WHO DO I THINK I AM?

Some of us spend the majority of our lives trying to figure out who the fuck we are. We try on different identities and labels, seeing if any feel like they fit. Sometimes they fit temporarily before we feel once again lost. Who am I? What makes me think I am special? Who do I think I am? This quote from Marianne Williamson rings true:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?... We are all meant to shine, as children do.”

Even if there was a time when we believed in our own light, “as children do,” most of us have lost this ability by the time we hit our tweens. We see nothing but the dirty smudge of our existence, like the billions of other smudges. The light within the majority of us is hidden behind the dirty world we have each created.

You might say, “But I haven’t created this disgusting world!” You are correct. We have collectively created “the world,” but we have each individually created our own worlds. All of us see the world differently, and therefore it is a different world that each of us experiences. When I was first trying to “find myself,” I saw the world as a very hostile place. I saw myself as someone very small and insignificant. I felt I had to fight to get my due and that improving my life was difficult, if not impossible.

I thought my defensive behaviors were necessary to show how strong I was. But looking back, I realize that I was codependent, emotionally abusive, judgmental, insecure, and had little respect or regard for myself. And it wasn’t just a teen thing. Into my 20s and early 30s, I continued to treat people disrespectfully while expecting to be treated with respect in return. For instance, I remember flicking my cigarette ashes in my boyfriend’s hair after he said something that offended me. I would never have put up with him doing that to me. Wow. I really had no class.

Years later, as a young mother, I remember kicking the door behind my man after he canceled our plans last minute. I felt wronged and entitled to throw a temper tantrum. I blamed everyone else for my behaviour. My boyfriends, my parents, the government, the patriarchy, the rich; I blamed everyone except myself. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was acting out my separateness in harmful ways that increased my feelings of separateness.

Unconsciously, I yearned for community and connection, but I didn’t realize it. When I found such connections, they were fleeting. For a time, I felt a smidgen of belonging to the street culture in my hometown. We were a motley crew of misfits, as most street communities are. I didn’t fit in so much as I blended in, which was something I needed at the time, after leaving a physically abusive relationship.

The next time I felt belonging was in the sex industry. I felt like I mattered as a stripper. People showed appreciation for me constantly. I wasn’t making minimum wage anymore. For some reason, making minimum wage made me feel like the scourge of society. Most minimum wage employers treated me like shit. In the strip clubs, I got respect. In the changerooms, I got camaraderie. I constantly met interesting people with whom I immediately recognized as equals because we were all strippers. Many of the regular strip club customers became lifelong friends.

People ask why strippers keep going back to stripping and I think the community is the biggest reason with money coming in second. Strippers are surrounded by our colleagues; whereas, intimacy providers, who are largely isolated as sole proprietors, don’t typically experience the power of community that strippers have access to. Intimacy providers get a lot of their social and intimacy needs met through their clients rather than each other. It is a different dynamic, for sure.

Being a stripper was empowering financially and it also gave me purpose. I started The Naked Truth and began coordinating stripathon fundraisers. My feeling of separateness decreased a lot when I became a stripper because I had a community. But it also increased because I felt even more separate from my family and the larger society. I felt my “otherness” as I created stories to hide my work and adopted a fake name. I belonged, but only in the strip club community. Over time, this feeling extended to all sex workers and my network of erotic entrepreneurs expanded. But my feeling of separateness from the rest of society continued to deepen.

Unfortunately, communities created through division seem bound to betray us. As a loud-mouthed, opinionated, stripper-mom activist, I pissed people off. People in the sex worker community rejected me, took me back, and rejected me, again and again. I eventually became used to it. I became hardened to criticism and hatred. I stopped taking it personally, but only because I decided the others were “idiots.” In other words, I “othered” them.

I was 31 years old when I first learned about Quantum Mechanics; that we are all energy in a field of energy. That was a paradigm shift that transformed me almost instantly. The idea that what I put out is what I get back made a lot of sense to me. I could see how it manifested in my personal interactions with people. If I was sweet, people were usually sweet in return. If I was moody, their previous sweetness could turn into moodiness with me. I’d called it “bad energy” for years without realizing that it truly was bad energy. Or as Dr. Bruce H. Lipton calls it, “destructive energies” as opposed to “constructive energies.”

The epiphany was life-changing in some ways, but difficult to practice none-the-less. I had the knowledge that we are all energy and I was trying to implement that knowledge in my life. However, it took time for the knowledge to become “knowing.” I found that whenever I began to feel like I was on the precipice of profound spiritual understanding, something happened in my life that sent me into my separateness again. A pitbull attack. An infidelity. A disabling pharmaceutical injury. COVID. I lived life as a victim of circumstances, separate and alone.

The real change came when I realized that everyone has “circumstances.” I intuitively knew that if I could just understand the spiritual dream that I chased, I wouldn’t be affected so deeply by “circumstances.” I am not the only person who has ever suffered a devastating pharmaceutical injury. People get cheated on all the time. Some spouses even look the other way. ALL OF US ENDURED COVID. Everything that has ever “happened to” me, has also happened to other people. So, it’s pointless wallow in self-pity.

Furthermore, none of us can control our “circumstances.” The only thing we can control is our perception of our circumstances. I finally realized that I needed to change the way I perceived my world if I didn’t want to be miserable anymore. It had nothing to do with circumstances and everything to do with how I viewed each circumstance as it arose. What an awakening! What an opportunity to be happy!

I conjured up Stripper Annie’s relentless strength and began the transformation of my life – the one that led to me becoming a bestselling author and chasing after my dreams like an unstoppable maniac on a mission. I threw myself into books and personal development. I started with Florence Scovel Shinn and Wayne Dyer, then moved into Napoleon Hill and Robert Kyosaki. Then I dove into Tantra because it was too tantalizing not to.

According to Tantra, each of us is a powerful manifestation of the love energy that we have called by many names: Universe / Creator / Higher Power / Shiva/Shakti / God/dess, etc.  You and I have manifested as separate individuals so that “God” can experience Itself. This makes each of us unique and special. Do you know how truly special you are? The following practices helped me to find out who I really am, as an individual.

Be the Perceiver and the Perceived

Have you ever had a full meltdown over something, and while it was happening, you also expressed inside your mind the thought, Whoa, what the hell am I doing? Have you ever known that something was wrong but you proceeded to do it anyway? How many times have you mentally shaken your own head at yourself? I think we have all experienced ourselves “watching” ourselves too many times to count. These experiences represent the perceiver part of us witnessing the perceived. We can literally observe ourselves and reflect on our own behaviours.

A way to practice being the perceiver is to imagine that your spirit lifts out of your body and watches your actions from above, drifting around with you as you go through the motions of your life. You could also imagine that you are watching your life on a television set or in a movie theatre. The fight with your friend might look very different from this angle. You may notice the other characters more distinctly than you do in your day-to-day life. In fact, you will be surprised how your perspective changes when viewing your life in this manner. You’ll notice that the perceiver is MUCH BIGGER than the perceived. The perceiver is our awareness, which is infinite. If you can get into the perceiver perspective during times of struggle, it’s a great way to diffuse destructive emotions. The perceiver doesn’t engage but only witnesses.

Now, practice being the perceived. This is the part of you that engages with the world, making decisions and yes, making mistakes. You may be rocking on the couch, in your own embrace, wishing for the pain to end. You may be walking down a country road, the sun beating on your back with a cool breeze on your brow. This is you experiencing yourself. In Tantra, we are told that we are all God experiencing Itself in different ways. I suppose that means, we are made in the image of God. Haven’t I heard that somewhere before? All spiritual beliefs have some similar teachings.

Be Equal

Since we are all from the same universal love-energy field, none of us is better nor worse than any other. The essence of who we all are is Divine. No one is above me and no one is below me. There is no actual hierarchy, only hierarchies created by our minds.

Imagine a light inside every person in existence, shining brightly to show that we are all the same. The cars driving by have lights shining out of the driver’s side windows and the other windows too. Lights are walking down the street. There are many lights that we cannot see but we know they are in the buildings that surround us.

As we practice randomly seeing the light in everyone, it will become easier to do in personal situations. When someone who intimidates you appears, look for their light. Allow your light to acknowledge their light with equality; there’s no need to announce it out loud. Silently acknowledge their bright light with your own. Likewise, when faced with someone you condemn. See the light inside of them. Recognize our innate equalness with one another.

Because we feel hopelessly separate from one another, we judge each other. We put each other in a hierarchy around us. Reminding ourselves that we are all equal at all times has a profound affect on us. We become more confident and comfortable in our own skin. We see the vulnerability in others, who haven’t figured out our equalness yet. Knowing our equalness helps us to embrace who we truly are without fear or apology.

Identify Your Values

Have you ever heard the saying, “Actions speak louder than words”? Words are powerful. Words are the backing of action. But it is our actions that identify who we really are. Most of us act based on subconscious values that were programmed into us at conception and through childhood. The trick is to identify the values that we WANT to live by, and then make an effort to live by them. This is called “intentional” living. Here is a simple, little exercise that has tremendous power if done thoughtfully. Be alone with yourself and write out your personal constitution. To get into the right frame of mind, ask yourself:

•              What values do I want to live by?

•              What kind of person do I want to be known as?

•              What are the kinds of things I hope people will say about me at my funeral?

Some of the values on my own personal constitution are: I forgive others. I preach hope. I make time for my loved ones. Write down your values and stick them to the wall beside your toothbrush. Read them every time you brush your teeth. When you are faced with a difficult decision, let your personal constitution guide you. It will keep you aligned with the true values you hold sacred, enabling you to feel sure of who you are and what you stand for.

Expand!

How much can you know? I don’t know the answer. I imagine that learning is infinite. I didn’t know I was a scientist until I was an adult in my 30s. I became fascinated by the subject of how a body heals. I continue to be FASCINATED by the power we have to heal ourselves in every cell of our bodies. I would never have known how much I enjoy reading scientific studies if I hadn’t thrown myself into learning.

Whatever interests you, get into it. If you start a book or video and it’s not that great, try a different one. There are no rules to learning when it is for the sake of learning. You won’t have to write an essay on any particular subject. (Unless you want to.) As you explore your inner geek, you will begin to develop a more well-rounded idea of who you really are.

Identify Your Limitations

We all have them… our limits. And I’m not talking about what we’re capable of. There is no limit to what we’re capable of. But there are limits to what we can tolerate in our lives without losing our shit. And by shit, I mean energy. I’ve heard of the concept of energy vampires. Energy vampires are people and situations that suck the life out of you.

For instance, I cannot tolerate being talked down to. The tone of voice that is used with me affects my energy in a drastic way. If I have certain people in my life who repeatedly speak to me in a patronizing manner, I cannot enjoy a peaceful life. I also cannot stand excuses. When people fail to keep their word, I don’t want to hear their excuses. These are hard limits for me. People with rude voices and too many excuses suck the life out of me!

It may not sound very ‘spiritual’ of me to admit these things, but Tantra recognizes that we are not just a spirit. We are autonomous individuals who are affected by the energy of others. We have a right and even a responsibility to protect our energy from others. For this reason, it is imperative that you identify your limitations when it comes to the people and circumstances in your life. How much you allow others to suck your energy is a reflection of how much self-respect you have.  

Give yourself the respect you deserve and protect your energy. If a friend or family member consistently makes you feel bad by their words or actions, remove them from your life. You will struggle to let your light shine as long as you allow others to throw mud on it. You might “owe” them. They might be your “life mate” or “child” or “only living relative.” If they dim your shine, you need to let them go. At the very least, minimize their impact in your life as much as possible.

I understand that it is not possible to remove some of the worst offenders in our lives. I have people I love with all my heart who disrespect me and cross my boundaries. I would never cut them out of my life entirely. But I control how much and how I interact with them. In such cases, we can find ways to make our interactions with them energetically manageable.

Check Your Power

I wish I was much younger when I learned about goals. The reason I say this is because I spent my whole life proving to myself how strong I was. But I waited till my late 40s to start proving to myself how powerful I am. Strength comes from adversity and resilience. Power comes from intention and achievement.

We spend so much time telling ourselves what we cannot do and very little time believing in ourselves. I think the biggest problem is that we don’t know how to reach for our goals. It’s hard to believe in yourself when you don’t know what you’re doing. When you learn how to reach your goals, you will natually have more confidence. Prepare to dream again, my friend.

Set aside some time to spend on the following exercise when you feel awake and there’s nothing distracting you. Follow the instructions in order. Take breaks as needed. View your responses as a working document that you can add to or edit at any time.

1.       Close your eyes and imagine that you have all the money you could ever wish for and nothing else was stopping you from having your dream life, what would your life be like? Would you have a dream home? Would you have a loving partner? A successful business? A holiday to a special place that you’d love to go? Enough money to support a loved one who is struggling? A new car? Your motorcycle license? Let your imagination run wild. Write a list of all your deepest desires in a column, one underneath the other.

2.       Next, imagine how long it would take you to achieve these dream goals. Beside each goal, put one of the following numbers to represent how long it would take in years to achieve it. 1, 3, 5, 10+. If everything worked out for you, how long, approximately, would it take to achieve each goal.

3.       Next, organize all of the goals under their corresponding numbers. All the 1-year goals go under 1. All the 3-year goals go under 3. Etc.

4.       Now it starts to get fun. Take your list of 1-year goals and pick your top 3 that you would love the most to accomplish in the next year or so. For each of your top three, write all the tiny goals that would need to be accomplished before you could reach the destination goal. These must be very specific actions that you would have to take to reach these goals in approximately 1 year.

5.       Now, take your 1-year goals and all the mini-goals you need to accomplish to achieve them, and determine when during the year they must be accomplished by for you to stay on track. Work backwards from 1-year. What needs to be accomplished by 9 months? 6 months? 3 months? Fill in the sections with the mini-goals that will ultimately lead to your 1-year “big” goals. This is your critical path. It will guide your next steps.

6.       Finally, take your 3-month goals and determine what needs to be done first. Prioritize the mini-goals. These will become your weekly goals, starting Monday!

Remember that this exercise is not done to stress you out. It is done to help you check your power! Don’t beat yourself up when you don’t accomplish mini-goals on your pre-determined timeline. Be flexible and gentle with yourself. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. Be willing to change your goals if inspired. When you accomplish mini-goals, be sure to celebrate. Always reward yourself at the end of the week for all that you accomplished towards your goals. Watch how powerful you become when you turn intentions into achievements.

Reprogram Your Unconscious

It starts when your unconscious says something mean to you, like: “I’m so stupid.” The fuck you are! You tell that inner critic that you’re as smart as they come, possibly even smarter. Tell it that your intelligence is so big that it can’t even be measured. Feel free to exaggerate because you need to fight fire with fire. The unconscious has had free reign since you developed language skills. It’s going to take a lot of work to reprogram it.

At first, you have to practice noticing when the inner voice trash talks you. Then, when you notice it, you have to “stop the recorded message” and replace it with something uplifting. “I’m in pain” is replaced with “I’m in gain.” “I can’t do it” turns into “I can’t wait to do it.” “I have to,” turns into “I get to.” Reprogram the inner critic so that it becomes an inner cheerleader. It’s easy to implement but takes time to go into effect. You’ve got to persistently reprogram the voice inside until you feel like you deserve the world.

Make Room for New Friends Who Amplify You

It was hard enough to find friends when there were no restrictions and some of the only friends available were the life-sucking kind. Now, I’m supposed to find new uplifting friends? But how? The standard advice is to join clubs, go to church, volunteer, attend events that draw the kind of people you want to vibe with. This is great advice but life-suckers are everywhere. They are hard to avoid and I seem to attract them like bees to honey. I’ve found that friends who amplify me expose themselves naturally over time (not that way, my adorably perverted friend). My advice? Get out and meet people, for sure. But don’t worry about finding new, uplifting friends. The right ones manifest naturally, once we are open to them.

Visualize Pure Love

Remember the little light inside each and every one of us? This is a visualization that you can do anytime, eyes open or closed. Imagine that you can see the light inside everyone. The brightness of their shine is so bright that it connects with the shine of other people’s lights. Sense the love energy that fuels each of the lights and the threads of glowing connection between us. Feel the shine of your own light growing bigger as the force of love energy inside you becomes stronger and stronger. Feel love energy pulsating through your entire body. Don’t be surprised if you become a little (or a lot) aroused. This is normal.

Let your love energy grow and grow so that it spreads out into the whole of your awareness. Sit in the glow of our collective love energy as it lights up the entire universe. You should feel tingly all over and happy right down to your toes. Try to spend an entire day seeing everyone as a love-energy light shining at you with pure acceptance. Shine your light at them with pure acceptance. What happens? Do you notice anything different? We are pure love. We are acceptance.

Practice Erotic Self-Love (With or Without CLIMAX)

Similar to the love energy visualization above, practicing erotic self love is something that is felt physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In this case, you want to be alone somewhere. Relax and close your eyes. Now, imagine there is an invisible energy caressing you exactly how you love it. It caresses your arms, your legs, your chest, stomach, and inner thighs. Imagine you can feel an intense love emanating off of the energy that caresses you so exquisitely.

Allow the energy to caress you everywhere, especially the places where it feels the best. Allow the energy to enter you, if you like. You can absorb it through your skin or take it like you are being penetrated by a lover. Do not judge the sensations or visions that come to your mind. Let them pass, as each wave of sensation begins anew, replacing the waves and visions before it. What does your mind make of these sensations? Is it an orgy of love energy? Is every part of your body experiencing sensation and arousal?

If you feel compelled to touch yourself, hold out for as long as possible. Lean into the sensations you seek from the love energy conjured by your mind. If you decide to finish this exercise by touching yourself and bringing yourself to orgasm, continue the love energy visualization into your self-pleasuring and feel the intense bliss it creates.

Note: Erotic Self-Love Visualization is not recommended if you suffer from sexual shame. Work on reprogramming the shame before trying this exercise because it is not good for you to feel intense arousal experiences and shame at the same time. It is very toxic and should be avoided.

The Results

When I finally got it, when I finally knew who the fuck I am, everything changed. I wasn’t miraculously free of making mistakes or perfectly confident at all times. That takes constistent practice and reprogramming, as well as acceptance and humour. What changed is that I no longer saw myself as a meaningless smudge of humanity, in a sea of other meaningless smudges. On the contrary, I now saw myself as a beaming light of God in a sea of beaming God-lights, each with our own special gifts that we’ve manifested from our Divine essence.

I stopped feeling the need to be a people-pleaser. I looked forward to being alone. I made mistakes excitedly, because I recognized it as learning. I experienced more optimism and contentment with my life because I knew how to reach for my dreams; and whether I achieve them or not, I love trying. I am told that my confidence shines through and I know it is because I am an unashamed entity of intention. As Marianne Williamson so insightfully and eloquently said:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.”

The path to myself was exhilarating. I feel like an unstoppable force of love, dancing my way through life. I don’t ask who do I think I am anymore. I know who the fuck I am. A bright, shining light of beautiful, love-energy who is also a sex-working mom with an ostomy. How fucking cool is that?!

Now, tell me, my friend… Who the fuck are you?

Love Annie xoxo

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