No other life form on earth has this struggle.  This confusion is unique to the human specie.

Humans can confuse their identity with what they do, e.g., teacher, musician, artist, attorney, physician, stay-at-home Mom, etc.

Our kind often associates our identity by our accomplishments, e.g., Ph.D., Chair. of the Board, an award winning building design, All American Athlete, Super Bowl Champions.

We associate our identity with our unique abilities, e.g., a "natural" athlete, a prodigy, a 182 IQ, being a clairvoyant, active imagination -- authors of Harry Potter, Star Trek.

We label ourselves by our genetics, e.g., African American, the rarest AB negative blood type, Family Genealogies -- Daughters of the American Revolution.

We draw conclusions about who we are by our associations, e.g., our Masonic order, Democrat, Rotarian, Teamsters, Fraternal Order of Police, Doctors Without Borders.

Our identity is often related to our sexual orientation, e.g., gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual.

We can conform to our physical stereotyping, e.g., having M.S., being a jogger, obese people are lazy, large breasts translate into attractiveness, being paralyzed -- stroke.

We can lose our identity when it is based in externals which change, e.g., I'm now retired, I am Martha Stewart, I was an executive at Enron, I'm 75, I watched my investment port folio vaporize, I am a sixth degree karate black belt with a paralyzing spinal injury.

None of these associations are accurate or even close to establishing who we are.  Many of them only apply to us Americans during these unique moments in history.  Being clear on this may help and encourage you to examine our identities more closely.  Think more universally, i.e., globally. Who are you?

We do arrive with a vast array of genetic codes that will determine certain predispositions concerning how our bodies will grow.

We are immediately acted on by external stimuli that will make imprints, e.g., being touched, fed, held and loved, toys that educate -- items that provide an orientation to our new surrounding.

We are created from the same essence as our Creator.  God cannot create anything less.  As we enter solid form, we lose some memory of our identity.  However, infinite possibilities await our discovery -- the primitive tribal craftsman whose wood carvings appear without formal instruction, the four year old who "knows" the piano as a master.

Our new setting will provide the matrix for our learning.  We excel more quickly when intuitive teachers encourage us, as soon as possible, to develop what we brought with us.  Most teachers, however, instruct us in skills for surviving in our physical environment.

When Spirituality becomes a science, the process of helping one another to awaken to our vast potential will be greatly accelerated.  We will learn that our thoughts create, that our emotions grow in the directions we choose and that our specific life curriculum will begin to greet us immediately.  Currently we are on our own.  Many of us experience our sojourn on the earth as confusing and without purpose.  We accept our interpretation of life instead of finding awakened masters, or spiritual directors who could guide and mentor us.  This class of beings currently is not organized or recognized culturally.  Priests currently hold this role, but many of them are locked in ancient insights that were handed down from their tribal past.  In the future, specific teachers will guide people more carefully through the processes of awakening by instructing "students" in the futility of certain thought patterns that can imprison them with illusionary attractions to and for the elements of our physical world.

No vocational or economic status will spare individuals from proceeding through the doors of their awakening and seeking application for their discovered skills.  Many will not succeed because of imprinted associations that have confused them.  When we cease being a student who is seeking further refinement of our spiritual identity, we begin believing that we are who we think we are -- power, prestige, authority, etc.  When we make these assumptions, we have sentenced ourselves to one of life's plateaus -- which translates into delay.

Begin studying your reasons, excuses and reactions for refusing to see your life's painful episodes as lessons that are perfectly designed and suited for your growth.  Many of these lessons will come in the tailor made forms of disrespect, injustice, loss of heath, rapid and unexpected changes, a loss of confidence, failure, arrested with a DUI, using "bad" judgment, betrayal.

Stop waiting for God to show up in your life, i.e., to save you, to perform miracles on your behalf, to light your path or to enable you to experience wholeness.  Practice making this ever present, unconditionally loving God visible in each experience.  Forget protecting your own self-respect.  Your identity will begin to soar from using the vast powers you were given at birth.  When you defend yourself, you are actually preventing a lesson from being recognized for what it is.  Understand this "game plan" and recognition of what is happening will come much more easily.  The goal?  Control over your responses from the consciousness of "knowing."

Refuse to "hang out" with those who consider themselves victims.  Victims will never heal and they actually feed on their increasing empathy with other people's wounds.  Support Groups are wonderful for supplying a new orientation, but soon your identity becomes absorbed with rehearsing and keeping alive what is past and cannot be changed.  Always live in the present.  Your pain is an unpolished marker in your life and nothing more.

Prevent yourself for putting someone on a pedestal because they appear "to have it all together," "they are the economic success I want to be," "their life is filled with wonderful opportunities."  When you scrape off the "stuff" we frequently project on others, we learn that they are just as vulnerable to their unlearned lessons as the rest of us.  Study them closely and you will learn from them or from their mistakes that all of us are standing on a level playing field.  What separates us are the artificial accouterments and ambience people use to surround themselves or that we have imagined as being valuable assets.  Both assumptions create delay.