How Meditation Helps You Be Yourself
How being in the present and being yourself are the same through meditation
“Be Yourself”
What does that really mean?
That oft-repeated platitude when fear and anxiety arise.
As in most matters involving that 4-letter word — self — meditation has something to say about it, and this is what I’ve learned:
Being Yourself is Letting Go
The most direct link between meditation and being yourself is that central part of letting go — that active act of relaxation I’ve discussed before.
A release, a sense of doing without trying, of giving no time for anxiety or doubt.
And the prompt — be yourself — when properly act out, is nearly indistinguishable from letting go, or at least they serve the same purpose.
This is a key exercise in meditation, to discover how to “be yourself” automatically — to just be without hesitation.
Anything else leaves room for thought, for pretence, for strategy, for artifice — for the very antithesis of being yourself. And these are all the objects of consciousness you may come to notice during meditation
And if all the thoughts and feelings and attitudes and ideas that you associate as being “you” can be observed right there in front of you, then how can they really be you?
You might agree with them, or feel that they are honest parts for you to play, but they are, either way, all parts of a character you play so that well you often don’t realise you’re playing it.
When meditation is about letting go, it shows the pointlessness in being anything but your most candid, honest, truest self, by bringing all of the things that you are being into vivid display in consciousness.
It leaves you free to be what you are, without pretence or expectation; it leaves you free to enjoy every moment, without the sting of embarrassment or self-consciousness.
It leaves you free to be yourself.
Self Confidence
Indeed, it’s in service of getting over that “sting of embarrassment or self-consciousness” that the prompt “be yourself” is usually deployed — when someone is in desperate need of some self-confidence.
But what is confidence?
Well, it isn’t the absence of fear or the dissolution of doubt.
It is, rather, the acceptance of the possibility of failure, embarrassment, rejection or pain, letting go those concerns and doing the thing anyway.
It certainly isn’t ruminating over the past or fearing for the future.
That might sound familiar:
Meditation isn’t the absence of thoughts, it’s the noticing and acknowledgement of those thoughts and the subsequent letting go of them.
And meditation is very much an exercise in noticing that your fears and rumination are just objects in consciousness and that they do not need to be identified with.
A key point of meditation is to build confidence in your knowledge that the thoughts and feelings that arise without your prompting will also dissipate without your intervention.
That the thoughts and feelings that seem to threaten your happiness, peace or equanimity will not last long enough to define you.
Meditation is confidence training.
It’s about building the ability to not act — to not react.
Or to only do so when it’s right to, when you need to — and to definitely do so when you need to.
It’s about recognising the immediate reality of your mind and knowing that you are not required to do or be anything.
You just are. And that is enough. Which is a pretty confident place to be.
The hope with meditation is to recognise this at every moment, to know you can exist in any moment and respond without reactivity, without getting lost in the chaos of wishful or dreadful possibilities.
To be confident.
To be yourself.
What Self Has The Confidence?
Another way to find some self-confidence is to give up on the idea that you have a “self” at all.
The non-existence of the self is regularly reiterated in some meditation practices.
This can be a pretty heavy philosophical argument to lift in the midst of a discussion about being yourself, so it’s better to leave the realisation of such things up to personal experience through meditation.
But from my experience, if you really look you’ll find nothing, and the better you are at seeing, the quicker you’ll see it missing.
If you look for it in the chaos of your thoughts and feelings, all you’ll find are objects of consciousness that you identify as your “self”, but they are not fundamentally different to anything else floating around in there.
Of course, there is a physical organism that we call “you” moving around reality with ideas in its head, talking to people and to itself, and trying to confidently be itself.
But the less strongly you hold onto that sense the freer you are to be more honest and open and straight-forward, better able to see others as they really are and connect with them in a way that isn’t filtered by these prejudices and preferences that you think constitute you.
That doesn’t mean having no character — others will imbue you with that anyway — and it’s not about having no opinions or thoughts or feelings.
It’s about being able to recognise those thoughts and feelings as they bubble to the surface of consciousness — recognise those fears and anxieties of embarrassment, pain, failure or rejection — and recognise that they’re not you; and then simply let them go.
Paradoxically, it’s easier to “be yourself” by letting go of your self.
Being Present is Being Yourself
There’s another way of looking at all this that has its own self-help platitude.
Namely, “Be present”, or “Be in the Now” — usually with a capital N.
I’ve asked this question — What’s so great about the now? — before, but for all the vapid familiarity of this platitude, it does have a point.
Of course, you’re always in the present — when else could you be? — but that point is that much of our mental lives is spent ruminating over the past or fearing for the future.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because I said it at the start when discussing the link between confidence and being yourself.
It may also sound familiar because, again, meditation is very much an exercise in noticing that your fears and rumination are just objects in consciousness, and the only present reality of them is their existence as those objects of consciousness.
Again again, meditation is partly about building up the ability to not react, or to only do so when it’s right to.
That means acknowledging that there’s nothing you can do to change the past, and that what needs to be done in the future can only be done when that future becomes the present.
Sure, some reasonable preparation for possible future outcomes is rational, and you can probably apologise or make amends for things you did in the past, but that too will only be done when the future becomes the present, and there will be a right time to do it.
That’s not to say that thoughts about the past or the future can’t punctuate consciousness while you’re successfully meditating — being present isn’t about pushing such thoughts one way or the other, but instead recognising those thoughts for what they are.
Because it’s only through thoughts (which are happening now) that you have any access to times that aren’t now. So being in the now is about not getting lost in those thoughts.
Being confident, being yourself, is in a fundamental sense being present — it’s being true to who and what you are right now, in the present.
It’s not running away with the fears of failure, or trying to mitigate the future or make up for the past — the less you attach yourself to those concerns, the closer you find yourself to the present.
Meditation is about training yourself to be in the present, and so it’s also about training to be yourself.
You can only be yourself in the present.
And you must be present to be yourself.
Be Yourself Now, Because You’ll Be Something Else Tomorrow
The other side of the everything’s-happening-now coin is that everything is also impermanent.
Everything — thoughts, feelings, the sounds around you, the words in front of you — they all come and go through the endless stream of conscious experience.
Meditation is the practice of maintaining that realisation, of noticing how thoughts arise without invitation and pass without permission.
As does everything else; whatever you can grab or kick or hug or cherish has its time and its end — some things more than others, some things all too brief.
Meditation is about recognising this fact, slowing down the stream enough to see the details as they pass; staying present for all of it and letting things have their time, without clinging to the good too firmly, or letting the bad define you.
Be Yourself Right Now
Of course, the point of being yourself is to do it in real life, not just when you’re meditating.
The point of meditation isn’t to hide yourself in the back of a cave or the top of a mountain, to be detached from the world or reality or to be unresponsive to life.
Meditation isn’t a state you arrive in, and the goal isn’t to be a better meditator only when you sit down to meditate, but to recognise that what you discover there is available at every moment:
That impermanence is always there;
Calling you to be yourself;
To see things as they really are;
In every impeccable detail;
And be fine with all its impermanence;
And even be thankful for it;
Without getting attached and dragged away;
To the future or the past;
To be present in every moment;
And to be, right now, what you are.
Be yourself.
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