unconditional acceptance

It’s been a year since I completed my yoga teacher training, but it feels like a lifetime has passed. I use my YTT as a time marker because it feels like a large pivotal point not just in the past year but also within my lifetime. I’m sure it won’t be the last, but it certainly would be one of the first intentionally-chosen changes I made to my life. It encompassed a shift in values, in habits, in lifestyle, in understanding. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’m no longer the same person.

I guess on most days, people are pretty sure of who they are. But sometimes not only am I sure that I will continue to evolve, I am not sure that I will ever stop changing. How can I wrap my head about identifying something that can’t be consistently defined?

Which brings me to the central consideration of today - the age-old question of identity. Consider this thought experiment:

"The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late first century. Plutarch asked whether a ship that had been restored by replacing every single wooden part remained the same ship.”

Then feast your ears on this reel audio.

I was rather struck by the audio’s narrative, and I’ve found it managed to imprint in my mind. I suppose I continue to be me, but also, I am no longer the same. And this will continue to be the only constant, à la the only constant is change.

From an academic point of view, you may, like me, enjoy this explanation:

“…a significant group of psychology scholars would consider the ship not as a thing, not even as a collection of objectively existing parts (masts, frames, oars…), but as an organizational structure that has a perceptual continuity. When Theseus thinks about his ship, he has expectations about what he can find in each place, how the pieces interact with each other, and how they interact with the world at large, with the sea, with his crew, with those who see the ship approaching Athens. As long as there is a spatio-temporal continuity between this set of relationships, whatever timbers it has, it is the ship of Theseus.”

But I digress. My point is, we have to unconditionally accept ourselves - changes and all. Combined with the ever-stacking concept of self, we are then able to fully embrace the past versions of ourselves. Rather than cringing, denying, and perhaps questioning our journey (forward, backwards, in a loop…), we can understand compassionately our non-linear progress, simply because we can be the 10-year-old, 20-year-old, and 30-year-old in different moments to react to different contexts.

We have to promise to unconditionally embrace and accept ourselves - moment to moment in the present, but also the sum of you that has come to pass. Then, and only then, will we find integration. Wholeness. To know that what changes is merely the experience and your interpretation of it, your reflection of it, but inside, your one-ness remains, like an ocean containing all the waves that come and go, that is home to births and deaths, expansion and retrogression.