I’ve been thinking a lot about identity. It started when I began to see all of the times in my life that my identity had been erased by a catastrophic change. Each of those traumas forced a cleaning of the slate, making me take a hard look at what I thought was my identity. Each was an opportunity to reinvent myself. There was freedom and creativity in that. The latest coup was cancer, and it wiped out everything in my life.

What is identity, anyway? It’s how we locate ourselves in the context of being human. It’s where we think we belong. It’s a function of the ego. We define ourselves, and let others define us, by the categories of our birth. What if I wasn’t a white-skinned American Boomer of Roma gypsy descent? But what if I wasn’t tall or short, fat or thin? We also define ourselves by the roles we play. What if I wasn’t a mother, or a cancer survivor? But what if I wasn’t rich or poor, single or married? What if I was none of any of these things––what if I was identity-free?

I’ve been practicing what it feels like to be No Identity. To do this I experience my body as a small spaceship, currently traveling through time on planet earth. There are a lot of spaceships around me. I hear myself judging my spaceship or those of others, trying to stop time and pin down identity. Then I stop, and take a moment to acknowledge No Identity. We all occupy the same space. That space is continuous, inside of us and outside of us. When expand my energy into that continuous space, into Zone, all judgement falls away.

Identity is what defines us as separate, it divides us. What we all have in common is the energy that fuels us––Life Force, God-Energy––and the opportunity to travel through this time on this planet, together.