When we talk about awakening, we talk about what makes us feel alive, what makes us feel whole.  We talk about a new understanding for ourselves and others around us.  When it comes to awakening, there is a degree of coming alive.  The excitement of new experiences and thoughts and ideas and the even greater thrill of planning and starting a project and seeing it through.  There is a different side to this as well.  A coming alive that can only happen with death.  There is a lot to say about the cost of a new life being the old one (I will reference that later this week as well), and it is true.  It isn’t physically possible in some cases to manage and maintain what we knew in the context of what we are learning.  Simply put, what we knew before doesn’t apply to where we are now, or where we want to go.  Those things got us here, but they aren’t going to get us where we are going.  I struggled to reconcile the pieces of my past that gave me comfort, joy, and familiarity.  I had to understand that I held on to those so tightly because they were the bright moments, moments I loved.   Moments that made me feel safe.  I had to understand that I wasn’t meant to repeat those moments over and over again, like some little parrot copy of what my parents wanted for themselves.    

I had to learn to let their dreams die so I could live my own.  I had to let my comfort no longer be a priority. I had to let my fear die so I could trust myself.  Even when I thought I was on the right path for me, I had to let my ego die, the knowledge I thought I had.  I had to let go of the idea that I knew exactly what I wanted, exactly who I was because those experiences that brought me there were limited.  I had to learn to swim in the deep end instead of living in the shallows of talking about a scenario that would be nice to see some day.  I had to let go of the identity of myself as a victim. Frankly, I had to let go of any identity I had, and that was a death.  It’s disconcerting to let go of what we know or think we know about who we are only to see we haven’t the slightest clue because the version of ourselves that we know isn’t really who we want to be at all.  But it’s even more disconcerting to wake up years later, after pretending to be that version of ourselves only to see that nothing around us is what we wanted.       

Saying goodbye and letting go is never easy, especially when it comes to identity and self.  We feel like we know who we are and we wrap up every decision we make in that definition.  But certain events, choices, and changes in our lives require a breaking down of that definition.  It requires a discovery of who we really are and a means to bring that out. And that means putting down everything we knew and becoming someone new.  While those pieces of us that got us here will always remain, they are no longer the drivers.  We lovingly wrap them and lay them to rest.  Letting those new buds emerge can be a scary thing.  We are vulnerable, but the only way to become is to emerge from the safety of what we knew and step into who we are.  Welcome the new, wake up to it.  Come alive in the death of what we knew and create who we are.