Tat Tvam Asi
Reflections on trauma, life and what remains.
Tat Tvam Asi.
I have always loved the simplicity of these words.
They come from the Chāndogya Upanishad, where a father is teaching his son about the nature of reality. In the Vedantic tradition, they point towards something much larger than the individual self—the recognition that what we experience as separate is, in some deeper sense, not separate at all.
I don’t pretend to have resolved what that means.
But after 25 years of yoga, I feel a little closer.
I find myself wondering about it in many ways, especially in those moments when I sense into my aliveness, and into how far my inner kingdom—my freedom—reaches.
What if I am not separate from what has happened to me?
And yet, what if I am not only what has happened to me?
What if the fear, the shame, the anger, the vulnerabilities and ways of self-protection are all part of my experience—but none of them are the whole of me?
There is also the breath that I can change.
The body that I can choose to feel the warmth of the sun with.
The person sitting opposite me that I can acknowledge or ignore.
The possibility of laughter, a smile, a little bit of connection.
The possibility of love.
Life continuing to move.
This is where the teaching meets my own experience.
Not as an idea to understand, but as something to live into.
I can honour what has happened.
I can learn from it.
I can notice how it still shapes me.
And I can also choose not to keep building tomorrow from yesterday.
There is something very freeing in that.
Not becoming someone else.
Not getting rid of the difficult parts.
But remembering that they are not all that I am.
Maybe Tat Tvam Asi is a reminder of this:
I belong to something larger than the story I have been telling about myself.
And maybe that is where life opens again.
You are that.
And perhaps, in remembering that, you begin to remember yourself.