Befriending Our True Nature
You wouldn’t know it by looking at me now, but there was a time when I had luscious locks of hair – truly, it was a thing to behold! I used to spend large chunks of my mornings carefully coaxing my hair into perfect shapes with the help of Aqua Net hairspray… (remember that stuff?) My hair was a vital part of my identity – it was synonymous with what I knew of myself. No doubt, I derived some of my personal worth and esteem from my hair.
Then in medical school, my hair began to “thin” (which is a euphemism for “fall out in droves”). During that time, I would wake up in the morning with a sense of dread as I assessed the damage on my pillow. Some mornings it looked like someone had snuck into my room in the middle of the night and rubbed their shedding cat all over my pillow. Absolutely nightmarish.
As you might imagine, this unexpected change of events was troubling for me. After all, I had great expectations for my hair and me – we were going places – we were going to live out our lives together in follicular bliss. I went through the classic stages of grief: denial (for a long time), anger, bargaining, and depression. The final stage, acceptance, eluded me for some time because it required that I look into the void – the hole in my self-worth (and on the top of my head) that was left by my over-identification with my hair.
While it is true that losing one’s hair can be difficult, many of us have lost much more. The experience of change or of losing something dear to us is all the more difficult when it is connected with a sense of who we are… our very identity! When we lose something that is tied to our inner worth, it can be excruciating – like a part of our very being goes away – leaving a terrible feeling of vacancy and emptiness.
Yet, the very nature of this life, this incarnated existence with our imperfect bodies and minds, is that we will experience change! Really, the only thing we can surely count on is impermanence. All of us have experienced change and loss… and we are bound to experience more of it.
So, this begs the question: In this sea of change – this constantly shifting landscape – how do we come to understand our true nature? Read more
