Do you keep trying to fit yourself into boxes or make yourself fit?
A More Helpful Way of Seeing Yourself
We spend so much of our lives trying to define ourselves.
Trying to understand who we are, to explain ourselves, and to find the right box.
And of course, this is deeply human. It helps us make sense of the world and keeps us safe. It can help us feel we belong and understand ourselves.
But is it always helpful?
Because the moment we place ourselves into a box — even a beautiful or meaningful one — something can begin to tighten. We lose some of our fluidity, stop listening to where life might naturally be moving us, and stop allowing ourselves to change shape.
This reflection came through very spontaneously one day while I was recording a Present Moment Moment. I actually lost my train of thought halfway through the video — and then suddenly another image arrived entirely.
A much friendlier way of seeing ourselves.
Imagine yourself as part of a constellation.
Not as a fixed identity, or a single label, or one final definition of who you are, but rather as a star within a constellation in the night sky.
Take Sirius, for example, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major. Seen from Earth, it appears to us as part of a particular arrangement in the sky, where the stars form a recognisable pattern.
But now imagine you’re able to travel through the universe and look again at that same cluster of stars from a different angle. That same constellation would appear completely differently. The stars themselves would not have changed, but the relationship between them would look different depending on where you’re standing. It would seem like a different constellation, but it is the same cluster of stars. And Sirius continues to shine as brightly as before.
Something about this feels deeply important to me.
Imagine you are Sirius, and what you connect and relate to is your constellation: the sacred web you are a part of, and that you receive from and give to.
Connected to all that is — nature, other people, memory, culture, the unseen, your body, and the cosmos itself — including the spaces in between, like the ever-changing colours that move through the night sky as we see it from Earth.
And depending on where we are looking from, different parts of us come into view, both from outside and from within. But Sirius keep on shining brightly.
For me, there is something relieving and permission-giving in this. We do not need to know exactly who we are at all times. We can shift and change, and yet our light still shines when we are anchored and grounded in ourselves.
It softens the man-made pressure to finally arrive at one perfect definition of ourselves that fits into a box we will always be too large for when we are truly being ourselves.
You are a living being in relationship with a larger whole. You are not fixed or fully explainable, and perhaps you were never meant to be.
Perhaps there is something gentler, easier, and more fulfilling in simply embracing your light and the mystery of who you are.
Written with ♡ from under the Magnolia tree
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Julia Kyambi is a medical doctor turned intuitive somatic guide.
She guides deep-feeling, soulful people on their journey of inner homecoming.
You can read more about me here.