Who are you? 
What costume do you wear?  
What story do you tell yourself about yourself?
Who are you?  Really?

As I head off to Rowe Camp and Conference Center to lead the workshop entitled “Feed Your Soul: Change Your Weight,” I review my story in my own head. (As if I could review it in someone else’s head.)  My “I was fat; now I am thin” story. “I was this; now I am that” story.  Very entertaining, inspiring and motivating stories, by the way.  Worth the trip to Rowe.  I digress…

Point being…
… As we most certainly build our identity out of that story that we repeat to ourselves over and over again, inside our head, every minute of the day (endlessly, really); then let us create a better story.

Let us build an “I can” story.  An “I love” story.  A story of happiness, compassion and health.   Once our identity is a good one, even a great one, one that we are at peace with, then let’s get radical and simply hold our identity as one beloved by God, the Universe, the Store Consciousness, the Mystery.  As Albert would say, “Let go of the optical delusion.”

Chew on that while you read through these 14 juicy quotes, and give pause for thought about your identity.  Who are you?  Really?

#OneWord Thursday: IDENTITY
14 Juicy Quotes to Help SHAPE Your Story

1. In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight. ~ Ram Dass
2. We know what we are, but not what we may be. ~ Shakespeare
3. I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line. ~ Jeanette Winterson
4. We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. ~ Albert Einstein
5. If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing. ~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
6. The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness. ~ John O’Donohue
7. Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others. ~ Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
8. I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist…I am a person who does those things. ~ Edward Gorey
9. I’ve tried
   to become someone else for a while,
   only to discover that he, too, was me. ~ Stephen Dunn
10. I protect myself by refusing to know myself. ~ Floriano Martins
11. Be not another, if you can be yourself. ~ Paracelsus
12. How do you know you are who you are? How do you know you’re not simply a clone of who you think you are? ~ Jarod Kintz, $3.33
13. We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core. Without them, we are empty. ~ Daisy Whitney, The Rivals
14. Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting. ~ Donald Van de Mark, The Good Among the Great: 19 Traits of the Most Admirable, Creative, and Joyous PeopleFor more positivity, visit our Facebook/Kick in the Tush Club  chapter!
    
    Spread the word–NOT the icing!Janice

    PS:  Dictated but not read by OLWL.  Excuse all typos!

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