Who am I?

She sits across from me, cross-legged, knee to knee on the uneven planks of the dock. Below us the water shifts restlessly. My skin prickles under the sun, soothed by the breeze.

They tell me to look into my partners eyes. My gaze slides off her face, as if we're opposite poles of a magnet.

We begin with the words, "I am."

Our teachers encourage us to talk in a stream of consciousness, all the time keeping the gaze to draw out the truth from the other's face. We are the channel; a straw to our deeper selves, pouring.

I falter.

How can I define myself? How can I describe the complexities of myself with mere words? How can I speak for seven minutes about me, only me. I feel mortified.

This is the point our teachers are trying to make. Words are never enough. Finding oneself lies far away from reason and analysis, the twin culprits of a false path.

Unintentionally, we all begin with facts. We keep them positive, reaffirming our belief in ourselves.

I am a sister. I am a daughter. I am a friend. I am a lover. I am blue haired. I am smiley. I am beautiful to some. I am British and American and Central European. I am twenty-six years old.

I am a woman.

I am a child.

I am a student. I am a teacher. I am a carer. I am a dancer. I am a cook. I am a yogi. I am a writer.

I am an observer. I am a creator.

I am a healer.


Subtley the flow of words carries us on. The ego's perceptions of itself and traditional compartmentalising of the persona blends with emerging acceptance of darkness beneath.


I am blind. I am whole. I am wise. I am loud. I am in love. I am in hate. I am broken. I am confident. I am naïve. I am burning. I am excited. I am scared. I am happy.

I am peaceful. I am cold. I am nervous. I am clean. I am lost. I am magnetic.

I am hiding. I am emerging. I am gentle. I am angry. I am mean. I am argumentative. I am kind. I am generous. I am insecure. I am compassionate.

I am strong. I am weak. I am running away. I am running towards.

I am transient. I am pure.

I am completely unique.

The calm envelops as we talk out loud. I am staring straight into my partner's eyes now, the veil lifted, my muscles relaxed. The sun pierces my retina but I don't close my eyelids.


I am a million different people from one day to the next. I am new for every person I meet. I am an amalgamation of everything I've ever done.

I am smaller than the simplest particle. I am nothing. I am a speck in time.

I am overwhelming. I am insignificant. I am supremely powerful.

I am a bubble. I am a bubble on the surface of an enormous cauldron of simmering Everything, elements fusing with other elements to make new entities. A perfect model of the sun. My rainbow-coloured surface reflects what is around me. I am full of nothing.


I exist momentarily in my unique state, formed from the whole, hovering above the ever-moving sea of existence, before I explode into nothing, my remains sucked back into the swirling potion, to be fused with Everything once again.

The teacher winds a stick around a gold singing bowl, its clear note vibrating through us to signal the end of the lesson. We sit in stunning calm, our words falling down around us on the lakeside dock like confetti.

I am the universe. I am love. I am everything.

The wild contrasts between statements leaps out at me. Each phrase has an opposite. Inner duality is something about myself that has bothered me for a long time. Now I realise we are all made of it. I can not just be strong. I am weak as well. I can not just be lost. I am found. I am neither and I am both.

I, like everything else in this world, exist in duality. As they say, fear is the same sensation as excitement, only perceived differently. We are all trying to fit together two ends of one spectrum, circles of definition stacked one on another to form the entities that we are. A giant spiral.

What she said about herself is an exact description of myself. What I am is what she is. As they say in sanskrit, om tat sat. It is what it is. Everyone else has the same experience as us. We all just are.

I am left with an overwhelming feeling of oneness.

The question "Who am I?" becomes ridiculous. We are all the same; not just in a figurative sense but in a real, palpable, pinch-able sense.

I get the feeling that if we'd been given endless time we would have repeated every possible attribute to each other, finding a little of everything within us, before finally returning to the only truth:

"I am."