What’s in a name…

Sunset in Aruba, September 2017

The last year has provided us with the blessing and the curse of time for intense reflection and examination. I deconstructed and analyzed each piece of myself until I was forced to sit in the discomfort created by what I uncovered. From the mental rubble, one deeply unsettling question arose: What defines me?

I ran through the laundry list of ways I could have chosen to define myself: my job, my education, my hobbies, my actions, my family, and my closest relationships. But there was something conspicuously absent from the list. Absent not because it did not belong, but because I wasn’t ready to admit that it was how I defined myself. What is it? Well, it was what I mistakenly believed I could control most: my thoughts.

If I am being honest, I have spent hours, weeks, maybe even months of my life lying awake at night, replaying embarrassing ideas, dissecting what my thoughts really mean, and wondering why I was so broken that I would ever have those thoughts to begin with. In an insidious pattern, I returned time and again to the belief that if I am my thoughts, my “wrong” thoughts negated my positive self-beliefs and dwarfed my accomplishments. Thoughts that were contrary to who I wanted to be meant that I was fatally flawed. General anxiety disorder accelerated this spiraling vortex of fallacies, forcing me towards the reckoning I knew was desperately needed.

My epiphany moment came after nearly a year of therapy and several months of yoga teacher training with My Vinyasa Practice. Practicing yoga invites self-study (svadhyaya) and evaluating the patterns (samskaras) that we fall into. This was a natural bridge connecting my yoga journey and my mental health journey, giving me a clear path to investigate my own experiences and beliefs.

“You aren’t your thoughts.” That’s it, that’s the whole epiphany. Yoga and therapy allowed me to view what was happening in my mind without moralizing my thoughts or judging myself. I finally believed that my being and my thoughts are not one and the same, but they can exist together as distinct aspects of the greater me. This breakthrough felt like a weight was lifted off my chest because I no longer regarded my brain as the enemy launching errant thoughts like rocks into an otherwise carefully curated and seemingly placid lake.

Now, after all of this you may be wondering how it is that I decided to define myself. Well, friends, I decided that I don’t need a way to define myself at all. I am very content believing that I am simply having the human experience of life - an experience that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. An experience that I would never trade for anything.

Authentically,

Cate