“Young lady, who do you think you are?!”

That question, posed to me by my mother when I was out of line as a child, when I was too bold for her comfort and needed to be pulled back into place, was amazingly effective. For a young lady learning about her place, the tone and implication communicated the great importance of constraint. As I grew, the power and purpose behind the question continued to pull me back to a familiar bounded comfort, and I got used to playing small.

Looking back, I can see how playing small took its toll. Years of denying the parts of my own creative nature that might push the limits of acceptability caused division and dissent within me. Friends would sometimes say that I was hard to get to know. It was my deteriorating physical health that gave me a picture of what was happening. With two abdominal surgeries before age 20 and vascular and bladder spasms starting in my 30s, patterns of the “inner tightness” that I carried came into clearer view. Habits of holding in, holding on and holding back were reflected in my thoughts, feelings and behaviors and had settled into the cells of my body. How I needed to relax! Then the message that “I am a spiritual being having a human experience” came to me. I remember I read it over and over in a New Age newsletter and cut it out and hung it on my wall. A new way of thinking, yet strangely resonant at some abandoned place in me. I took an introductory class in body energy work and experienced again both the wild out-of-the-box newness and the oh-yes-I’m-starting-to-remember familiarity of an invisible reality underlying the whole of creation, the whole of me. Who did I think I was? I remembered that as a young teen I had discovered a poem by June Jordan that so captivated me that I got out construction paper and cut out every letter and re- composed her message, high in my room above the curtains. It was:

I am impossible to explain
remote from old and new interpretations
and yet
not exactly

There was boldness in posting these assertions of my very essence. The aliveness that they 1 stirred in me was persistent and inviting. Alongside the ingrained habits that I had acquired of saying “no” to any out-of-bounds impulse, there was also an enduring pull to a deeper “yes.”

Following that pull began to rearrange my life. With additional energy classes, I began to perceive the subtle vibrational language of life and marveled at the new world opening up to me. What amazing multidimensional beings we are! How whole-making to acknowledge the truth of it! How refreshing to reclaim Spirit’s vibrant presence! It seemed that a world nearly lost to me had been brought back from the dim edges of my awareness and was being revived as my expanding experience of reality.

My awakening to this larger context activated a response in me like a quickening. I felt the dormant parts of me rising and wanting to live. “There is more of me,” I kept thinking. Who did I think I was? Without consciously planning it, I noticed I was using my full name more often. it helped to reflect the expanding sensation of self I was experiencing. It seemed that opening to the fullness of my being had set a particular process into motion. As I continued to say “yes” to this unfolding process, I came up against the hard “rules” of thought and conduct so well established in me. Yet I could taste the new freedom and potential wanting to be born. I described it like this:

The closer I get to the Center of me the more I approach Truth. And I cry.

Coming nearer to the core of me was like opting for a meltdown. I felt an inevitable attraction to draw near the fire even while the heat was burning off armor that felt like flesh. I had reached a point of choice: either I could choke off the life force from moving too much in me, numbing myself and going through the expected motions of living or, By God, I could give myself as fully as I knew how to what had been calling me by name and freely enter in to the passion of Life. The tears came as the restraint softened.

Letting down my guard has been a gradual process. At times it felt very fragile. I learned to give it regular times of rest and silence and solitude. I respected its messages. And I gave it permission to dance. When the longing to let out overcame the practice of holding in, the body knew the movements it needed to unwind and express. It is through my body that I most commune with the Center of me. In motion and in stillness, it is through the substance of the body that the union of spirit and form is known to me. In that communion, restrictions fall away. And there rises a knowing that that communion is who I am.

I’ve come to see that letting go of restrictions is my greatest gift to myself and to the world. I feel how this conflicts with the pressures in and around me to stay small and bound for comfort’s sake. Yet, in giving in to those pressures, I turn from my true identity, and my experience of life is diminished. As I relate and respond to that which is highest within me, I’m led forward in new and unpredictable ways that invite me to grow into more of who I am. Again and again, I return to Center and allow a process of sacred molting as each layer of false belief comes up to be seen and released.

I feel lighter now than ever before. I’ve come to know a peace that resonates through my being as a pleasurable ease. This buoyant tranquility remains with me when I am absorbed in the uplifting pull of Center. It is so unlike my old pattern of “keeping the peace,” which was constricting to me and others. And the more I continue to relax into my larger Presence, the more I know myself to be a part of an ongoing process of creative intent. It is as if Life itself lives through me, moving through whatever has been yielded, to bring about liberation and emergence on an ever-larger scale.

When I am intentionally together with others responding to this same Life pulse in them, the intrinsically uplifting momentum is intensified. I love to consider the magic that will be invoked when we release all our props and relax completely into the presence of Center! I imagine it like this:

I know myself to be a portal for the most powerful energy in the Universe to move through. I know myself to be that energy! No longer can I identify myself with a nature which is not divine. Divine Presence is what remains as my resistance is released. A process of restoration is underway in me whereby body, mind and heart awaken to Oneness with the abiding Presence.

This seems to be in process for us all. What deep appreciation I feel for this most fundamental question: Who do you think you are?