Your Name Is A Label You Put On Your Conditioning - Grasshopper

“I’m John Morgan.” That’s an assertion set in stone. In order to carve out who we really are, we have to chip away at our conditioning, until we discover who we are without our labels.

“I’m shy,” “I’m aggressive,” “I’m confident,” “I’m a bricklayer,” “I’m Irish.” Those are the labels we give ourselves and each one of them contains a limitation, because if we’re “that,” then we can’t be something else.

 

Deeper than labels is where we find the part of us that can’t be labeled. It’s like the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu taught us in the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” The labels we give ourselves are representations, not the real thing. The NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) folks make a great distinction on this topic when they teach, “The map is not the territory.”

 

I’m pretty sure that our life’s mission is to find our natural essence: who we are without labels or limitations. That process begins by subtracting the labels we’ve added. Each time you retire a label, you get closer to your unvarnished self – the animating force of your existence. It’s there that limitations vanish and creativity flows.

 

Think of yourself as a car with a collection of bumper stickers put on top of each other over the years. Each time you peel one away, you get closer to who you are without labels.

 

We’ve been conditioned to think we are the labels that others or we put on us. Once you begin the process of removing labels, you become less identified with your conditioning and become free to be who you are without labels – someone not carved in stone.

 

All the best,

John