“Who do you want to be when you grow up?”, Mrs. Burress, my 4th grade teacher asks us as we sit at our desks, pencils at the ready. She then assigns us a project to draw out our answers.

The masterpiece I drew was of me as a popstar-veterinarian-president. Quite the dream, I know.

Even as young children, the world was conditioning us to define who we are with what we do, and what roles we play in society.

The problem with this is that it becomes part of how we interpret our value in the world. We start to say ‘I’m only as good as the work that I do’, ‘I don’t know who I am without my kids’, ‘I failed at that test, I’m a bad student. I’m not smart.’

Our status in the world becomes the measuring stick of our worth and it is painful for us, because we fear that maybe we don’t have any worth at all. We climb the corporate ladders, we make as much money as possible, we hide our insecurities under false bravado, we get jealous when we see people doing better than us on social media, and create a persona for the world to see and we do everything in our power to protect that persona.

What I’ve noticed is that when I wrapped my identity and value up in things like how smart I was, success, appearance, that I was afraid, self-conscious, jealous, and discontented.

What happens is when you only identify with the material world, the ego always needs more. It will be on the lookout for approval, and when it doesn’t get that - for example, you don’t feel seen, heard, valued, didn’t get enough likes on your last post, it will react by making something wrong with you or making something wrong with them. You’ll be flooded with negative emotion - anger, disappointment, doubt, judgment, self-loathing.

So how do we free ourselves of this blight that the thinking mind creates?

In my search for the truth to the question, ‘who am I’, what I’ve learned is that there are two parts of ourselves, Human and Being.

The human part is our ego, the one identified with material life. And the being part is our Essence, our true Spirit that is beyond form.

Eckhart Tolle says “Being aware of stillness means to be still. To be still is to be conscious without thought. You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are still. When you are still, you are who you were before you temporarily assumed this physical and mental form called a person. You are also who you will be when the form dissolves. When you are still, you are who you are beyond your temporal existence: consciousness - unconditioned, formless, eternal.”

Tolle offers us a way to free ourselves of the conditioned mind through stillness.

Become aware of your breathing - a phenomenon that happens to you, without you needing to put in any effort at all. As you focus your awareness on the breath, and just the breath, thoughts dissolve and you become still. Present.

From this place, open your alert attention to hear the sounds around you.

Just to receive the sound, without any thought.

Open your alert attention to notice an object in your environment, maybe the grass, a candle, a cup. And see it without any thought.

All we can ever be is here, now. That’s all that ever exists. If you become entranced by your thoughts of future or past, you are in your thoughts and out-of-touch with current reality.

If you ever want to learn who you really are, just take a conscious breath to wake up from the thinking mind and return to the present moment.

It’s this simple, yet powerful realization that has helped me disidentify with the labels I’ve associated with “me”. Doctor, entrepreneur, wife, daughter, sister, friend. These are just labels of things that I do. But it is not who I be.

By remembering who I am, and who I am not, I am free.

And you can have this same freedom. It is available to us all. And it is as simple and easy as breathing.