Rediscovering Identity: A Journey Beyond Doing

I am not what I’m thinking, I am who I’m being. A human being, not a human doing.

It is coming up to 6 months now since I left England to spend time with my mum in Thailand.  I had felt increasingly that I was becoming more and more disconnected from myself as I buried myself deeper and deeper into doing more and more, feeling that I was trapped on a fast paced treadmill taking me further away from knowing who I am.

I had decided several months before my departure date that I would leave and worked and saved hard to allow myself enough financial reserves to take an extended time out from working.  My aim was to join my mum in a peaceful area of Northern Thailand and reconnect with myself to figure out who is Emily.

My decision was not precipitated by any calamitous event, if anything, looking through the eyes of traditional “success” I was well on my way.  I had a loving partner, I was spearheading my own project at work and was slowly but surely growing my private Personal Training business. Yet there was a continuous nagging feeling that this wasn’t the right path for me.  Despite these “advances”, I was feeling more than ever that  I could not decipher who I was as a person.  My days endlessly looped around hours of work, training, binge watching Netflix and gardening; my mind constantly chattering about how to “improve” my situation amid feeling a deep sense of lack.  I found my mindset hardening as I increasingly used logic to solve my way out of my situations (useful when dealing with logical situations such as how to get my bike started when the battery is flat, not often the case when trying to navigate the vagaries of life).  In addition to this I was dogged by dreams of sitting at airports waiting for a flight to take me away.  Plagued by doubt as to whether I should listen to my dreams and whether leaving was the right thing to do, I spontaneously purchased a plane ticket to Thailand. Sharing the news with Kelly was difficult, a communications event I messed up, and yet she only became my strongest supporter as I prepared my departure.

With hindsight, my departure from the UK coincidentally coincided with the rise of Covid-19 and had I left it any longer, I would have missed the opportunity of being here.  My focus when I first arrived out here involved having a routine of physical activity, massages to eliminate excess tension in my body and to help heal a motorbiking accident, a strict eating regime (no grains or coffee!) and to figure myself out, all at once.  I was still carrying the adrenaline charged, iron-fisted, dopamine-addicted tendencies from my recent lifestyle and I did battle with the new influences of meditation and Buddhist and Taoist teachings that my mum brought to the table.  There was conflict not only externally but internally too and on any given day it would either be the routinely physical mindset dominating or the mindless meditation attempting to push the reset button.  Over time though I felt myself dropping more of the ideas and beliefs I had about myself and a small glimmer of who Emily is has started shinning through.

I was not my likes or dislikes, I was not my jobs (past, present or future), I was not my fashion sense, my genetic inheritance, my failures or triumphs, I was not my thoughts, I was not my emotions.  Instead what I realised was that I am responsible for dropping all these notions of who I think I am and instead need to learn to live at one with nature and humanity in a way that promotes sustainability and yes, love.