The Sacred Art of Sliding Your Identity
Learning to Loosen the Grip of Who You Think You Are
This post grows out of work I’ve been doing with Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, which itself is a sustained engagement with Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence. In particular, it draws from the chapter titled The Power of Being. What follows is not an attempt to define identity, because identity, like Being itself, collapses the moment we try to pin it down. It emerged instead from noticing how instinctively we cling to names, roles, moods, and emotional weather patterns as if they were solid ground. And how rarely we experiment with something far more subtle and far more freeing: the capacity to shift where identity is located.
The Slide Rule of the Self
Beatrice Bruteau offers one of the clearest metaphors I know for this. She suggests that our sense of self can move along a scale, like the old slide ruler inside a childhood pencil case. Most of us assume identity is fixed, something we are. But Bruteau points out that identity behaves more like a position we habitually occupy, often without realizing we could slide it elsewhere.
At the most bound end of the scale, identity is locked into nouns and roles.
I am a parent.
I am a pastor.
I am a failure.
I am the responsible one.
These identities provide structure and social traction, but they are fragile. They must be defended. They bruise easily. When life disrupts them, we feel personally threatened because the role has been carrying our sense of being.
Slide a little further, and identity loosens into adjectives and emotional states.
I am anxious.
I am creative.
I am depressed.
I am angry.
This middle territory feels more honest and psychologically sophisticated, but it is still unstable. Emotions rise and fall, yet when we say “I am angry,” we quietly fuse who we are with what is passing through us. The weather becomes the sky.
The Far End of the Scale: “I Am”
Bruteau points to another possibility at the far end of the slide. A place where identity no longer finishes the sentence with a noun or an adjective. Where it rests, unmodified, as:
I am.
No role.
No mood.
No explanation.
This is not dissociation or numbing. Grief still hurts. Anger still burns. Joy still sparkles. What changes is where identity stands in relation to those experiences. They are present, but they are no longer required to define who you are.
Spiritual maturity is not living permanently at this end of the scale. That would be neither possible nor human. The work is learning how to slide. To recognize when identity has fused with a role or a feeling, and to know how to return, even briefly, to the simple fact of being.
A Simple Practice for Sliding the Center of Identity
Kabir Helminski offers a deceptively simple practice that directly supports this movement. It looks almost too minimal to matter, but it works precisely because it bypasses the mind’s urge to analyze or improve.
On the inbreath, silently think “I”, while allowing attention to settle gently in the region of the heart.
On the outbreath, silently think “AM”, as the breath releases from the body.
Nothing else is required.
This is not an affirmation. It is not a technique for producing calm. The words “I AM” are not being used to say something about yourself. They are used to rest identity in the place where it has no qualifiers.
Most breath practices stabilize attention. This one subtly re-anchors identity.
The breath provides a neutral rhythm for the body, while “I” and “AM” escort the sense of self away from roles, moods, and narratives and into sheer existence. Thoughts and emotions continue to arise. Nothing is pushed away. The difference is that they are no longer mistaken for the one who is breathing.
The focus on the heart is not sentimental. In Sufi stream Helminski draws from, the heart is understood as a center of perception rather than emotion. Letting attention settle there helps bypass the head’s compulsion to define and manage experience.
This practice works best when approached lightly. One or two minutes is enough. A few breaths before responding to an email, while waiting at a stoplight, or in the middle of an emotional surge can be more effective than a long formal sit.
If effort creeps in, that’s your signal that identity has slid back toward the middle of the scale. Simply notice it and begin again. The aim is not to stay in “I am,” but to become familiar with it.
Identity as a Skill, Not a Prison
What begins to change over time is not your personality or your circumstances, but your relationship to them. Roles become tools rather than cages. Emotions regain their dignity without running the show. You stop needing life to cooperate in order to feel real.
Identity does not disappear.
It loosens.
And in that loosening, something deeper remembers itself, not as a story to be defended, but as a presence that was never in danger to begin with.
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This touched something very quietly.
Not trying to redefine who we are, only inviting us to stand a little differently in what we already are.
That gentleness, that ease, feels very true.
Many thanks, Brother Aleks, now I feel like I can handle any chaos!🕉️