The Cage of Identity

'We are all living in cages with the doors wide open'. This poignant and startling quote from George Lucas was delicately dropped into my life a few weeks back as I strolled along the beach at sunrise and passed by one of our wonderful community members - one of those deeply intuitive people who speaks with such precision to the moment. At that time, I was in contemplation around identity and mulling over this subject through the context of yoga. I was - and I still am - having one of those excellent moments in the journey, where the understanding of a topic that has been reflected upon for a long time, begins to appear like the landscape beneath a lifting fog.

Since leaving the music industry little by little over the past 10 years and yoga pouring in to fill every presented space, there has been a lot that's come up for me around identity, direction and life meaning. The circumstances of my family life demanded I make some changes a decade ago; I needed to be around more, I needed to be sober more, I needed to be powerful in a way that was not forced and was not fragile like the false power of dictators and aggressors but the kind of steady calm power that could not be disputed. The kind that may even hold sway for a slight woman, who finds herself confronting a room full of meth dealers and rapists, encouraging them to take a good hard look at themselves whilst maintaining compassion.

We all pick and choose our own 'team'. The people we believe to be our kind of people because of the most superficial reasonings and subsequently put up barriers to those we determine are not. Sometimes this is essential for safety and that has to be honoured but for the most part, it is simply to feed and 'protect' that which we reaffirm within ourselves to be our identity. We validate that identity by confirming similar traits and ideolgoies in the people we place around us. Our 'like-minded' kin. I've always been for what I've determined the underdog. Those who I see through the colourings of my own mind, to be the ones in suffering. Doesn't life have a wonderful way of teaching us a thing or two about judgement? Some people have their judgements around the poor, others have them around the rich. Of the educated or of the not so privileged. Some judge by skin colour or gender. Whatever parameters we run with, we build our own cage. We shrink our world and as a consequence our own opportunity. Forgetting that any person in any moment might be the one to give us the gem of wisdom that changes our life from that moment on.

So often in friendship, in business, even within family we allow the bars of our likes or dislikes to build our own tiny little cage, to live a tiny little life, without even knowing it. Where do you find your biases? What stirs you? How do you react when someone is or has, something different to you? Particularly a differing a opinion? It can take a lot of work breaking down judgements, rarely a week goes by when an opportunity doesn't present for me to see my own judgements. Just this week I found myself being critical of a very famous motivational speaker. Then, when one of my dear friends challenged me on it, I realised how little I really even knew directly about this person and how much judgement was coming from this underdog attitude that derided the rich - old attitudes coming from a working class lineage.

How can we start to see these things that we have absorbed so wholly as our own story, that they have become invisible to us? When we are deep in our conditioning it's like the fish that doesn't think anything of the water, it is simply what is. In order to see our cage we must take small steps outside of it - into spaces that are not part of the normal grooves we tread over and over again. What happens when we take a little side step? When we place ourselves into a space that is not part of our norm? Being with people who speak another language or do line dancing when our love is hip hop? Can we be open enough to simply have a wonderful time? Can we talk with as much ease to the homeless as we can to the mansioned?

It's a big, beautiful, diverse Universe out there, how much of it are you missing out on because of the cage that you maintain?