge in the more difficult times, but a surge nonetheless).

But feeling gratitude can do more for us than help us to have a better day. To harbor gratitude in a culture of “not enough” can be a radical act of empowerment: a rejection of the values that lead us in to destruction , and an affirmation of our very right to be alive. Entranced by the ideas of “more” and “better”, we tend to forget the basic miracle of our very lives. We are alive! We have the gift of life.We are humans, with hard bone, flexing and flexible muscle, blood like water, eyes that see, and see ourselves, voices that come out of our bodies and create meaning, and ears that hear and interpret, with minds that can make choices, and hearts that can love. In my best moments I feel that miracle, am amazed by just being alive. As Joanna Macy says, gratitude is revolutionary: it “contradicts the predominant message of the consumer society, which is ‘you’re not enough’. One of the cruelest aspects [of this society] is that it breeds profound dissatisfaction...taking from people their very birthright–to be happy in their skin...Gratitude work is liberating and subversive.”

In this time, especially, it seems hard to remember what we have, how blessed we are. We see life growing harder, we see it slipping away, and everything can feel so difficult. But when we take the time to look, to remember what we are made of and to notice the beauty that still thrives around us– be it trees, a kind gesture, a mural on a building, grass in the sidewalk crack, or the miracle of our own fingernail (thin, ridged, hard, flexible, composed of millions of cells) we feel the preciousness again, and we therefore want to fight for it. I want to fight for my fingernails’ right to live, for my babies fingernails’ right to live; I want to fight for the continued experience of hearing the sound of a violin, for the vision of a sunset, for taste of an apple. . . Gratitude reminds us that we can choose, as we are blessed with consciousness and will, to continue on this journey of life. Because of my gratitude I can say, “ I love this, I choose to keep this in my life”. Most times this choice will take work, but the gratitude, the love, will give the continued energy necessary. Gratitude empowers us once again.

There are many simple ways of cultivating gratitude. In our house we practice being grateful each evening. As we sit for dinner, my four year old will ask us what we are each “grateful for”. I must have started him on this, but he has done this since he was two and he loves doing it. Children are naturals at loving what is. . . We also take time once a week to go around and individually say what we appreciate about each other. This is grounding and healing and reminds us of what is important. It isn’t too hard to incorporate a practice of gratitude into your life–remembering to do it is often the hardest part. I used to wake up each morning and count ten things I was thankful for that day. Some days were harder than others, but it helped set my day off on the right note. Being the foundation, or wellspring, of all religions and spiritual disciplines, it is not hard to find other examples of practices. Experiencing gratitude is the first step in the “spiral” in Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects (work that I am deeply inspired by and that is dedicated to the healing of our world). Here is one of the exercises she provides for fostering gratitude and seeing the good in other and the world. “This practice is adapted from the Meditation of Jubilation and Transformation, taught in a Buddhist text written two thousand years ago at the outset of the Mahayana tradition. You can find the original version in chapter six of the Perfection of Wisdom in 8000 Lines.

Relax and close your eyes. Open your awareness to the fellow beings who share with you this planet-time...in this town...in this country...and in other lands......See their multitudes in your mind's eye......Now let your awareness open wider yet, to encompass all beings who ever lived...of all races and creeds and walks of life, rich, poor, kings and beggars, saints and sinners...see the vast vistas of these fellow beings stretching into the distance, like successive mountain ranges......Now consider the fact that in each of these innumerable lives some act of merit was performed. No matter how stunted or deprived the life, there was a gesture of generosity, a gift of love, an act of valor or self-sacrifice... on the battlefield or workplace, hospital or home...From these beings in their endless multitudes arose actions of courage, kindness, of teaching and healing. Let yourself see these manifold and immeasurable acts of merit......


Now imagine you can sweep together these acts of merit...sweep them into a pile in front of you...use your hands...pile them up...pile them into a heap viewing it with gladness and gratitude...Now pat them into a ball. It is the Great Ball of Merit...hold it now and weigh it in your hands...rejoice in it, knowing that no act of goodness is ever lost. It remains ever and always a present resource...a means for the transformation of life...So now, with jubilation and gratitude, you turn that great ball...turn it over...over...into the healing of our world.



I have been trying to see, with some great success recently, that it is a privilege to be alive right now, in this most tumultuous time, because humans are waking up to who they are: conscious beings in a beautiful, alive and unfolding universe. We are creating our own path. Gratitude allows us to recognize all that we do have already– this gift of life, and this gift of conscious life (our own and the many others here with us)– so that we are able to create the world we want. I am so grateful for gratitude. At the least, it helps us through a hard day; at it’s best, it is the foundation for transforming our world into a place of joyful co-existence with all life.