Power of Identity – “Style for Creating”

The inherent creative power of our mind is to co-create experiences that we then use as a creative tool to define us. While our body naturally forms union with an experience by performing it, or creating the behavior of the experience, the conscious mind identifies itself as the person having the experience. The nature of the experience gives us a sense of ourselves that form our very core which becomes the story-teller in our lives as a consistent and congruent idea. While behavior can be modified or directly changed, identity is permanent.
Our identity - id (ego) – entity (exists as real, distinct and self-contained) – is primarily created through external influences. The ego is the aspect of the mind that causes us to seek ourselves through external means. We look outside of ourselves as a way of gaining a sense of ourselves. We have an experience, which activates and calls forth certain aspects of our inner being that we use to interact, which exercises and strengthens those qualities while at the same time we begin identifying with them. Every situation causes an internal response that provokes certain thoughts and emotions, and we then form a reaction to our own emotional thoughts. Our identity first births the very thoughts that we have an emotional reaction to, then we get a sense of our self as our emotional reactions and identify with them “as if” they are real. Through this constant process of our outer experience determining our inner experience we get a sense of who we are in relationship to the external world. With this orientation, we are subject to and shaped by other people, situations, circumstances, and conditions that seem beyond our control.
Our identity, which initially is developed without our awareness or direct participation through our conditioning, becomes our character as the very core of determining what kind of stories we are capable of telling. Just like in a story, myth or movie, our character becomes the story-teller of our life. All of our stories about our experiences, other people, and the way things are is based on what our character naturally produces. It’s the primary filter through which we perceive reality itself as a congruent and ongoing theme of a particular genre’.
This is an eternal psychological Principle that few truly understand. Whenever we come into new situation or relationships, and we notice immediately how we feel, what is being stimulated in us, or what part of us it’s calling forth, this is revealing to us the natural ability for personal development that that situation, environment or relationship has to offer. If we stay in it, continue with the relationship or placing ourselves in that environment, we not only bring those qualities right to the foreground and begin developing them through the nature of our interaction, but also begin identifying with how we feel and express ourselves as a result. If we’re in a situation that makes us feel bad, stimulates negative emotions, and we stay in it for a period of time, it will literally reshape our identity based on the emotions we experience. We will become the type of person who has those emotions. Those emotions will become filters for how we perceive the world around us and the nature of the experiences we have as a result.
All transformation requires a shift in our identity. How we sense ourselves in relationship with, or contrast to the external, material world. We must cultivate the ability to create new situations and experiences, that when we identify with them, changes how we sense our self, how we feel about our self as an interaction with them. Knowing this, we can use it as a tool for affecting our identity in a desirable manner. Our identity has the natural tendency to show up the same way in every situation and simply express the same identity over and over. Instead of allowing a situation to transform us, we act subconsciously to transform the situation to conform to our habitual ways of perceiving ourselves. Our primary identity as our key mental model forms our comfort zone. Once comfortable with a particular identity, we are extremely reluctant to change, not because we don’t want to per say, but because we literally don’t know how to. Our conditioned identity becomes the main pattern for how we create experiences as a general rule of thumb.
Many times, even when we are given a new situation that we could use to create a new experience of ourselves, we instead just bring the same attitude and story with us and retell it in the new environment. This happens because we remain unaware of how to actually promote a transformative experience. In order to consciously create, we must create an ideal of ourselves based on the qualities, traits and characteristics that we desire to develop in ourselves. Our ideal becomes the creative vision or composition for us to aspire towards. We can notice what people and situations speak to those qualities in us, and we can increase those relationships. Once we decide who, how and what kind of person we desire to be, we can engage in consciously embodying those new qualities in more expressive ways. We can begin telling new stories about our self that fashion us in new and inspiring ways. We can determine who we want to become and consciously act to orchestrate our life in such a way that it serves to naturally stimulate new and more desirable qualities making them available for new levels of expression.

Linda Gadbois, DES., CCHt.