Choose Your Identity
Ilchi Lee has dedicated his life to health and peace education. He also founder of D Yoga. Lee writes about identity and said that people tend to think they are born into their identity as though it were written into their genetic code upon conception. In reality, though, identity is a mental construct. Your identity is invented in your head, or you adopt it from others who invented it for you. Breaking this illusion of identity may be one of the most important things you can do in the quest to become the true master of your own brain.
When you were a small child, you may have had a clearer picture of who you wanted to be.
You simply wanted to be one of the good guys who were nice to others and did something helpful with their lives. But as you grew up and experienced life, you added layers on top of that desired identity. These are the ways you choose to present yourself to others, and the way you choose to define who you are to yourself. You accepted a lot of notions about who you are from your environment because you wanted to be loved and accepted. As you became an adult, you added additional layers of your own invention because you wanted to present yourself to your best advantage among your peers and in society at large.
While many of these layers do help us function in society and give us a reference point from which we can estimate our place in the world, they can hold us back from what we truly want to be.
To start peeling these layers back, always ask how and why you created a particular notion about yourself. If you say, “I am no good at math,” or, “I am a shy person,” ask yourself how and why you took this identity upon yourself. You will find that many of these identities are related to emotional memories that may or may not be serving you well. You may decide to keep those which are beneficial to you and to discard those which are not.
While it may be true that some tendencies are genetically hardwired into our brains, it is up to you whether or not you follow your simple biology. The more you take control of the things you are and the things you will become, the more satisfied and confident you will be within yourself.
August 16, 2008 12:39 pm 1 Comment
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Ilchi Lee Fan » Dahn Yoga Training Discussion — October 18, 2008 @ 7:26 am
[...] the Dahn Masters group, there may be a cultural influence that affects the results in some way. Ilchi Lee says that in the future, we hope to conduct a similar study within one [...]
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