Freeing your Soul’s Authenticity from Ego with Lalla’s Poetry - Part 1
Back in the fourteenth century, the beloved Kashmiri mystic poet Lalla wrote about the challenge of being authentically human in the face of ego. These poems of hers I’ll share with you are for inspiration and teaching, as relevant now as 700 years ago.
Our inner essence or soul’s authenticity is what makes us human. But here in the twenty-first century, more than ever, the scrambles of the day, too much screen time, and personal, social, and climate stresses push us in ways that build up our egoic defenses. And those defenses tend to block our inner essence.
You have a unique essence or soul that is the secret to being fully, genuinely yourself. Our soul’s authenticity is naturally limited by our ego, which includes our normal sense of self and unquestioned beliefs, unconscious fears, and constricting habits. Simply put, our ego is a false self that tricks us into thinking that’s all we are.
Imagine a light bulb. Now let’s say the light of the light bulb is your unique essence — shining forth freely, authentically, dynamically, without limit. And then, let’s say the glass of the light bulb represents your ego. We start out as babies with clear glass, innocent and free of most habitual patterns, our light freely shining.
But over time, our light bulb naturally gets patterned, marked, and encrusted in various ways, depending on our life experience. Then, gradually we lose touch with our soul, or inner personal essence that is always free, pure, and authentic. So we forget how to be genuine and spontaneous. And we end up believing we are the patterns encrusting the light bulb instead of the light itself.
How to be authentic: solving a universal dilemma
Then when we finally decide we want to get back in touch with our soul and try to remove the grime, we find it’s pretty stuck on. Have you ever been frustrated in your attempts to change a habit or change yourself? Lalla writes of this universal human dilemma:
What has happened to me?
All these songs tell one story:
that of Lalla on a lake, not knowing
what sandbar I’ll run aground on.
“What has happened to me?” Lalla asks. How did I get caught up in my ego? “All these songs,”– all these stories I tell myself amount to the same story. Instead of light and an encrusted light bulb, Lalla’s metaphor is of a lake and a sandbar. A lake is a beautiful soul metaphor — water is fluid, dynamic, flowing, and free, thus reminding us of our soul’s infinite potential.
Lalla laments running aground on the sandbar — her stuck ego self. In this way, she loses the spacious freedom of the lake. Running aground on the sandbar is a trap. But it’s also a trap to believe our ego is solid and secure. After all, the lake both creates and melts the sandbar. In other words, without our authentic essence, we are no more than a pile of loose sand.
Lalla goes on in the same poem:
What kind of luck have I had?
I made harmony out of a man’s clumsy
plastering job on the ceiling.
Still I wonder which sandbank will strand me.
And how is it now with me?
Magnificent, this becoming
more and more awake.
From Naked Song by Lalla, translations by Coleman Barks, p. 23.
Again Lalla asks herself, “What kind of luck have I had” in remembering the lake is my authentic soul self vs. running aground on the sandbar of my false self?
“I made harmony out of a man’s clumsy plastering job on the ceiling,” introduces a new metaphor — reinforcing how she’s faced her difficulties and limitations, yet, even so, finds harmony.
When Lalla reflects, “Still I wonder which sandbank will strand me,” she’s acknowledging that the freedom of the lake isn’t a permanent state. But she wants to come back to the lake, so she asks a key question: “And how is it now with me?”
Whenever we ask, “How is it now with me?” we open to the present moment — the only moment where we can be truly awake. That means we can be fully in touch with our inner light, our lake nature and we can also see the sandbar with fresh eyes — that is, whatever might be impeding our authenticity.
“Magnificent this becoming more and more awake.” Lalla ends her poem with gratitude.
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Check out Part 2 of this three-part series where you’ll learn how Lalla views meditation as a path to our soul’s authenticity. In Part 3, Lalla shows us how to stay fresh and how to share our authenticity with the world.
