On Becoming
For as long as I can remember, there has always been this yearnful part inside me that has longed for safe arrival in a future reality where things felt peaceful. Integrative even. That somehow, somewhere deep inside me, something would be revealed and my life would make sense—my purpose, the roles I play, the very reason I came to this planet and to this incarnation.
Who I am meant to be.
But so much of my life has been spent in this space of searching. Trying to find the one thing that could help me access the parts of myself that desire connection and belonging. The recognition that who I am is knowable and that my existence, in this life, is not without meaning.
Like many creatives and highly sensitive people, I have regularly turned to art to access and express a deeper truth that yearns to be told. Writing and publishing books of fiction and poetic prose. Trusting that what I was accessing was helping to bring me closer to me. That somewhere within these stories and narratives, these raw, expressive pieces of art, that I could find myself in them.
In Psychology, there is a term, locus of control. It is the very point from which we look at and perceive just how much control we have in (and over) our lives. Internal locus, being the operant space of withinness, an inward meaning-making space where our beliefs about this world and our place in it exist. External locus, understanding and recognizing just how much things outside of us (systems and customs) influence our way of seeing, our path, even our trajectory.
Thinking of your own life, my sense is that you can see how you may sit within both worlds. Co-existing in these, at times, non-linear spaces. The inner realm where you ask questions and are curious about what you think and how you truly feel about your life, your relationships, and both your failures and accomplishments. The external realm where so much can feel outside your control, as if decisions are made for you by people and systems that do not know, cannot comprehend, the intricacies of who you are. Not wholly.
Perhaps we are forever in a state of becoming. Becoming aware of who we are to ourselves, for ourselves, and to this world and the people and systems in it.
I think of the Yogic traditions here, having spent years in spiritual satsang, interfaith communities, and yoga philosophy spaces where the Pancha Koshas keep coming up in discourse, almost as a way of reminding us how universal this experience is.
They are often described as the five layers or sheaths that one must pierce to arrive at the authentic self. The truest essence of the soul, the cosmic witness that tethers us to a world outside us, that is accessible to us because of our human being.
To sit in revelatory spaces is such a finite experience. And we never really know how long we will get, how long this all will last, how long it might take for us to reconcile with the disparate parts of ourselves that we have concealed from our own awareness. The truest essence of who we are to (and for) ourselves.
For we must know that few among us are spared the experiences of loss and grief, disappointment, heartache, failure, confusion, distress—so many emotions that help us to navigate the suffering of this world.
And so too, being disarmed to ourselves and our mind, so many of us have experienced the joy and freedom, the expressive beauty of arrival, deeply seated belonging, an undeniable happiness when things just seem to be cohesive and complete.
Could it be that these very experiences are the vehicles that help us to arrive in these timeless spaces of becoming? And that moments, themselves, are the temporal spaces that truly define who we are? And just as they are fleeting, maybe who we are is too?
I imagine that we may be searching for meaning in a world, using language and words and terms that could never truly encapsulate or define what it means to exist. And that searching is an integral part to understanding.
For more information on Existential Therapy, consider booking a free 15-minute consult with Fleurian at Aspect Psychotherapy.
