Becoming Nobody Special

» On mindfulness, awareness and loving presence «

About ​t​en weeks into our family vacation to Sri Lanka and India, I came across an experience from within myself that I had not encountered before; I felt bored. Bored of travelling that is. It was so unexpected given the years of "OE" travel, followed by another decade of sojourns, chasing my heart-strings around the world, and a joy-filled willingness to let the winds sweep through my plans. So when the discontent crept in, it surprised me.

Despite the cacophonous backdrop of Indian chaos, the grandeur of Himalayan geography and the attentiveness of hospitality, something within me was dissolving. ​It wasn't the first time I​'d felt untethered, particularly in attachments of the heart, but this was another layer, deeper in my psyche. It felt like I was being untethered​ from the sense of who I am!

What was dawning within me was the amount of effort and preoccupation that I had in recent years put into becoming somebody. 

​I​t felt like I ​h​ad been cresting a wave of positive growth and momentum, making a positive contribution not only to my own personal development, but also that of my family unit and to the wider community.

And then we chose to go overseas for an extended holiday family adventure.

So I temporarily closed up my therapy practice, handed over my ​c​ommunity responsibilities, and stepped back from the meaningful collaborations in my life.

Turns out, ​t​en weeks into our adventure, the absence of these activities in my life, the movement of energy that I had invested whole-heartedly into, had created a void in my psyche. Was I a worthy person in the absence of these actions? What was my identity now?

​I couldn't at first fathom how that question dug so deep. I was well accustomed to picking up my backpack and heading for the road, letting go of the identity I'd cultivated 'back home'. 

Until I realised, oh that was my past identity - a kind of happy-go-lucky-itinerent-who-could-pull-a-lucrative-contract-when-she-needed (is there a shorthand term for that??). Now, I had ten years of putting down roots, establishing myself into domestic life, study and devotion. 

In the arc of travel, it was not uncommon to have all our cooking, cleaning and laundry done for us, so ​even the everyday tasks that could have given me a sense of worthwhile contribution into a small unit of human existence ​w​ere not present in that form. I longed to feel meaningful.

I realised I was touching a void that, with all the best intentions in the world, I had busied myself, to avoid that feeling. With some humility in the realisation, I had to acknowledge that knitted within my offerings, I had been creating my 'somebody' persona.

But in North India, in the high vast plains of Ladakh, I was slipping into becoming nobody.

There was a moment of giving myself a small nod and a wink at 'becoming nobody' and to hold that space open for myself. A moment to feel the emptiness of it, and to remain open to how it might texture and pattern my world.

But I didn't stay grounded in that spaciousness.

Rather, another piece of my psyche rose up, and dexterously, quietly, without any show, it distorted my view. 

Now I was sitting with "I am becoming nobody special".

Well​, that word special did a number on me. 

With the ​accumulative efforts of my cultivated identity dissolving​, and my self​-worth becoming untethered from the associated gestures and actions of those pursuits, I started to feel distressed within my body. My solar plexus, the center of my upper abdomen, felt empty, drained out. Wrapped around this was a sadness that longed for recognition, or appreciation, or acknowledgement, or maybe it was connection. It all felt one-and-the-same, tinged with failure. My early morning vitality collapsed; what was the point of my being here​, on the other side of the world​, anyway! I wasn't sure I wanted to confront the more existential question looming behind it.

I was ​in a spiral, and it was here, mercifully, that I ​c​ame across a book by Pema Chödrön. The title beckon​ed to me​: The Places That Scare You.

At the heart of her teaching was this word groundlessness.

Oh.

That was what this feeling was!​!

It was one of those rare moments of being truly got.

My inner world, which had felt so bewildering, was being met and held within Pema's teachings. ​What struck me was the reverence with which she approached groundlessness. Rather than something to fear or overcome, it was something she seemed willing to wrap herself in, to cosy up with, to welcome as part of the human experience.

Groundlessness ​i​s not a failure, but a fertile edge where compassion and humility might arise.

My bodymind ate these words up like they were my last meal.

And in that softening​ towards my own experience, I began to recognise a tender, aching place within me—a part that still longed to be seen, valued, recognised.

As I sat with the ache, I began to see how my sense of worthiness had become entangled with the things I did, the contributions I made, the ways I showed up in the world. In the absence of those familiar expressions of myself, ​m​y longing had become exposed.​ I wasn't simply missing the meaningful activities of my life. I was confronting the possibility that, without them, there might be nothing particularly meaningful about me.

There it was.

The hook.​ An experience. An old pattern playing out for all its worth!

I had experienced the spaciousness of not knowing who I was.

And I had experienced the distress of believing I was no longer special.

That word, special, had hooked me back into an old identity pattern—what Pema calls shenpa—that familiar human tendency to become caught in our habitual reactions, beliefs and ways of making meaning.

Emptiness. Collapse. Two very different experiences, yet both arising in the same unfamiliar territory of groundlessness.

Reading Pema Chödrön's book felt like a transmission, rather than simply a teaching. Her words brought the principles of Hakomi into living experience. I could feel my humanness, rather than fixate on my 'wrongness'.

​T​here was a period, up there in the Himalayas, where I had thought our family holiday had ignored its 'use-by' date by about ten years, and I was on the wrong trip. But actually, in stripping away the domestic world, Life was able to expose my entanglements, and I was able to give myself the space needed to stay with the rawness​, and to hold the tenderness that surfaced when my strategies for 'specialness' dissolved.

As Pema Chödrön describes it, this is the soft spot—the tender heart revealed when our usual protections fall away.

In Life's arena, in our everyday-ness, it isn't about rising above the discomfort. It's about staying with it, meeting it with gentleness.

I think this is where our inner life and spiritual practice are no longer separate. They meet in the quiet willingness to stay—with the rawness, the tenderness, the unravelling—and in the willingness to let go of the need to become somebody.