identity

Your Many Deaths

January 21, 2024

If you do it right, you will suffer many deaths in your lifetime. And if you do it right, each one will bring you closer to your real self. Believe it or not, everything that is happening in your life is working to bring about these little deaths, which will peel back the layers of your false self and allow the truest form of your being to emerge. Really your “false self” is just all the forms of you that existed before this and which must be shed, like a snake repeatedly sloughing off its skin. Other people may not even notice how you have changed, but you will feel like a new person, freshly alive in a new way (born again). It’s just the newest form of you – and you are destined to do it again. Read More

Grace is Pervasive

March 27, 2021

When I said I was deeply Christian, I wasn’t just saying that. Grace is the number one reason. Most of my life, I have been captivated by the phenomenon of grace in the Christian story. Maybe it’s because I was a guilty child, but maybe it’s because grace is a revolution in thinking for all of us. Maybe we are just built to be big containers for grace. When you drink from that well, a big reservoir opens up inside you and grace is the only thing. Read More

I Am Deeply Christian And Don’t Call Me That

March 25, 2021

Every once in a while, I am employed to help someone “deconstruct their faith.” I consider it a high honor since it helps me fulfill one of my life commitments – to “undo things.” It is #3 on my list I like to call “My Life Plan.” The text in My Life Plan reads this way: “Undo things – like Jesus, defy expectations and convention.” This is also one of the reasons I find myself floating away from what we call Christianity, but then also finding profound truth in the person and teaching of Jesus – he was sort of liberated from anything that resembled religion. He himself was floating away from his own religion (!!!). He was also deconstructing (maybe even destroying) the conventional understanding of faith, but also, at the same time, fulfilling the essential and best parts of it. Read More

The Contempt In Us

January 31, 2021

Search any human heart and you will find contempt. It comes in many forms and is unfortunately as natural to us as breathing and eating. It organizes us. Somewhere along the way (probably in adolescence), we start identifying everything we hate – everything we think we are not and everything we do not want to be. This is probably a necessary process of forming our identity; the problem is too often we get stuck there and believe that is the only way to “be somebody.” Long into our adulthood, we continue to define ourselves by what we hate. Some people die full of contempt, fairly certain they have things figured out and other people don’t. Read More

A New Story

July 18, 2013

A child who hates himself will act in such a way as to cause you to hate him as well. This is the only safe way he knows to find out if there is something other than hate in the world. He acts this way in order to check and see if there is love for him even when he is at his worst. One of our only jobs with children is to show them that there is something other than the choir of voices that confirm the way they already feel about themselves.

Legacy

November 25, 2012

I’ve been thinking a little about “legacy” lately, since I am in my 30s and all. And my mom just turned 60 and we are having another little child who is a girl. She is a wonderful gift, but one of the things about having all girls is that your “name” doesn’t get carried on through your own family. I mean there are other little Ybarras which grow up to be big Ybarras and the name will live on, but not from my immediate family. Read More

Attachment

August 4, 2012

What is called human attachment is really a profound idea. It’s the idea that from day one, we are all seeking connection with others, specifically “higher minds” in order to organize ourselves, feel sure of ourselves and secure.

If you think about it, nearly everything could be seen as attachment behavior. Everything is an attempt to secure our place, know we are safe, feel valued. I just remember thinking as a kid: “If someone could just notice me enough, then I would feel right.” We are built for this sort of seeking out of attention and comfort. And for me, this flows right to spirituality: the only way any of us will feel truly secure is if we find that deeper Force which caused the universe to quicken into existence. Read More