My and I

In life we are often busy with ‘my’ and ‘I’. This is also what we mostly learn from our parents and at school. I want to become a doctor, I want a certain partner/ house, my dream is to have this, my car is etc. This is al natural and at the same time it is never ending. It is not that when we have our partner, house or car, that we really change. We still stay the same because we didn’t really change, only the things around us changed.

Not often do we look more closely to those words; ‘my’ and ‘I’. Let start with the word ‘my’. When we look at our hand, we can say “my hand” or “my finger”. We can also say my hair, my leg, my foot etc.. What is interesting in this is that the word my implies that there is also an ‘I’. If I say “my hand” it means I own this hand. The owner and the subject that is owned are two different things. So I can never be “my hand”, since ‘my’ implies that I am the owner of the hand and the owner is not the same as the object that is owned. If I say my car, my house or my cat, then nobody will think that I am that car, house or cat.

And then we arrive at the word ‘I’. What is this “I” exactly that owns the hand? It must be something with awareness and that is able to observe. With meditation we also learn more about this ‘I’. While we observe our thoughts and our body, we take distance from it. The observer and the thing that is being observed are never the same and there is a distance between them. And thus does meditation more than just make us feel better and more stable. It also learns us about ‘my’ and ‘I’, things we use or say every day, but take for granted without really understanding the meaning of it. For now I keep it at this, but we look further at this soon and if you have any question about this you can also reach out to me.