The Core Self: A Guided Inquiry

Audio transcription:

Inextricably me - when all conditions and identifiers are stripped, what remains? A self removed from story. Nameless, timeless, ageless, pure presence. Our histories shape us, influence and inform ways in which to be, to define, to liberate or empower us. But any conditional force that promises to liberate and empower, just through being a conditionality, can just as quickly restrict or disempower, it risks becoming a cage instead of a key. 

What remains when we step beyond codes of conduct, separated through borders and surnames? Who are you when you rise half-asleep in the stillest moments of the night to walk to the washroom? Unconcerned about the world, about how much money you have in the bank, about how you look in that moment - just breathing and being cared for by all your organs working intelligently to support life- who is that? In ancient understandings across traditions and cultures, we often hear how we are “all one” - so what is that? We are all the same - same blood, tissue, breath, bones, we come from the stars, from all the elements of primordial nature, we return to the same. Many bodies, one energy, one consciousness, sisters and brothers in the same family. 

To say the world is one big family, and to remain congruent in our values, aligning our thoughts, speech, actions along with this - what might need to shift to align us in this? I’ve had the honour of sitting with and learning from many traditional frames, and this is what it keeps returning to. To consider ourselves as extensions of this planet — how we treat the land, the water, and the soil—is how we treat ourselves. And how we tend to ourselves reflects in our care for all living beings. We are always provided for, and then some.

Consider this: the apple gives itself freely, and within it, the seeds to regrow. What grace lives in this design? To nourish, and to return nourishment. To give, and to be the ground from which more giving grows. This is the Core Self: a self in service of the other, and in service of the whole. When we hold another with care, aren’t we also being held by the very act of our offering?

In the Andes, this is called Aini—right exchange. In many Indigenous traditions on Turtle Island, it is customary to offer tobacco to a teacher before asking for anything. Give first, not out of transaction, but from a place of respect and humility.

What might this look like in our day-to-day lives? How do we honor this sacred reciprocity in modern rhythms?

It could begin with presence. With remembering that even the smallest gesture of care—towards another, the Earth, ourselves—ripples in more than one direction. That generosity isn’t separate from receiving. That we belong to each other, and to something far older, far wiser, far more tender than we’ve been taught to imagine.

Let this be the inquiry: not what we must become, but what we already are, beneath it all. And how we might live from there.

With reverence, 

Daya