Who am I? Identity formation, examining our thoughts and being creative beings

Often we learn through vulnerable moments in which we are lucid enough to look at what is happening and not indulge the momentum of thoughts, whose message seem to say “DON’T THINK THAT!!!!” and that process, for me, is what I want to share here.

Last week the contemplation for our Knowing The View Monday night class was who am I? The actual moments of contemplation yielded some blankness, but my experiences off the pillow, put the contemplation in perspective. It is a question that interests me anyway.

The experience that provided me the space in which to notice who I am has been through noticing HOW I notice others, especially at the gym – a place where I am vulnerable and insecure.

My reaction upon encountering another individual is frequently one of judgment and bias; I give myself the presumptuos permission to categorize the experience of that person. I am curious about the person, but in a somewhat limited manner. I want to place them in the big picture. This often goes well for me. People feel understood because I have "correctly" placed them in the complicated schema of New York City and we can proceed from there. It is a skill and a virtue, sometimes based in compassion and at times fuel to perpetuate my confusion. So this process of noting for me is firstly about self-love for my freakish self and then about radically opening the possibility of unconditional love for all of freakish humanity.

My initial observation (a discrimination in itself) is above my reaction thought, which is  in quotes. These are just a few examples and they are not meant to offend anyone. I don’t believe we can circumvent prejudiced thinking without examining it.

Middle aged White man with long hair grunting loudly on some running machine.

"He must have just come back from an all male retreat in the woods".

Asian woman working out hard with her trainer. She explains between deep loud inhalations that the Buddha is bigger than everything.

" She must be a Soka Goki Buddhist.”

A Black woman, who dresses and holds herself like a man or a teenage boy, escorts a girl into the “Pole Dancing” class.

“Overprotective Macho Butch”. I think as I say hello and smile.

My trainer is a very young guy, light-skinned with a mop of curls on his head.

“Is he Jewish or Puerto Rican? Is he even out of high school? Is he from Coney Island or Bay Ridge?”

Me in the mirror.

“Awkward pear shaped white woman with the wrong work-out sneakers, who could work out every day for a year and would still be strange and unbalanced. You’re doing it wrong. You look good doing this. You look bad doing this. Your face gets all red when you work out. Look at that weird fat on your arm.”

This is the interesting part of being a writer. We can create and reflect upon character. Sometimes categories are helpful here. The success of many novels depends on the writer’s familiarity with their character AS the stereotype that they would fit into. This year I read Jonathan Letham and Virginia Woolf whose characters are a genuine product of place and culture. I am influenced by documentarians and investigators whose work is informed by how well they understand the systems that their subjects mutually define and are defined by. Still, I think that the complexity of a fictional character and the quality of a documentarian’s research increases when a writer recognizes the extraordinary nature that humans have, with every breath to fold up, fitting neatly into a file folder and to explode into multi-dimensional creatures.

As I move more into myself as a writer and as a facilitator of “diversity workshops “ I realize that I must balance in my view both the categories that exist externally, when their presence is creating a vibe while paying close attention to the story of each individual examining the assumptions that I automatically bury under ten tons of reactionary thoughts. (I also realize that I have the choice to ignore/transcend ALL categories.)

Curiosity. Keep looking. Prajna. Metta. Maitre.

So I am thinking about identity formation, allowing the concepts I have been studying to mingle with thoughts about how we construct and believe in identities such as gender and race. In terms of myself, I would like to be willing to release any solid idea of what it means for me to be white, female, maternal, educated, pan-sexual, middle-class, Buddhist, bi-lingual, an only child, political etc. and to be able to look at others without immediately imposing some combination of these traits, their opposites or in-betweens.

I do believe that one way to work with issues of race, class, gender and nationality is to open to the experience of fluid self. We can be curious about what in our identity is an idea. We can explore whether or not is has meaning.

There is so much more I would like to and intend to say about this subject. For one, we still have to look at reality. Opression and priveldge exist. They exist around categories of identity, race, sexual preference, class, skin-color, gender and nationality and a slew of others.

I believe meditation has a lot to offer to these big questions. I think WE, the shapers of our relative world, have a lot to offer Buddhism in how to work with these subjects. So did Audre Lorde.....

“Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather the refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation”

-Audre Lorde from Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. Sister Outsider