Re-membering

Give some thought to this idea: the ego may not create a false self so much as assemble a fragmented self from what happened to us. Experiences that were overwhelming, painful, or simply too complex to integrate can become compartmentalized. We learn to put certain memories, emotions, fears, and identities into separate rooms of the psyche. Over time, the collection of rooms distills into who we believe we are.

However, our deeper self may be much larger than the architecture we constructed to survive.

That makes re-membering an especially rich word. To remember is literally to bring back together—to re-member. Perhaps healing and spiritual maturation are not primarily about becoming someone new, but about gathering the scattered pieces of ourselves back into relationship with one another.

And perhaps knowing who we really are is what begins to happen when the fragments no longer have to defend their separate existence.

The constructed ego says, “This is who I am because this is what happened to me.”

Re-membering begins to ask, “Who am I beneath what happened to me?”

The journey, then, is not the destruction of the ego. It is the integration of the fragmented self—the gradual discovery that beneath the identities, defenses, wounds, memories, and stories lies a more complete self that was never actually destroyed, only dispersed.