You’re Not Going To Like This - Grasshopper

Most people rail against this fact of life: You’re not who you profess to be.

If you define yourself with a label, you have mislabeled who you are.

 

Notice how often people argue about a label that’s been ascribed to them. They are correct; they are not that label. Nor are they the one that they have affixed to themselves.

 

We name things in an attempt to order our world. When everything fits into our neat little box, we are satisfied with the world order. When they don’t fit, which is most of the time, we rail against reality.

 

Labeling yourself or someone else goes counter to what is: namely that you can’t be accurately named.

 

When you discover what’s underneath all the bumper stickers, you reach a place where naming ceases. Prove it to yourself. Just think back on a moment in your life when your breath was taken away by something. In that moment, you weren’t labeling the experience; you were experiencing it.

 

All labeling happens after the experience. The label is not the experience. If you don’t believe that, eat the menu the next time you’re out to dinner.

 

You may not like that you’re not the grandiose or pejorative label you’ve given yourself or others have bestowed upon you. That’s like liking or not liking Santa Claus. He’s not real and neither are your labels.

 

Start peeling your labels off one-by-one and begin to experience what author Eckhart Tolle calls the life beneath your life story. It’s there that you’ll begin to like yourself.

 

All the best,

John