A Way of Being That Does Not Fracture the Self

On unbecoming—and the quiet reclamation of a self no longer performing to feel safe.

“… I am not becoming so much as returning. Not chasing freedom, but withdrawing from all the performances that have kept me from recognising I already am free.”

Hello dear reader,

How are you, truly, this week? Do you feel able—if only for a moment—to stand fully in yourself?

A Fox (1868) by Siegwald Dahl (Norwegian, 1827-1902)

Squatting on the forest floor with my hands pressed to the silent earth, slowly letting myself remember that I am held, I noticed a tree with one of its large branches hanging half-broken.

I realised I did not think of it badly because of that. It was an obvious fact that it is no less perfect a tree, even with one of its branches limp. I simply accepted it as it was, no less or more beautiful than other unbroken trees.

And when I later approached that tree to hug it, as I often do with those who have seen much, and remained—and especially when it has been a while since I experienced a warm human embrace—I began crying.

Holding its trunk, I realised that this tree accepts me the same way I accepted it just a moment ago. With some of my branches limp, dangling half-broken around my body helplessly, others still reaching to the sky, risking hope—I am no less perfect a human.

Standing there, my soft body pressed to the wooden one, I felt unconditional love infusing me as if through osmosis, and for the first time in a long while, I felt welcomed just as I am.

Even if we do not know each other, we could be friends

When, with my hands pressed to the soil still, my body lowered and compressed, I realised I was experiencing the forest from the vantage point of a fox, a baby deer, or an adult one perhaps—its head half-lifted mid-graze, eyes sharp, ears attentive.

I noticed spiderwebs shimmering in the late afternoon sun; I heard birds chirping and singing in the canopy. I thought of the wealth of ants and beetles and worms underneath my palms; the mice, squirrels, deer, boars, foxes—all silently sharing that moment with me, possibly observing me from somewhere.

I felt that even if we do not know each other, we could be friends. We are friends. I thought of all the animals inside my body—the bacteria and microscopic kin, creating entire ecosystems that power me to life.

And in that moment, gratitude filled me in recognition of this excellent company. Subtle communion, belonging without needing to be seen. Suddenly, I did not feel as alone. This place has lent me its wisdom about understanding who we are to each other and how we are to each other. And how I can be to myself.

The spiritual path is a paradoxical one. On one hand, it brings me to places of belonging I never knew, because for the first time I am discovering them deep and unshakeable within myself, rather than in the outside world. On the other, I have never felt more isolated, different, unfitting, or straight-up “weird”.

There are not many people I could walk up to in a café, as we joke with my mentor and dear friend, Ian, and say, “How did it feel for you when the sense of self dissolved? Pretty confusing, isn’t it?”—and then we would have a cheesecake and a cup of tea, over which we would continue sharing about the experiences that sometimes visit us: psychic disturbances at night, perception shifts, and past lives we had glimpsed in meditation or dream.

More and more, what I experience is not something I can openly share with others without making myself sound like an oddity—or someone whose mind went running wild in the fields, untethered by the constraints of “sanity”.

I am learning to accept that it is so—and will increasingly be, as I am told. Even if I find people whose lives include experiences of certain similarities, the truth is that this pool is growing ever smaller.

If you have been feeling similarly, you also probably know that despite all this loneliness and hardship, you would not trade where you are now even for a day of the once-present sense of “belonging”. Because you know all too well now, as I do too, that it was just illusory—a mere stretch of conditioning you were yet to let go of and strip away, layer by layer.

As I kept wandering through the forest, losing my mind and finding my soul, as is popularly attributed to John Muir, I stumbled upon a mossy tree stump. On it, I found three blue-striped feathers, and a few steps further, a grey and fluffy one. “Gifts,” I thought, and put them in a front pocket of my jacket. I felt blessed and spoiled.

“Why disregard the present?” I asked myself, recalling the words once offered to me by a dear voice. “Why, even though the future holds its overwhelming and constant proposals of transformation, the now has already declared such great blessings?”

When I got back home, I bathed the feathers in soap and warm water, and put them on the windowsill to dry in the setting sun. The next day, I brushed them carefully and placed them on my small shrine to be reminded: empty hands mean that I am finally ready to receive. The impulse to grasp is precisely what evokes the feeling of lack.

As a little girl, I used to make wavy motions with my arms whenever I was running down the staircase. I do not know why; I was not thinking or imagining anything in particular while at it. It simply felt… fitting. I would do it every single time. Until I did not anymore, of course—as it appeared to me unserious. And as most of us have been told, to finally grow up, one needs to serious-up.

“We are raised in cultures that really narrow down the parameter of how much we get to inhabit of our own life,” points out Francis Weller, a psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist. This narrowed-down parameter is devoid of the freedom of expression, joy, and playfulness which we still embody in the early years of our lives, but soon enough abandon as we pass the threshold of adulthood, laced with a profound sense of inadequacy.

But it is not only joy and a sense of whimsy we are denied when dwelling in an adult body. It is also no longer acceptable to feel and express sorrow fully when it washes up against our jagged shores; nor is it welcome to allow the boiling anger to steam out un-curated, aiding us in self-regulation.

Even before we collect our first ID, we are already entrenched in the stickiness of performative adulthood. It is not maturation. Some of us never truly grow up—which is to say, some of us never truly blossom. Instead, we hold these wild, honest parts of ourselves with judgment and shame.

I did it again last week, near the forest—the waves, I mean. I was making my way down a hill in little jumps and my arms just flew up and assumed the wavy motion. It felt fitting, as I said. A reclaiming of the self before it was curated. “If someone saw me now,” I thought, “they would think ‘God, she’s a freak’”—and I laughed at it with delight.

Freak, after all, did not always carry the weight of shame and exclusion it does today. It once spoke of brisk movement—sudden gestures, dancing without apology. Another early meaning was tied to change itself: whims, caprices, shifts that made no rational sense but resonated deeply. A “freak of nature,” for example, once described something unexplainable—often natural or divine.

Before it was used to mark people as strange or deviant, it belonged to the language of fluidity—of letting one’s self shift shape, unravel, express, and re-form again.

At last! At last I let myself be just the way I am. The truth is, if we all welcomed back all parts of ourselves and wore them without shame, we would all be the most lovely “freaks”—and in such a universe, nobody would be shamed for being one.

“When you do not follow your nature,” Dane Rudhyar pointed out, “there is a hole in the universe where you were supposed to be.” Until we mend all the holes, however, embracing one’s entire, freaky self—especially among the few who do—is not always a light or joyful experience. And yet, it is one worth everything.

It can be healing, to simply tell part of the truth

Yesterday, I found a butterfly on the windowsill in the garden shed, where new plants—tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, strawberries—are silently stirring towards wakefulness from their seed-stage dormancy; all nestled in small pots which hold them in soil before, once more, they are held directly by the Earth herself.

The butterfly, Paź Królowej, was, however, at the other edge of the cycle, having already slipped into eternal dormancy. It must have remembered the flight of last summer. Now, its wings were furled inward, protecting its body’s dream. I looked carefully at its tiny, still face; the limbs once eagerly steeped in pollen now curled up, frozen in the air like a thought too big or scary to pass through the narrow corridors of one’s reckoning.

I welcomed the body into the palms of mine, which formed a soft shelter—one cupped gently over the other, with just enough space for a breeze to caress the motionless wings.

I held it nestled in my palms as I rounded up the hens and geese and ducks into the coop for the night. With my hands entirely devoted to the butterfly, I was unable to keep them stretched to the sides as a boundary between the day and night, so I had to walk more—cutting off the pathways of the quick and small bird feet stubbornly running back towards the pond, unwilling to reconcile with the day’s departure.

I brought the butterfly home and placed it on my shrine, next to the feathers. Gifts. Gifts in abundance; reminders that beauty and grief are not opposite poles but part of the same truth-field.

“We are not meant to become someone else. We are meant to excavate the original knowing we came with,” wrote Toko-pa Turner.

The complication in our unbecoming-to-return is that life comes with no trigger warning. Things happen out of the blue. Something unfolds, and suddenly, with no preparation, we find ourselves in the middle of a happening we did not wish to happen.

A few days ago, I was driving a car, and my eyes settled on a small black-furred body thrown in the middle of the street. Someone’s best friend, a two-loving-hands-sized, pointy-eared dog, had made its last walk that day. I burst into tears in an instant. Probably because my nervous system had already been brought to its edge by all the recent events visiting me abundantly without warning. And also because I, too, share my life with a two-loving-hands-sized, pointy-eared dog.

I wanted to stop my car and get out and lift the little, discarded by the world body from the harsh asphalt and lay it on the soft grass somewhere nearby, but away from the death-bearing car wheels. But the street was too busy for me to do it safely. Driving away, I sent love to those paws that had carried this entire cosmos of a little furred being through our lucky world—and which now lay frozen in the air, just like the limbs of a butterfly.

I think that is why “here” is really important when you are in a situation for which nothing has prepared you—that is the space for honest inner reckoning. For disillusionment.

“To have the language of ‘here,’ it is not gentle. It’s not even consoling. It just might be part of the truth. And that can be healing, to simply tell part of the truth,” offered Pádraig Ó Tuama in his conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being.

Be the place you can stand on when your feet are sore

Last week, I wrote of the river-self—how identity, like water, is not fixed but formed by the shape of what it moves through. How what we often call “self” is a web of conditions, upheld by momentum, not a singular truth or essence to hold together at all costs.

We explored what softens when we stop striving to become someone, to “fix” the self, and instead let it unravel—gently loosening the web of constructs that hold it together—until what is left is simply presence; a porous and unguarded inner being. A slow liberation.

This week, it seems that the mud is settling slowly, and I am able to see through the waters more clearly, becoming more familiar with what remains when striving weakens. I am becoming less, and arriving more.

It is a state of congruence—where fewer parts in me contradict the moment I am immersed in. Where I no longer so often automatically contort to make sense in the eyes of the other, but let myself just… be here. As I am. And do what I do. And let that be enough.

These past days have felt like a blurry wading through age-old memory—returning to the inner being that is not curated or earned but simply present, underneath the scaffolding I once mistook for home. Remembering that is is not another version of myself, but that which never needed to be versioned in the first place.

Amidst this remembering, I found myself drawn to the teachings that mirror what the earth and body already knew.

In The Journey Within, Swami Radhanath writes of how becoming aware of our innate divinity allows us to move beyond the compulsions that once defined us. This awareness, once glimpsed, does not eradicate our old tendencies through force, but gradually renders them irrelevant. They begin to fall away like garments we no longer need—or want—to wear.

There is a gentleness to this realignment, but also a precision—it asks that we relinquish not only what harms us, but also what no longer reflects who we truly, deeply are. It is not a process of improvement, or self-betterment, but a return to congruence.

He speaks to a cellular reorientation: a life uncoiled from the grip of conditioning, realigned with our unwavering inner truth. The slow realisation that what we were seeking was never elsewhere, only occluded.

This is echoed in Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements, where he writes of the quiet freedom that arises when we stop trying to justify our existence. It is a simple yet radical proposition: that we are already enough. That being fully oneself is not something to defend, but to inhabit.

To live without explanation is to no longer contort the self for the sake of coherence in others’ eyes, but to keep arriving unadorned, forevermore. It means to locate dignity not in performance, but finally in the simplicity of presence—sweet at times, bitter at others.

Michael A. Singer, in The Untethered Soul, offers an even vaster exploration—describing an inner architecture sustained not by effort, but by openness. A kind of spiritual porosity. The capacity to remain available to life even when it ruptures us. Especially then. Not to resist experience, but to remain permeable—attuned enough to be shaped by it without being shattered.

It is a subtle, ongoing practice, often unseen by others: staying with what visits our homes of being without needing to name it, change it, or claim it. Remaining intact through surrender, not resistance. A door frame, rather than a door, shut tight.

And then, from Taoist philosophy, the concept of wu wei. Often mistranslated as passivity, but in truth, it is the cultivation of accord with the nature of things. It is action that does not estrange you from yourself.

In an article by Harry J. Stead I returned to recently, it was described as an attunement to unfolding—a deep kind of discipline. The discipline of receptivity. Of not inserting oneself into life as an interruption, but as a participant in its logic. In this way, wu wei is not the absence of effort, but the absence of inner contradiction. To move without violating your own rhythm. To speak without abandoning your truth. To rest when resting is what life asks of you. As Harry J. Stead wrote:

“When we learn to work with our own Inner Nature, and with the natural laws operating around us, we reach the level of Wu Wei. Then we work with the natural order of things and operate on the principle of minimal effort. Since the natural world follows that principle, it does not make mistakes. Mistakes are made–or imagined–by man, the creature with the overloaded Brain who separates himself from the supporting network of natural laws by interfering and trying too hard.”

Together, these teachings sketch a kind of interior architecture—one that supports rather than constrains. A way of being that does not fracture the self. They are not prescriptions for a “better” life, but invitations to a more honest one. Each one gestures toward the same truth: that what we seek is not found in striving, but in remembering what was quietly intact all along.

And perhaps that is what these past weeks have been pointing me toward—through feathers on the trail, through the butterfly, and through unexpected griefs: that I am not becoming so much as returning. That death, while brutal, can be beautiful. Distilling. Not chasing freedom, but withdrawing from all the performances that have kept me from recognising I already am free.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”

—consoled Wendell Berry. This is when, by going to the edges of our own reckoning—and, for once, not asking others to populate that edge with information and insight—we are invited (or made) to pause. To listen. Really listen—to what emerges from within.

We are already whole when we stop trying to explain, become, or correct ourselves into acceptability.

In Irish, when talking about trust, there is a beautiful phrase from West Kerry which I recently learned. It says, “Mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne”—“You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.”

You too, dear reader, can be the place you can stand on when your feet are sore.

If you find warmth, comfort, inspiration, joy, motivation, or anything else of value in these letters and would like to show your support, please consider becoming a deeply valued patron by upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. This will also give you access to the full archive. If you have a financial restriction, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

And if you’re not yet ready to be fully held by yourself, I’ll leave you in the embrace of Rilke’s words—three pieces I kept returning to these past weeks, offered now for your soothing:

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.

If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

“Therefore, (…) love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend.

Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

And the poem:

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you. 
Let this darkness be a bell tower 
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength. 
Move back and forth into the change. 
What is it like, such intensity of pain? 
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night, 
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, 
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you, 
say to the silent earth: I flow. 
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

— Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower; Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29. Written by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy

Reminders that beauty and grief are not opposite poles but part of the same truth-field.

Before you go:

What part of you are you learning to stand with, rather than fix?

What would it mean to become the place you can stand in when your feet are sore?

And what part of your so-called “freaky self” is quietly asking to be worn without shame?