Who Are You Becoming?

(upbeat music) Headspace Studio. Hey, welcome back to Radio Headspace, I'm Dora, and I'm so glad you're here. (gentle music) I want to start with a question today. How many times have you already become a different person over the course of your life? Take a moment to reflect on who you were 10 years ago, the things you cared about, the way you spent your time, the version of yourself you were so certain you were. And then think about who you are now. Chances are there's a significant distance between those two people, and somehow you made that crossing. You became someone new, and you probably didn't even have a word for it while it was happening. We tend to think of reinvention as something extraordinary, a dramatic pivot, an Instagram worthy before and after. But what I've come to believe is that reinvention is actually just what being human looks like up close. We're always in the process of becoming, always shedding something, and always growing into something else. The question isn't whether we'll change, it's whether we'll do it with awareness, or whether we'll resist it until the resistance becomes its own kind of suffering. (gentle music) (birds chirping) And I know something about that resistance. When I made the transition from nursing to becoming a full-time teacher and meditation guide, it wasn't the clean, exciting pivot it might look like from the outside. There was grief in it, real, raw and deep grief. I had spent years becoming a nurse. I invested financially, and also mentally, and emotionally. I had built an identity around it, a sense of purpose, a way of understanding my place in the world and what I had to offer. Nursing wasn't just a job for me, it was a calling. It was how I showed up for people in their most vulnerable moments. It was who I was and then I decided to step away from it. And for a while, I genuinely didn't know who I was without it. (gentle music) There was a strange disorienting in between space where the old identity had been set down, but the new one hadn't fully arrived yet. I grieved the nurse in me. I grieved the certainty of knowing exactly what my role was and how to fill it. And underneath all of that was a subtle layer of fear, one I didn't always say out loud. What if this new version of me isn't enough? What if I'm making a mistake? What if I'm walking away from the truest version of myself? What I didn't understand back then, and what I've come to understand now is that the grief was a part of the process. It wasn't a sign that something was going wrong. It was a sign that something had deeply mattered. You don't grieve things that don't mean anything. And the fact that leaving nursing was hard meant that my nursing career was also worth honoring. I just had...