Give Yourself A Break From Being You

Give yourself a break from...being you. So you can experience the deeper You. So you can experience more lightness, expansion, and delight.
So you can go beyond the made-up walls of your personality and get to know your unique self.

The audio is taken from a video and sometimes the sound might not be of the highest quality. I am sharing it anyway because I believe it offers a unique perspective that can support your liberation, expansion, and well-being.

Transcript

Hi there,

Today's video is an invitation to give yourself a break from being you.

And I know that it sounds very weird or maybe crazy even.

You might be thinking so,

Oh,

If I stop being me,

Am I supposed to pretend I'm someone else or anything like that?

What do you mean,

Karolina,

To give myself a break from being me?

And I totally do not mean that you should be pretending to be someone else or that you should deny who you are.

Actually the intention behind giving yourself a break from being you,

And I will of course explain what I mean by it in a moment,

But the intention is to experience the deeper you,

To experience the richer,

More mysterious,

More delightful,

Deeper self that is beyond the idea of self that you have.

So we all have in our minds,

In our bodies also,

It's like in our muscles,

In the way we hold tension,

In the way we move,

In our emotional pathways,

We have stories about who we are.

And we're usually partially conscious,

Some of it is subconscious,

And some of it might be unconscious.

So we might not be even aware of having those stories.

But they define who we think we are.

They define who we identify with.

So some examples of some parts of those stories could be like,

I'm a very shy person and it's never easy for me to connect with others,

Especially if I don't know them.

I feel uncomfortable in big groups.

I hate confrontation.

I just need plenty of time to be on my own.

It could be like one thread of someone's story.

Or another example could be like,

I love being in control.

I can never just fully relax because I need to be on top of things.

I love action.

I don't like to rest.

I don't like to give too much attention to my feelings.

I prefer just doing things.

Something like that.

Or just the last one would be like,

I'm such a people person and a people pleaser a little bit.

I can see the needs of others and it's so important for me to support others,

Sometimes to the point of forgetting about myself.

And sometimes I lose myself in other people and their needs and feelings.

So I don't really know what I feel.

And sometimes I'm exhausted,

But I feel like I need to be always there for others.

And so on and so on.

Many different stories.

And they have a role.

It's a developmental process that starts in early childhood to develop some sense of individuated separate self.

So this is a good thing that we have those stories and that we can somehow define ourselves.

And yet,

Even though it is helpful and necessary as we grow up,

It becomes a prison of a sort.

So I'd like to use an analogy.

When you buy a house with a yard or a garden,

You fence it,

Right?

You put a fence to define the borders of your property.

Is the fence useful?

Of course,

Of course,

It shows where your property starts.

It maybe prevents people or animals entering to your yard.

It gives you privacy.

Yeah,

So it's useful,

The fence.

But would it be useful if you decided that the fence defines where you can live and you cannot ever go beyond the fence?

You cannot go to the street,

To the supermarket,

To the forest,

To the beach,

To the town.

You can never leave the borders of your fence.

Of course,

It would be helpful.

It would mean that you would be like a prisoner in your own yard,

In your own home.

But this is something that,

To some extent at least,

Happens in our inner life.

We become so attached to the structures,

To the definitions of our personality that we think that's who we are,

That we think that we are our yard,

You know?

And what's beyond the fence,

It's not us.

But is it true?

Is it true that I belong to my property but I do not belong to the forest or to the street or the beach?

Of course not.

I do belong in all those places and I can go there.

I'm a free human being.

So what about our personality or our sense of self?

How about just questioning a little bit the definitions of self and going beyond the fence of who we think that we are?

So I'm inviting you to just hold all the ideas of who you are,

The stories about yourself a bit more lightly,

Knowing that they are made up,

They are like a fence in a way,

That you belong beyond as well.

And there are some practices that you can do to kind of have experiential experience.

You can experience in an embodied way going beyond the fence.

And I'll give a couple of examples.

A lot of people enjoy meditation or that like sitting meditation when the stories,

The sense of self kind of dissolves and there is just the consciousness,

The flow of beingness.

And it's gorgeous.

I love doing it.

I recommend that,

Just being in the flow of beingness.

And I also love more active and more playful,

I would say,

Practices for that.

So I'll share some of those and give you an example.

Doing something different is great for that.

And I am a person who rarely sings,

You know,

Like even for myself,

I rarely sing.

And if I do sing,

Usually just by myself.

But recently,

I did sing when I was with someone and it was lots of fun,

Really.

So this morning,

I decided to sing and dance to my own singing.

Yes.

And I wanted to experience like what will come through,

What kind of melody or words and movement will come through.

I wanted to be surprised.

And sure,

I was.

Actually,

What came through was musical style,

Delightful,

Funny,

A bit sassy song and movement.

It was gorgeous.

It was lovely.

And I was in the sense of being surprised and being like,

Oh,

Really?

That's also me?

Those words,

Those movements,

That feeling in my body,

In myself,

This quality of being,

Is it me?

I like it.

I love it.

So that gave me,

That's an example of how you can go beyond the fence of who you habitually think that you are and identify with.

Do something different,

Something that you usually don't do.

Be willing to be surprised and really experience it in your body.

Another example could be when you walk in a park,

For instance,

If you usually maybe are on headphones or look down or straight,

Maybe look at the trees and touch them.

Maybe listen to the birds or maybe look some people in the eye.

Maybe even smile or say hello if it feels good to you.

But do something different.

Experience yourself beyond the story that you keep repeating and then it reinforces itself and it's like self-fulfilling prophecy and you start really being sure that's who you are.

Just do something different.

If you like writing or art,

That's great,

Too.

You can,

For instance,

Write as a character who is very different than you.

Get into their shoes,

Into their mind and feelings and write as them.

Or if you love drawing or painting,

Maybe use different colors or a different style or different shapes or draw something or paint something really different than usually.

Body movement,

Experiment with walking or moving or lying down in a different way,

Different postures,

Like feeling it in the body is usually great.

So these are a couple of examples.

I hope you will have fun with it.

I hope you will start seeing maybe in your everyday life experience that the ideas that you have about you that feel solid,

They are made up,

Actually.

If you slow down for a moment,

You have a little gap that you can choose differently.

So for instance,

In everyday life,

A friend is asking you,

Hey,

Where do you want to go for that coffee?

And maybe you always say,

I don't know,

Wherever you choose.

Maybe this reaction will start coming up and you can pause and you might decide to play with it and say something different.

Hey,

I want to go to that cafe in the corner.

Just check how it feels to be another expression of who you are.

Because who you are,

It's so much faster than who you think you are.

And this was such a huge revelation to me,

I think 2008 or 2009,

When I learned for the first time an agram,

A personality style.

And I saw this was one of my first glimpses into my personality,

What I thought defined me.

It's just like a mask that I'm wearing,

Or maybe a piece of clothing that is useful,

That it's a part of me,

But I am much more.

And so you are.

So I hope you will be playing with it and feel free to let me know if you'd like to share about your experience.

Have a beautiful day with an expanded,

Light and vast sense of who you are.

Bye bye.