失去身份如何帮助我找到真相

十年前，当我登上飞机在印度接受瑜伽老师的培训时，我一直在停下来，这对我的生活不再对我感到不正确。我一直从事一项奇特的企业工作湾街（加拿大的华尔街）将近十年。我的生活非常好。我有社会地位。从本质上讲，我正在实现商业世界的梦想。对于局外人来说，我看上去很令人难以置信，在纸上，我的生活似乎是完美的。

我n reality, I felt horribly disconnected and lost in my life. My day-to-day life — the work I was doing, my浪漫关系，我的一些友谊，我的消遣方式，我的衣服，我说的话，我谈论的话，表现方式 - 不再觉得它属于我。如此之多。

回顾过去，我可以看到我沉浸在我所谓的performing— that is, changing my behavior because I lived in fear of the negative consequences of being my authentic self.

As a Brown woman born in Canada to Punjabi移民父母, I’d received confusing messages my whole life about how I needed to show up in order to fit in, succeed, and get ahead — whether it was from my family, my Canadian peers, or from society on a whole. As a result, I had started living as someone I simply wasn’t. Living like this有帮助我变得外在成功，但是内部我精疲力尽，在精神上空缺。

在30多岁的初期，我开始唤醒自己需要改变生活的事实，但是我不知道从哪里开始或生活会是什么样。我开始了一个激烈的灵魂搜索时期。我采取的第一个重大步骤之一是通过参加3个月的休假将自己暂时从企业界中脱离。以加深我的目标瑜伽和正念练习(frankly, spending a truckload of time alone!), I headed to my motherland, India, to complete a 2-month yoga teacher training program.

与我自己的生活形成鲜明对比的是，回到家中的对比是鲜明的 - 我立即被剥夺了定义我的身份的一切。每天都有相同的制服，以及我们在那之后分享的一切都取决于我们。没有标签或标题。与我来自的企业界不同，没人问我去哪里上学或谋生。他们只是想知道我来自哪个国家。和我的外向markers of status收拾好的（没有花哨的衣服，没有金光闪闪！），我只是房间里的数百个，穿着与其他所有人一样的黄色T恤和白色裤子。

For the first time in my life, nobody knew who I was, and nobody had any expectations about how I was going to behave — I was free to be anybody. Faced with this situation I asked myself:我要成为谁? I was so used to carefully and meticulously curating my image that doing so had become my default setting. The question of who to be was complicated for me, and felt really scary, because in truth, I simply didn’t know who I was.

在Ashram，我每天花了近8个小时与同伴瑜伽士一起进行冥想，从事一系列正念经历。被迫进入一个深深的自我反省和脆弱性的环境，我决定选择它 - 成为我的版本，是最原始，最开放，充满爱心，善良，善良和现在的版本。

当人们问我自己时，我故意谈论我的价值观instead of my education or work background. When people asked me how I was feeling, Iopenly shared我在这种经历中感到非常脆弱，而不是自动抽出一个“我做得很棒！”搭配表演的微笑。最重要的是，我自由地激情。由于喜悦，悲伤或恐惧，这表现为像婴儿一样哭泣的结合，笑着笑着表达我的愤怒，并表达了我感到的其他任何东西。

作为一个非常努力克服我对童年欺凌和社会疏远的经历的人，当我在Ashram上我开始迅速结交朋友时，我感到震惊 -我吸引的人是真正的善良和善良的人，他们想与真正的我建立联系。好人想以我最原始和最脆弱的状态与我成为朋友，这一事实证明了我值得和关注的事实，即使没有我为自己的自我价值而依靠成功的标志。

我觉得的温暖，爱和自我接受不仅有助于提出核心属性my Authentic Self, but also affirmed things about me that I now hold to be my self-truths: that I’m a wonderful person at my core, that I’m caring and compassionate, that I’m both fun and funny, and that I can develop loving relationships with a wide range of people. In short, my ashram experience helped to kick-start my journey towards self-love and embracingmy Authentic Self。

Arriving back home after this experience, everything around me was the same. I sat at the same desk at同样的工作，我和同一个朋友一起度过了一段时间，壁橱里挂着同一件衣服。但我是不同的。我现在知道可以改变我的生活会没关系 - 而且我不再需要我如此紧密地坚持的事情out of fear。我could let go.

Of course, things didn’t change overnight. But this glimpse of my true, authentic self, and how it felt to live it out, set the wheels in motion for a sea change in my life. I learned from this experience that sometimes you need to take a big, bold step or take yourself out of your current situation in order to identify the change you need.

我还了解到，当您觉醒自己的真实自我时，您将不想回去。