Losing Yourself

Doug Heatwole

​People often talk about finding themselves, about going off and being alone and looking inward to find who they really are. But the task that we really need to undertake is to lose ourselves, to remove ourselves from the center of our thinking. In Centering Prayer we let go of our thoughts, and we find that they want to keep on returning, they won't go away. Somehow we insist on being someone, even if we don't know who that is. But in losing yourself, you become part of the whole, indistinguishable from other individuals. And that gives us anguish; we can't or won't accept that we should be wrapped up with so much more than ourselves. But that is why death is so frightening to us, because we don't want to let ourselves go; we don't want to lose the one who we have nurtured and built up our whole lives long. Everything we have achieved, everything we have accumulated, everything about us is about to be sacrificed, taken away, blown to the wind. It seems such a waste, to have invested so much in who we are and then to just let it go. It doesn't make sense and we insist on hanging on by our nails to the very end, rather than just voluntarily offering ourselves to the whole. 

Entering into Centering Prayer is indeed practice for dying. Each day we practice letting ourselves go. When I realize I have returned to myself, to my foolish, self-centered thoughts and I consent to the Lord by allowing my sacred word to retake the foreground of my mind, I feel as if I am falling into the abyss. I experience weightlessness, a turning of my stomach as I freefall, not in control of my body or mind, a helplessness. It is a feeling of dread of my own mortality. I am terrified of the inevitable--my ultimate annihilation. I am a moment from nauseousness, a churning of my inwards, out of control, anticipating... I know not what. That is part of the inequilibrium, the disorientation, a loss of who I am, where I am, where I am going, who I will be.

Just when we think we are lost forever, the Lord rescues us, He saves us from the utter abyss. Our faith, at its core, if it is real, if it is existential - that seems twisted, ironic, because what I am seeing or questioning is whether I will continue to exist. If I let go, I won't exist - that is what I insist or want to keep insisting. I want to hold onto my version of reality, insisting that what I see, what I perceive, what I conceive is first and foremost true, not only true to me but true to everyone. I want everyone to see things my way. To surrender that is to sacrifice my ego. I will not let go, I will not say "uncle", I will not surrender. No, no, no. Before I will truly believe, truly trust in God, I want proof. Until God shows me that He has me, he loves me, he catches me, he saves me from my fall.

In transcendence, I discover that I was not falling into an abyss - I was suspended all along! It was my perception that the world was rushing by me, it was out of my grasp, out of my control. But from the beginning, God had me in His hands. I was never in danger of losing my identity. My identity isn't bound up with me in my head; my identity is bound up with God and safely embedded in His creation. It was only my mistaken view of reality, of my relationship to the Cosmos that was giving me this stomach-falling feeling of losing everything, when instead I was safe--saved--all along. I had said to myself that I believed that I was saved by God, but I wasn't trusting Him. I kept a steady fear of losing myself to eternity...until I had fallen safely into His Being, into the net woven and held between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A safety net woven and as intricate and beautiful as that of a numinous spider web. God seemed to catch me when I felt myself falling, but my senses had deceived me. I wasn't falling...God had me in his hands all along.

May our practice of Centering Prayer give us confidence that God has hold of us. May we realize that our feeling of losing ourself is a false-self-induced perception and not reality. Our continued return to the inner room and the sacred word is our consent to God’s presence and action: our acknowledgement that He has us.