MY OWN WALKING - Winterval Journal 2025/26

' No one, after your death is going to say why weren't you more like this or that,?  

You should ask yourself, why weren't you more your self?'  
Koshin Paley Ellison 

Once you start to pull at the threads and implications of this statement, all the pretenses and social conformities of modern life begin to unveil themselves before your eyes. Are we ever truly ourselves, what is that anyway, how would we know, how would we recognise what our true self even looks or feels like? Being more your self, doesn't mean nestling into you and your opinions and to hell with everyone else, quite the opposite actually. But this inevitably is our starting place. We retreat into recollecting our past life.

I try to locate a sense of myself somewhere in this self composed narrative I call my life story. If I reflect on that story as I habitually relate it, this has quite often been in pursuit of some ideal I had, for who I might become. And that thought required me to be a particular person, that thinks and behaves in a particular way. You could say that from ones childhood through your teenage years, you are trying on qualities or personas to see if they fit you. You experiment with, and reimagine your future self, what is not yet fully formed in your sense of your self, what you might turn out to be. The 'your' becomes inextricably entwined with 'the self 'into the compound word 'yourself', revolving through our imaginative teenage cos play.

So much of our teenage angst revolves around perceptions and expectations of ourselves as a particular gender. What you imagine as a man or woman you should be like. Now, quite often I'd think I ought to be this supremely confident man, sure of who he was, clear about what I wanted, was ambitious, took risks, and had a go for it attitude, to make things happen by sheer assertive force of personality or will. A man was physically and mentally strong, extraordinarily capable and forthright about what they believe. This form of masculinity was a stance we were supposed to adopt. The problem for me was, I wasn't at all sure I had these qualities, nor whether I wanted some of them.

Once I realised I was gay, this began a process of decoupling myself from making comparisons with who I was against the mirror of this masculine stereotype. One I'd been finding myself perpetually falling short of. There are, however, numerous ways of being a man, the majority of them chronically under explored and under used. Mainly because the cultural constraints placed on what masculinity is and isn't, are very tightly drawn. The current controversy over gender, is founded upon a clash of quite extreme viewpoints on what a man or a woman is. That its either a fixed binary or a broad flexible spectrum, entirely biologically or fully culturally determined, in a traditional versus a progressive view of manhood. And the clash of these polarities, these two, actually quite flawed certainties, has produced not one resolution, but one hell of a mess on the floor. 

Gender has many aspects that condition and fix it, whilst also being a cultural performance, a mode of outward self expression of an inner sense of identity. I recognise that this is currently a contentious issue, because gender and sexual orientation are vital constituent parts of who we are. Yet, this is not the bee all and end all of life, not the complete package, particularly when you ask why weren't you more yourself? And your answer becomes - this is what I was allowed to be.

Whether a traditional man, a gay man or non-binary, these are just ideas, conceptions about who you are that we lay over ourselves, they are ultimately not who you are really. If we fix too much of our identity and value onto these notions, they can become cages too, which we never allow ourselves to step outside of. No longer permitting ourselves to be contradictory, contrary or inconsistent individuals. We actively curate and contain who we believe we are. Making ourselves fit the stereotype,whether inherited or self created.

One of my spiritual teachers once said, 'There's only one thing worse than not getting what you want, and that's getting what you want' . Once you achieve your aim and fully arrive at 'yourself', this no doubt much longed for destination, after the euphoria has died down, there is a moment of anti-climax, a realisation that this is not quite the end of the journey you thought it was. You may have resolved one inner conflict, only to find others rising up to start clamoring for their resolution too. Never ever allow yourself to become the maid servant of your dissatisfaction, you'll be run ragged.

When I first encountered Buddhism, I was being run ragged by my dissatisfaction. Not a happy bunny at all. Buddhist meditation and teachings landed in an extremely needy, but receptive lap. I had for a while, what is commonly called Beginners Mind, a naturally open and eager receptivity to whatever I was presented with, this went in deeper and I had a clearer sense of the potential Buddhism was pointing me towards. And then it suddenly became quite ordinary, as though the beacon of light got dimmed. It was an activity I did devotedly every morning, because consistency in practice is extolled, commitment considered a quality to be cultivated. Binding ourselves tightly without a rope, to things we have found some value in, or are reputedly still beneficial. 

Once we start being a practicing Buddhist, a Christian or Moslem, we define ourselves by these names. And what we truly are becomes lost in the accretion of centuries old metaphysics and doctrinal frameworks. Any faith can be an expedient means, a necessary road upon which we travel in order to get ourselves to a place where we no longer need it. To a place where we can be free of any terms, designations and strategies, where the search for meaning and self importance retire themselves. However, we are more likely to find ourselves getting stuck, trapped in thinking we need to be a particular spiritual person in a particular spiritual way. It's not necessarily the religions fault, this is just what humans tend to do, we conform ourselves to our misconceptions.

In the Buddhist Heart Sutra it recounts all the things that the state of Enlightenment is not. Its not a thing that our senses can name, grasp or define, its not a thing our desires can obtain, its not even a thing really. At the conclusion comes a mantra that urges you to be gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond That appears to remove Enlightenment so far from our actual lived experience, to be comparable to an unbelievable fantasy. As Dogen put it - in order to be yourself, you need to forget yourself.

Though it does have its predictive oracles every time we meditate. As you let go of associative thought patterns, current mental obsessions, the concerns and fetishes surrounding your self definition, your sense of purpose or analysing the meaning of your meditation experience. Somewhere in the fleetingly brief disappearance of mental chitter chatter, the moments where you let go of stridently insisting on 'yourself' being you, who you really are, a freedom from all concepts, naming, definitions and expectations, tentatively emerges, blinks, pops like a bubble and is gone. For one liberated moment  the 'your' becomes decoupled from the 'self'' leaving it denuded and free to fly.