The Starting Point

My mind never really turns off, so I stopped trying to force it to.
I learned to build the environment that quiets it through movement, focus, and connection — things that command my undivided attention so there’s no room for thought to creep in.

Because when I’m aligned, I’m free.
Not led by fear, which needs a center to protect.
A false sense of self to guide.
Without that, I’m responding to reality through no filter.
Just direct perception.

I used to treat every thought I had like it was true.
I never challenged them.
I never imagined something I believed so deeply could be wrong.
Only through direct observation and reflection did my lens widen enough to see my thoughts aren’t reality — they’re interpretations of it.
Interpretations distorted by my limited context.

Once I considered more than I concluded, I became curious enough to make a practice out of turning the lens on myself — to strip the stories that constructed a self that never served me and lived in fear out of a false sense of security.

You can’t change something you can’t see.
You need a reference point.
So I confronted them.
Looked long enough to understand where they came from, how they found their way back, and what needed to go.

I saw I was the common denominator in every experience I had.
And that I, with all the labels I claimed, my judgments, fears, my past, the fortress I subconsciously built around myself…
what was left beneath all of that was what I feared most: the unknown.
But that’s where I’d find the real me.

Once I could let go of all of that — what I knew, what held me together, what caused me pain — without it, I might finally come through.
Not who I think I am as I know it,
but the me that’s left today when I release every story.
Who I am right now.
And who I’ve always been, buried beneath the paint I let dry on the canvas of my mind.

That part of me isn’t shaped by color, words, or definitions.
It’s something underneath that.
It’s in all of us.

There, we are whole as we are.
Present.
Not static, but dynamic beings.

That’s what it means to be alive.
That’s what it means to be free.