A beginner’s guide to the true self.

Understanding the ‘You’ that underpins my work

I’ve decided to write a series of brief blogs to introduce you to understanding I refer to within the coaching model I use.  This will be a series of brief blogs, which each give you a little food for thought, and will build week by week.

The first place we need to start is with the idea of who “you” are.  Most of us will have some kind of idea that we are “Vicky” and that we are 37, able-bodied, live with our partner, run our own business, live in Essex and so on and so forth.  We have an identification with a body, a name, a place, an age, an activity and all of that comes under an umbrella that we consider to be “me”.  That’s very reasonable.  After all, it’s what we’ve been taught to believe since our body appeared on the earth.  All of our activities and efforts are centred on making sure that this idea of “me” is okay, is doing well in the world.

Yet, there’s something about living our lives in this way that doesn’t feel right.  Something about identifying with this body and story, seems a bit, well, off.  If you forget the description for a while and close your eyes, you can still feel that sense of “me”, can you not?  If you were to imagine that your legs were no longer there – you can still feel that sense of you, right?  What about if we removed your arms?  It’s still there, isn’t it?  Now your torso is gone.  But you’re not gone, are you?  And now your head has just vanished too, but the sense of you remains, doesn’t it?  So that sense of you that we’ve always assumed comes part and parcel with this body that we have, when inspected more closely, doesn’t actually live in the body.  In fact, it’s the other way around!  The sense of your body lives within you.  Investigate this, and see if you can feel this understanding for yourself…  You can only have the experience of having a body, through the knowing of it.  THAT is who you are.  You are the knower.  Your body, life, personality, age etc is the known.  You are the awareness within which the experience of being a human “Vicky” (and every other person for that matter) happens.

Let me know if you have any questions.  Here is the link to the next instalment if you’re ready: Being Human