Moving To Identify Yourself Through The Maze Of Distractions That Life Presents

Some years ago while managing a "Family Camp” at a refugee center in the Pacific, I came across the term “Stateless.”

?I explored what this meant.

Displaced, homeless, citizenshipless, refugee, nationless.

Stateless people have no legal protection, and no right to vote, and they lack access to education, employment, health care, and property rights. Currently, there are ten million plus stateless people around the globe. They live without hope, safety, and stability and are completely stuck where they are. I have seen it in their eyes. To me, their eyes appeared dead, deep in their forehead, solid and dark.

?We become stateless, even if, only in our minds, when we are searching for meaning, searching for a stable influence in our lives. When we are in the depth of change when we struggle to know who we are, afraid of what might become of us, frozen in time and place. Is feeling stateless a way to travel through life??

This is a time to mobilize, a time to recognize this is only part of the longer journey of life. One foot in front of the other, attempting to stabilize our thoughts and actions.

?The child growing up with the inner critic voice becoming louder in their ear as the years go by, experiences statelessness. Belongs nowhere and belongs to nobody. Almost “faceless” unidentified, attempting to emerge out of the wilderness in order to self-identify.?

Moving to identify yourself through the maze of distractions that life presents, put the child growing up in a haze of uncertainty, destabilizing them further.

Learning to identify who we are, gives the individual room to move forward into deep self-knowing and provides a deeper understanding of where they belong, in the family, in the community, and in the workplace. Through reflection, both of the self and the mirroring presented to us?we move to a greater understanding of our own potential.

?One of the most fulfilling gifts as a Coach, Mentor/therapist is to experience my clients coming out of the haze. Saying no to the distractions, the inner critic voices. Being fully present in the moment, acknowledging who they have become.

In my experience, my clients often display the same sunken eyes and demeanor as stateless people—the obvious difference, of course, is that they are not technically stateless.?Stateless people have no choice: we do.?But we often don’t realize that we do.

Statelessness is the space in which the Inner Critic thrives.?The ability to notice it is also the ability to control it.?Control begins with the fundamental understanding: although we can feel stateless—from our families, our businesses, maybe even our countries and ideas—we still have the internal power to decide how to act.

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The liberation is in becoming that “Self-made individual” who formulates their own path and stabilizes themselves through their own knowing. Having both feet on the ground, with deep wisdom through knowledge and understanding as to where they fit in a world that presents mostly through the eyes of others.

I believe that every individual, without exception, is valuable and deserves to be considered and respected. Including ourselves.