In the course of human thought, one of the most persistent and profound inquiries has been to question the nature of existence itself — what does it mean “to be”?

In the previous blog on the Nature of Existence, we looked at the cyclical nature of life and death and I argued that life and death are actions, not identities.  We are not ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ simply because we are incarnate or not.

Building on that theme, it is also true to say that we are not the mind, either, nor are we our emotions.  But much of what we ‘think’, and how our language is constructed, tells us who we are, and sometimes not in helpful ways.

In this blog I am going to address the interplay between language, mind and emotions and how they can imprint the energy body with identity.  And how you can remove those imprints using Mental Discipline, should those believed identities not actually be true.  

To look at this interplay, let us first compare identity constructs in the English and Irish languages to demonstrate what I mean.

Language as Identifiers

The Irish language is old.  It predates the standardised or written forms of English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and others by centuries to over a millennium and is among the oldest vernacular literary languages in Europe still spoken today.

Common to many of the Romance languages, from the Latin, the ‘I am’ identifier in Irish is not used for emotions.  For instance, in Irish, we do not say ‘I am happy’, we say ‘Happiness is on me’; ‘Tá áthas orm’.  Similarly, we do not say ‘I am afraid’, instead we say, ‘Fear is on me’; “Tá eagla orm”.  And we do not say ‘I am sad’, instead we say, ’Sadness is on me’; “Tá brón orm”.

In English, while we may intellectually know that we are not an emotion, or a thought, when we use the construct of ‘I am’, the body registers it in our energetic body as an identity, and that means we feel it in our core.  In Irish, instead, the ‘I am’ is not used for emotions, making the emotion feel as if it were on the body, and not inside of it.  This is important for how it makes us feel and that it is telling us who we are.

To test this theory, try sitting and saying ‘I am afraid’ five times and see how it feels inside your body.  Notice the shifts before, during and after saying it.  Then shake off that feeling and sit in a different spot and then say ‘I am. Fear is on me’ five times and notice how that feels in your body and compare that feeling with the ‘I am afraid’ experience.  The difference is profound. 

Noticing this key difference does two things.  Firstly, it reveals how the indigenous Irish (pre-westernised thought) carried their identity differently in their bodies to how the English did.  And secondly, it points to how crucial it is to be aware of the thoughts that you allow in your body.

Our Identity is in Our Core

Energetically, identity is stored in the central column of the energy body that runs from the crown chakra, at the crown of the head, to the base chakra at the perineum.  This core column sits between the front and back of the body and holds and informs each of the chakras, holding everything that we are (or at least, that we think that we are) and emanates that from our core into our lives.

Everything that we welcome as our identity resides in this core.  However, it is also true that if we carry unwanted energy in the body that is not our identity, but we say that it is, such as ‘I am depressed’, we are inviting that depression energy into our core.  Anything in our core is considered our true identity, which makes the problematic energy much harder to clear. 

Often, when we have wounds and trauma, we also allow these to ‘become’ our identity when we identify with ‘our story’.  We are not ‘our story’, far from it.  But if we see ourselves as our experiences (‘I am a failure’), or our challenges (‘I am disabled’), etc., you can see how we limit ourselves, but crucially, you can see how we tell lies to ourselves that we come to believe.  

And that means that having control of your mind and what you tell yourself is not just important for knowing your true identity, but it’s also of crucial importance in the creation of your experiences.

Thoughts then Emotions

If you are afraid of snakes and you see a snake in the grass, you might say, ‘Oh, no! A snake!’, and feel fear.  What has happened is that your thought first says ‘something fearful is nearby’, and then the emotions respond with fear.  But then you look again and realise that what you saw wasn’t a snake at all, that it was only a rope, and so now you might say, ‘Oh, it’s only a rope’ and you relax.  Your emotions always follow your thoughts.  

Thoughts, or what you allow to occur in your mind, is under your control; you get to decide which thoughts you wish to allow.  Then, because your body is in service to you, it gives you the emotions that you have requested with your thoughts.

Before being frightened by the snake, when you saw the snake in the grass, you might have double-checked to see if the thing that you saw was in fact a snake before allowing the thought to turn into an emotion.

And because we can decide which thoughts we want to allow, by checking for the truthfulness of thoughts as they occur, we can train our minds to be disciplined.  Click here for more on ‘Mental Discipline’.

True Identity

Noticing the constructs at work in our language, and how they influence our well-being, is part of Mental Discipline, a practice available to us through awareness and is a core principle of nearly every spiritual practice.

So, we are not the body, nor the mind or emotions. What are we then?  We are not ‘our story’, the lifetime we have lived, or any of the lifetimes that we have lived.  The soul is the amalgamation of all of those lifetimes of experiences, so, even though our awareness and our rising consciousness is the mechanism through which we are informed as to who we truly are, it is not our identity.  So what or who are we? 

The 13th Century poet, Rumi, said it best when he said, “You are not just a drop in the ocean.  You are the entire ocean in a drop”.

If the entire ocean is all of life, the essence of the entire universe, its vastness, mystery, and divinity, we are that.  We are the essence of life, the consciousness and power that connects all things, the life-force that makes things grow. This perspective, rooted in mystical traditions, says we are not observers of life, we are expressions of it, intimately connected to everything around us.  

Knowing this by feeling it, enables us to access the highest levels of consciousness of the universe by going within.  When we begin to do this, the individualism dissolves, and we begin to see that we are in every living being because the life-force in me is the same life-force in you, and in every person, animal and flower.

We are the life-force flowing through our bodies; we are the life-force of the living breathing universe.  We are life itself.