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The Meditation
For two days, my river meditation centered on the question “who am I?”
Day 1:
I started to cry when my mind went blank. I didn't know who I was and I didn't know how to figure out who I was. As I was crying, I heard a fish splashing around and looked up to see what was going on. It's salmon spawning season here in Milwaukee, so I thought that the fish was unsuccessfully trying to swim upstream. Saddened by this fish's journey and my own inability to find my home and sense of self-definition, I began to search the internet. I entered “how do you figure out who you are" into Google and clicked the links that called to me.
Each of the websites suggested different thought-provoking and/or journaling prompts that would help me understand my likes/dislikes, my needs/wants, my hobbies, and my roles. I had already done the work of discovering these aspects of myself. I knew I came back to this search because these aspects were manifestations of who I was. They did not define me. I wanted to know how to define myself outside of the manifestation of who I am. I wanted know me, Blaque, outside of my relationship to the external world. I wanted to know my internal world: who I was at my core.
At the end of each article or blog post, each of the authors commented that, like my intuition, the "who I am" questions could not be determined by the natural mind. They all agreed that this was a spiritual question that required a spiritual exploration. One of the authors ended the section on spiritual definition by commenting that our true self-definition was that we were all God's children. I thought, "Well, yes, duh, I know that now." It wasn't enough though because being a child of God told me whose I was, who gives me direction, and who I look to for guidance. Knowing your parents, for me, only tells you part of who you are. I needed to know who I was as an individual, rather than an individual in relational to another person or another being.
So I cut the internet search and just sat here. While sitting in the silence, I was led back to text messages I had sent to my spiritual advisor while I was fully dissociated back to a child. In those text messages, which were untainted by the harsh realities of this world, I realized that I had written over and over who I was. In those days in the hospital and following weeks, I knew who I was and I knew it firmly. I realized that once I had shared with certain people who I was and did not receive validation, understanding, or a yes and amen, I began to doubt who I was.
The answer had always been sitting inside of me. I have always known who I am. Yet, I have constantly buried who I am under comparison, expectations, external validation, guilt. My self-definition has also been buried under the weight of my parent's abuse, neglect, violence and the abuse and violence I have experienced in relationships, jobs, and the world.
Despite all of the things piled on top of my soul, I have always been able to connect with my light. When I moved in that intuition, I lived in an inexplicable state of lightness that dimmed when I began to force myself into a box to fit into someone else's vision of who I should be.
So, standing at the river, I reminded myself of who I knew myself to be.
Day 2:
I returned to the river knowing who I was. This knowing was fortified by a conversation I had the previous afternoon with a mentor who had watched me grow up in my childhood church. As she listened to me tell my story, she helped me to see more of who I was. This enlightenment was not based upon her definition of me. On the contrary, it was based in her intuitive translation of my story into Divine language.
As I stood reflecting on my newfound sense of self, I saw another small fish splashing around seemingly failing to swim upstream to spawn. A older white man on a walk with his dog, saw me at the river and asked me if I had seen any salmon swimming upstream. I told him that I had seen several and mentioned that there was one fish that seemed to be stuck. To my surprise he told me that the smaller silver fish that seemed to be going nowhere were actually creating their nests to prepare for spawning.
As this is my first time watching the spawning season, I had been comparing the smaller fish's journey to that of the larger salmon who I knew were swimming upstream to spawn.The smaller fish were creating nests in these rocks because they were born here and the bigger fish were continuing upstream to where they were born. In fact, the larger fish who had father to travel had larger fins and larger bodies. The smaller fish, I then assumed were smaller because they did not have far to travel and might not have needed to travel upstream in order to spawn. Each fish was built for the task of spawning. Each fish traveled a singular journey to where they were born to create a nest and plant the seeds of the next generation.
The Healing
I realized that I could not base my self-definition upon the validation of others.
I could not base my self-definition upon who around me was the same as me.
I could not base my self-definition upon a blueprint that I did or did not see in front of me.
I could not base my self-definition upon what I could see.
I could not base my self-definition upon what my parents approved of.
I could not base my self-definition upon an external source.
I know who I am because I know who the Divine has called me to be.
Affirmation will come from the right people only after I stand firm in who I am.
If I do not stand firm in who I am, I will continue to allow myself to be taken off of my path because of my fear of not being like others.
I will keep the knowledge of who I am close to my heart.
If people see it they see it.
If they don’t they don’t.
I know who I am.
I know that sometimes when I look around me I get scared of the expansiveness of who I am.
The Meditation Meets the Healing
Like the fish who have different bodies built for different spawning journeys, I may be built differently from others with whom I share the same river.
Like the fish who swim, by themselves, to their birthplace, my journey may look different from others' who are also spawning in the same river.
I know that I will easily swim upstream to find my home without any trouble when I step into the natural evolution of who I am. Though there are fisherman trying to catch me for their own purposes, I am smart enough to avoid them in order to fulfill the purpose is indelibly tattooed on my heart.
I've been running from my home for a long time.
I've been ignoring my internal compass and the magnetism to my purpose.
It's time to stop ignoring what I know is true.
I am a being of deep water.
I am a upstream swimming being.
I am a wildfire.
I know where home is.
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