"How am I not myself?"

We all have a concept of ourselves - how we are. It's important to look fully at that concept and recognize the limitations it can bring. There's a poem I've always loved that illuminated for me the polarizing effect our concepts can have on us.

In Mind - Denise Levertov

There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears
a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she
is kind and very clean without
ostentation-
but she has
no imagination

And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs
but she is not kind.

How much of our concept of 'self' has been edited til the final draft is acceptable to others? Much like my dream about the two dimensional moon, our concept of ourselves can be an obstacle. We need to acknowledge our full self to fully interact in the world.

I have the worst time acknowledging the fact that I can be stubborn. I once stubbornly refused to admit that I was stubborn during a zen workshop exercise intended to bring to light our self concepts. I even realized what I was doing and thought it was pretty funny, yet I couldn't say the words "I am stubborn."

What's so bad about being stubborn? The problem wasn't exactly the word or the concept of the word. It's the idea I had that it was an absolute. If I admit to being stubborn then that means I am always stubborn. Which I knew wasn't true. Sometimes, very often actually, I'm really flexible.

But our concepts about ourselves, good or bad, are limiting because we tend to make them absolutes. If we believe we are a 'nice' or 'generous' person, we might feel we always have to be nice or generous to be ourselves. Then what happens when we feel that we honestly don't have time or attention or things to share? Who are we then?

Often we will make ourselves uncomfortable and unhappy to live up to our idea of how/who we are. We limit our full experience and interaction with our environment so that it fits with our two dimensional, absolute concept.

It's comfortable to have an absolute concept and to feel like we know how we are. But is it worth the discomfort it causes living up to it?