Without your memories, beliefs and opinions, without your experiences, who would you be? Without your name or your job or your house, without your particular clothes or tattoos or car, without that first girl or guy who broke your heart, who would you be? If you didn’t worry about what was expected of you, what would you do? If you dropped all of it, even for an instant, what do you think you’d feel? Freedom, maybe? Peace, expansion, oneness? It’s weird, right? Without all these things we cling to, all the countless ways we create an “us” and a “them” we’d be each other; we’d be so much the same.

If you struggle with the question, “Who am I, really?”, if you feel cut off from your own intuition, the best thing you can do is get quiet. The answer to the question of who you are is there inside you. No one else can give it to you, but you don’t need it from anyone else, anyway. Sitting quietly, just breathing in, and breathing out, is the simplest thing in the world, but so many people resist it. There may be a huge gap between your authentic, unadulterated self, and the “you” that’s out in the world, kind of living your life. I say kind of, because if you aren’t in touch with your deepest truths, if you don’t really know yourself, life will feel foggy, like there’s a veil over it. As you travel along your way, your choices will be shots in the dark guided by impulsivity or desperation, or you’ll take the routes that seem safest. You may feel like you’re waiting for life to begin, like it’s out there, somewhere ahead of you, and you just need to accomplish a few more things to find it. Life is not in the doing, though, it’s in the being. What are you being? Busy?

So many people fill their days full of stuff to fill the void, that abyss that exists between their true self, and this struggling personality which may be full of constructs that have little or nothing to do with their heart or their inner yes, and everything to do with how they’ve been programmed to think. In our culture, we’ve been taught that external stuff will make us happy. Do you know how many commercials are geared toward little kids? Look at this shiny new toy, look at this happy kid who has it, don’t you want to be that kid? Don’t you want to feel that way? And it never ends. We’re all programmed some way or another, and at a certain point, you want to look and see if those ideas are actually yours. If you sit and get quiet and you do that consistently, anything that is not you will fall away, and that experience can be terrifying for people, which is why so many resist it. Who am I without all those ideas and plans I’ve been clinging to? Who am I without my anger or blame or shame? Who am I if I’m not on this particular track I’ve been walking for so long? Don’t you want to know?

We create borders and try to organize things. It’s perfectly natural, we want to bring order to this wild, gorgeous, sometimes piercingly painful world, but love has no borders. It’s the most freeing, borderless thing in the world. I guess I should have said, “spoiler alert” because when I sit and get quiet, when I let all that noise drop away, do you know what I feel? Love. Sometimes lots of thoughts have to drop away before I feel it, sometimes my mind is crowded and clinging and really loud. Other times I drop right in, but underneath everything, that’s what’s waiting for you. If you drop the stories and the opinions and the borders and the fears, you’ll hit pay-dirt. Once you know what you are, once you hit that foundation, a whole new world opens. You won’t have to agonize over choices, you’ll be moving with love. It’s a flow. You won’t wonder what you’re doing here, it will be obvious that the best use of your time is just to spread what you are in whatever gorgeous ways you can. You won’t wonder what the point of it all is, you’ll be too busy loving, and loving life, for as many loving days as you’ve got. If it’s too loud in your head, take five minutes to get quiet and just breathe. Here’s my tagline for you: Can you hear me now?!

Sending you some love (It’s in there!)

Ally Hamilton