🌙 Field Note: When the Self Speaks First

There are moments
when something in me becomes very still —
so still it feels like the world exhales.

And in that stillness,
I can tell the difference
between the voice of my identity
and the voice of my Self.

The identity speaks quickly.
Tightly.
Urgently.
Like it has something to defend.

The Self speaks slowly, softly,
intentionally —
like a truth remembering its way back to me.

The identity argues.
Self doesn’t need to.

The identity wants to be right.
Self wants to be real.

When the Self speaks first,
the body relaxes.
The breath opens.

There is nothing to protect
and nothing to prove.

There is only…
being true to who I am.

Not “my truth,”
not a story shaped by the past,
but the quiet knowing
that rises from a deeper place —
the place untouched
by fear, by memory,
by who I thought I needed to be.

When the Self speaks first,
the next step becomes obvious.
The future becomes simple.
The threshold becomes walkable.

So, I sit here in the quiet of my own presence…
and I practice one thing:

Listening
for the voice
that doesn’t need to convince me.

Listening
for the truth
that arrives without effort.

Listening
for the Self
that has been leading me
all along.

🌙 Author’s Note

This piece came to me in one of those rare, crystalline moments of stillness — the kind where the body becomes quiet enough for truth to surface without effort.
It was born from a deeper noticing: that transformation doesn’t begin when we “work” on ourselves… it begins the moment the Self speaks louder than the identity we’ve been defending.

If you felt something shift inside you while reading this — something soften, open, or exhale — that is the Self recognizing itself.
That recognition is the beginning of the threshold.

Thank you for meeting yourself in this moment.

With love and presence,
🌙 Gitanjali

Field Notes from the Threshold
Where the Self begins to speak.

Image Credit: Gitanjali Koppikar, Salt Flats, 2024