Who Am I?

A Spunky Nun Sets Me on a Path of Self-Inquiry

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The following is from a talk I gave at a meeting of the Insight Meditation Circle of Cape Cod. I was asked to speak on my experience at a recent day-long silent meditation retreat I had participated in. The theme of the night’s meeting was “Who am I?”:

The question “Who am I?” always takes me back to my favorite teacher of all time, Sister Vera. She was a legend at my high school; passionate, vibrant, loving, and tough. On the first day of her senior honors English seminar, she presented the class with this very same question: “Who am I?”

But don’t answer, she said, I just want you to contemplate the question throughout the school year. So of course, I took things to an extreme and contemplated it for forty years. I’m still contemplating.

But actually, what I didn’t realize was that I had inadvertently switched out the question “Who am I?” with “Who do I want to be?” And that’s quite a different thing, isn’t it? A question of desire rather than honest looking in the here and now. In fact, the desire to become is one of the three types of desire in the Buddhist canon: the desire to acquire or gain something, the desire to reject or annihilate something, and the desire to become something.

And so, really, I obsessed on the desire to become something for forty years. What do I want to do for a living? That was the big one for me, and still is. Am I stuck being a contractor all my life? Couldn’t I be a teacher, a musician, a writer, a sculptor? A rich entrepreneur? Where do I want to live? How do I want to make my mark? I must be more than this. Better than this. I was so busy thinking about what I wanted to be that I never really took the time to look at who I was. Who I am, right here and right now, without desire, without judgement, without a gaining idea, without the distraction of any preconceived notions of success, status, or distinction.

It's only in the last three or four years, through meditation and reading and listening to the Dharma and practicing mindfulness that I’ve begun to see this clearly—the difference between desire and awareness—and begun to take a good hard look at who I am right here and right now, in this moment, in this body, in this space.

So, Deb wanted me to share my experience at the silent meditation retreat, which the Sangha held at the Quaker Meeting House in Sandwich a little over a week ago.

My experience was mixed, to say the least. I had a bit of a hard time, to be honest, both physically and emotionally.

Physically, I hurt my back. Now I have to tell people I hurt my back meditating; that’s not embarrassing! But I chose to sit in the half-lotus position all day*. I don’t know if I was trying to prove something to myself or others but even when I started to hurt pretty badly, I kept sitting like that. I didn’t listen to my body. I was holding my back and my stomach and my shoulders too rigidly. I woke up the next day with this terrific knot in my upper back, and it’s still there, though slowly healing, over a week later. Sometimes it’s good not to “scratch the itch,” but pain like that is not a distraction, it’s your body trying to tell you something important. I should have taken my inspiration from Jim, who knows that at his age, chair meditation is best for him, no qualms about it. Or at least switched off between the chair and the cushion.

The full-lotus position

Emotionally? I think that was even harder. I’m kind of an introvert—well, very much an introvert—and to be in a room no bigger than this one with ten other people for eight hours was awkward enough. Add to that no talking, no eye contact, and periodic walking meditation, which I’ve never really done with others before, and I was in pretty unfamiliar territory.

At some point in the afternoon, I realized I felt like a stranger to myself. My sense of self was becoming rather hazy and unclear. Thinking about it—a lot—later on, I realized that without anyone looking at me, saying my name, smiling at me, helping me to remember who I think I am—a real person named Don Boivin, a nice guy, a loveable guy, someone who matters, someone who exists—my idea of self was dissolving, disappearing. I realized how much I rely on others to validate my self-image. A smile, a compliment, a little recognition, it doesn’t take much to help me build and maintain this identity. Last week I think I realized that this self I take for granted is nebulous; not nearly as solid a structure as I believed.

Well, I recently read in one of Pema Chodron’s books where she went to her teacher during a retreat and said, “It’s not working, I can’t meditate, I can’t concentrate.” She had a litany of concerns, I forget what they were now, but her teacher replied, “Good! If you said everything was going well, then I would be concerned.” So, at least I know I’m in good company.

This week I’ve been thinking about this theme, the question, Who am I?, a lot, and I ended up doing some writing in my journal about it. I wonder if I could share that journal entry with you. It’s just a short piece, and then I’ll be done talking.

Journal, 10/26/2023

When I say, “my hands” or “my heart” or refer to any part of my body as a possession of mine, like “my suitcase” or “my car,” it is, in a sense, cleaving the self into two parts: the body part itself, and the I that possesses it. I, like most I’m sure, have always taken this idea, that my body is mine, for granted, and never really questioned too deeply who is the “I” that is somehow separate enough from the body to think it owns it. It’s just my soul, my essence, that part of me that isn’t my body, I always assumed.

Well, but when I really think about it, I realize that there is not a single part of my body, from my toes to my torso to my organs, brain, and even my mind, that I would not refer to as mine. Even my thoughts, feelings, emotions, and perceptions I consider mine. Even this so-called soul or “essence.” So where, for goodness’ sake, is the I that possesses these things? Where, where, where?

I have to face the fact that it isn’t anywhere. It doesn’t exist. There is no Don Boivin essence. Upon close examination, my self dissolves into nothing. It’s like a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass. Just a collection of dots; and magnified even further, mostly just a bunch of space.

I’m guessing this is what Buddhist thought means by “emptiness.”

And it’s nothing to be frightened of, really, because the fact is, this emptiness, this lack of an independent self, is also the case for every other living thing on the planet, including all my friends and family.

And I’m still alive, I still feel things like love and compassion, fear and anxiety. I still enjoy a good movie, a walk in the woods, and get super nervous if I have to speak in public. Nothing really changes. Except, maybe, when I remember that I’m no more than, or no less than, a dandelion blooming in the sun, here today, gone tomorrow, made of nothing but mulch and organic matter, a part of the whole structure of the universe; when I remember this, this emptiness, it’s actually kind of liberating, and maybe, just maybe, with this awareness, I take this whole drama called me and my life a little less seriously, and I relax just a little bit more, and am more open to the simple pleasures around me, and maybe even have a little more patience and love and understanding for the rest of the cast and crew in this drama, who are just as empty, and yet also just as full, as I am.

Thank you, and thank you to Sister Vera, who is invisible now, but abiding yet, and as real as she ever was.

*I later learned that it is the “Burmese” meditation position I have been employing, the half-lotus being one step up in difficulty. The full-lotus position, I am convinced, is for skinny-legged people who have been practicing extreme yoga for most of their lives.

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