Who Are You Without Your Favorite Personality?
How the spiritual path invites you to stop wearing yesterday’s outfit
This reflection continues our series on Cynthia Bourgeault’s Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, rooted in Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence. In Chapter 5, Cynthia gives one of her most useful metaphors for understanding personality: it is a wardrobe. You have outfits for work, for conflict, for family gatherings, for spiritual groups. You have your “competent adult” outfit, your “charming talker” outfit, your “don’t mess with me today” outfit, your “rescuer” outfit, and your “I’m fine, really, nothing is wrong” outfit. Some of these fit the situation. Some of them don’t. But most of us cling to one or two favorites like a child who insists on wearing the same superhero pajamas every day.
The spiritual path is not about throwing the wardrobe away. It is about learning how to stop confusing the clothes with the one who is wearing them.
Personality as Yesterday’s Outfit
Cynthia draws directly from both Gurdjieff and Sufi psychology here. Personality is the acquired layer: the habits, behaviors, roles, coping strategies, and social conditioning we developed to function in the world. It is not inherently bad. It is useful. It helps you speak clearly in public, stay calm in a crisis, comfort a friend, and navigate a complicated life. In that sense, it really is a wardrobe.
But the problem is not the wardrobe itself.
The problem is identification.
Most people are so tightly fused with one favorite persona that they wear it everywhere, even when it is absurdly inappropriate. You take your “competent leader” energy into intimate moments. You bring your “comic relief” persona into situations that need tenderness. You walk into spiritual practice wearing the same armor that once kept you safe in childhood.
This is not wrong. It is simply unconscious.
Cynthia’s point is that the more identified you are with a personality, the less room there is for presence to move. You cannot notice life as it is because your outfit is doing the reacting for you.
The Favorite Personality
Everyone has one. You know exactly which it is.
The one you defend.
The one you polish.
The one you insist is “just who I am.”
Maybe it is the intellectual.
Maybe it is the caretaker.
Maybe it is the tough one.
Maybe it is the spiritual one.
Maybe it is the rebel.
Maybe it is the peacemaker.
And of course, like all clothing that gets worn too long, it begins to smell.
This is why spiritual work becomes uncomfortable. Presence exposes the silliness of the outfit. You see how much energy goes into maintaining it, defending it, or performing it. You notice how often it gets hooked. You realize how many of your so-called “values” are simply the wardrobe doing what it learned to do.
Helminski calls these our “addictive dependencies.” Cynthia calls them our “positional fixes.” And both point to the same truth: identification with personality keeps you from the deeper field of being.
Letting Essence Choose What To Wear
Essence is not a persona. It is the aliveness, temperament, vibration, and raw being you came into this life with. It is pre-verbal, pre-image, pre-conditioning. It is the grain of your soul.
Cynthia emphasizes again and again that essence needs personality to express itself. Personality is not the enemy. It is a tool. But it is a tool that must be held lightly.
In her teaching, when you are grounded in presence, something remarkable happens: you reach into the wardrobe and choose the outfit the moment actually needs. Not the outfit that protects you. Not the outfit that flatters you. Not the outfit that keeps your story intact.
You choose what serves.
You choose what aligns.
You choose what moves the situation toward clarity, mercy, or right action.
This is what freedom feels like.
Experiment: Wear Something Else
A practical exercise emerges naturally from this chapter.
Try noticing your favorite persona.
The one you default to.
The one you return to under stress.
Then try something else. Even for a breath.
If you are the helper, try not helping for once.
If you are the fixer, let the problem sit unwrapped.
If you are the joker, keep a moment of silence.
If you are the peacemaker, let someone else smooth the tension.
If you are the intellectual, speak from your chest instead of your head.
None of this is meant to suppress anything.
It is meant to give essence some breathing room.
Cynthia calls this “finding your way by smell, not by measurement.” You feel your way toward the deeper center. You listen for the subtle shift between personality tightening and presence opening. You learn what “inner looseness” feels like.
Over time, the wardrobe stops being a prison. It becomes a collection of options.
Why Presence Is the Real Outfit
Presence is the only thing you have that is not conditioned.
It is the only thing you cannot fake.
It is the place where essence and personality meet long enough to produce insight, compassion, and clarity.
From presence, you can use your personality as a servant, not a dictator. Roles become functional instead of compulsive. You show up with the right energy for the moment instead of dragging the same familiar persona into every room you enter.
This is why Cynthia insists that the path is not about “finding your true self.” You cannot define it or measure it or brand it. You can only coincide with it. Presence is the doorway into that coincidence.
And the wardrobe metaphor makes sense: the real you is not the outfit. The real you is the one who can take it off.
Virgin Monk Boy’s Take
Most people treat personality like a uniform. They wear it until the seams split and then complain that the world keeps shrinking. The spiritual path is learning how to hang the costume back in the closet and walk into the room wearing nothing but awareness.
You can still grab an outfit when you need one.
Just stop pretending the outfit is your skin.
Blessed are the ones who know when to change clothes.
Blessed are the ones who meet life dressed for the occasion.
Blessed are the ones who realize the soul never needed a costume to begin with.
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I just accidentally deleted a whole paragraph I had written, which of course was my IPAD’S FAULT 🤬 & my childish “throw the device & break it to punish it” costume got halfway slipped on before my “don’t you dare, you just bought that ipad & you could break it” Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones costume took over. Now I’m half way in between pondering what costume (personality) I’m wearing now.
I may read this article a dozen times. Fascinating & so true, diving into deep water of who I’ve played & what costume I’ve worn, so much of the time without even realizing it. Sometimes jobs called for a certain costume, other times it was just the one I wanted to wear, other times like a few moments ago it just popped on in response to something that happened unexpectedly….
And underneath it all there was still me. The naked me without the costume or the real me without the personality - & still unconsciously forgot about that me constantly.
Being in theatre in high school which led to a theatre major in college, changing costumes & personalities was a “job” that i loved “playing” - it wasnt “work”. I was blessed with 2 jobs, both for several decades, that were a dream come true - i loved the personality & costume i was allowed to put on & while yes, there were some rules, there was quite a bit of self-supervised freedom to play & i rarely gave a thought to anything but how blessed I was to have a job where I was hired to be ME while i worked.
The past 5 & a half years since I got sick with Covid (now Long Covid) & finally had to quit my job after 4 years of medical leave has flipped that script i just described on itz head. I’m single, no kids, family a few states away, live alone, so I’ve had plenty of time alone to think. Meditate. Feel. Cry. Worry. And seeing over 30 drs trying to figure out a new vicious virus, for the first time in my life CONSCIOUSLY pick what costume to wear, what personality to be. A lot of the times I’ve been too sick to even do that. Or one could argue I did have a costume & personality on - sick patient. It’s changed a lot and this post you wrote and question you asked is something I have been exploring for those past 5 years because so often I’ve got too much brain fog, fatigue, pain, anxiety, worry, grief, to even contemplate who to be or how to act. And not knowing who i am without my favorite personality, while being terrifying at first, has also given me an I don’t give a shit strength I had never experienced before.
What a beautifully written, simple yet not always so easy to do practice. Your take on it at the end always pulls it all together for me so precisely yet with room for my own opinions, feelings, growths & gifts.
Most important thing it’s given me is time to be quiet. To listen (most folks call it meditate which always intimidated me). To be naked without a personality or costume & get to explore that creature. And the Spirit that created it. Sometimes even with pain i can feel the gift.
🎭I’ve worn lots of different personalities in my life — most of the costumes didn’t fit quite right. I feel like an onion, peeling off one layer after another.🍂