I Am: A guide to transforming reality and creating the life you want

By Anya Lincoln

A powerful guide to transformation, this book takes you on a journey to the center of your consciousness. It helps you uncover the "hidden code" that has been shaping your life. This "hidden code," your "I am", is precisely why you keep re-creating stubborn patterns instead of manifesting your desires.

At the beginning of the book, you will understand why and how your personal reality works the way it does. You will understand why things seem unchangeable, when, in fact, they are just one of the possibilities you can experience. You will learn how deep assumptions that we make about ourselves shape and define our reality. Even though these assumptions are hidden, they manifest as fears, anxieties, depression at the level of thought and repeating conflict, toxic relationships, and being stuck or creatively blocked at the level of reality.

You will also see that this personal reality extends much further than you might suspect. Why is this important? It is important because your ability to transform reality goes far beyond what you may perceive as in your power to change. You will learn a signature process called Identity work. Identity work investigates your reality as if it was a reflection of what you deeply know about who you are. We hold the mirror of our reality to point us back to one thing that can change it . Your Identity, your "I am."

What happens with people when they start looking at reality as a reflection of their consciousness and let go of all the thoughts they mistake for who they are? They find confidence, and connection to their true life purpose, they find themselves in a state of creative flow and synchronicity, they find resilience and courage to change their lives, and they become happy.

Other people report finding unexpected solutions to problems they couldn't solve before. This is because our Identity is a thought through which we filter all of our thinking. To find new and creative solutions to problems one must drop all of their old assumptions. The biggest assumption is the "alpha thought". It is who you think you are.

Another amazing thing about going through the process of Identity work is how fast you begin manifesting the kind of reality you want. Things align, as if by magic. You become much more precise in what you manifest. This happens because you don't need to learn how to manifest, how to raise your vibration, or how to visualize as you are already a master of creating reality. You just need to understand and let go of why you keep creating the reality you don't want.

This book is a guide to what some may call working with one's shadow or doing inner healing. The biggest difference with common self-help approaches, however, is that the Identity work and the philosophy behind it point you to a place where you are already complete and whole. You do not have to be always in the process of healing. Identity work is a fast and effective process compared to most therapy and coaching modalities. It is a door to self-love that you may have only felt as a child.

"I am" is a deeply spiritual book. Its metaphysical nature, however, doesn't get in the way of being completely common sense. It works whether or not you believe in the philosophy behind it. You may not be interested in new-age or enlightenment literature, but you can make the inquiries work for you and see real results.

The second part of the book will support you through the process of life change that will inevitably follow your insights. It will show you how to stay calm when things get scary, and how to address money fears and relationship concerns. The book will help you to overcome mind objections and stay the course until you see your life become what you want it to be.

This book is also for a seasoned spiritual seeker. If you are concerned with the phenomena of "spiritual bypassing", this book will give you exactly what you need to be enlightened and active in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098370411

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Aha moment:

It’s bigger than I thought!

When I was thirty-nine, I found myself in a tsunami of chaos that followed my decision to live honestly and authentically in every respect. My marriage was falling apart, all other major relationships were either in crisis or disappearing, and I was facing the realization that I have no idea how I will be supporting myself and my children.

Prior to this personal cataclysm, I was living a rather comfortable lifestyle. My husband made a generous income. My children attended elite private schools, and we owned a house in a great neighborhood. I was making some money as a professional artist and was recognized for my talent and skill. But as it happens, the spiritual calling I felt since childhood—but managed to keep in the shadows—intensified to such a degree that I could no longer ignore it. The time was inconvenient, to say the least. I knew that, if I were to live authentically, I would have to face my biggest fears, and it would cost me the security of the life I was accustomed to. And that is exactly what happened.

As scary as it was, I welcomed change in all areas of my life, but there was one issue that truly stumped me. It is very commonplace, especially for parents that spend years putting their careers on the back burner while raising their children: I had no idea how I was going to make the money I now needed. No idea how I was going to make ends meet. To anyone who was concerned for me, I said, I’ve got this. In truth, I knew I had never created a life in which I was able to personally generate serious income. I was aware that money followed a certain pattern in my life. No matter what I tried, no matter the talent or the opportunities or even my hard work, in the end, it was never enough. I had no idea how to solve this puzzle, much less in a fairly short period. I needed a real breakthrough around creating my own money.

It may be worth mentioning that by this point in my life, I was pretty much a self-help black belt. I could question a belief like nobody else. I could re-center myself faster than I could make a cup of coffee. I could clearly see that all thoughts are just thoughts. I trusted my intuition implicitly. I had practiced this stuff all my life with some pretty impressive results. In this pivotal moment of change, I decided that I would take everything I know about how the universe works and figure out this money-thing. As I had done so many times before when facing challenges, I picked up my journal and went straight to my ritual of writing and inquiry, excited to arrive at a solution.

No matter how much I tried to focus on working out my problem, however, my attention kept drifting to a phone conversation I just had with an old friend a couple of days before. She was a successful businesswoman, and she had just gotten divorced for the second time and was using an online dating service. As we were catching up, she described to me a curious constellation of men with whom she was now involved. One guy was from Canada, and another was from her home state. As we talked, something revelatory started occurring to me. The men that my friend found sounded more and more like the characters that she was involved with around her first divorce, ten years earlier.

At the time of her first divorce, she found herself part of a complicated love triangle involving an older and a younger man. The older gentleman brought a kind of a fatherly comfort to her, but with him, she had a non-existent sex life. Without breaking it off with the first guy, my friend started an affair with a younger man who was torn between her and some other woman of interest. This time, almost the same set up: there was an older guy with money but not much sex appeal, and a younger, hot guy who was, at the time, dating two other women with whom my friend reported she was in competition with. Even though all these relationships were fairly new, the patterns that were developing were—almost to a T—replicas of the relationships she had in her twenties. Except, the first time around, the people she was involved with were all in her immediate circle. This time, however, all the connections were through online dating sites. Selecting from an unlimited pool of new candidates, she managed to pick eerily similar people, sight unseen. She was describing her relationships as new, but the repetition was hard to ignore.

What made my friend’s case interesting to ponder is that she and I were on opposite sides of the spectrum when it came to our approach and understanding of how life worked. Apart from being longtime friends, there was little we shared in our views of how the human experience is shaped. She was a self-proclaimed atheist, very skeptical and pragmatic and wouldn’t be caught dead trying to, say, question a limiting belief, or look inside herself for the cause of her problems. I, on the other hand, thought very differently. I had faith, believed in the fact that there was a spiritual solution for every problem, and was learning how to be a conscious creator of my life. But here I was, realizing that most of my consciously creative efforts had nothing matching the force and precision of what my friend created completely unconsciously and effortlessly. I thought, If I could identify what was creating my friend’s reality without her conscious participation, I might know where to look to change my reality around money.

I began my inquiry by looking at every choice my friend made and asking what thoughts and beliefs could be driving her decisions. I thought that by comparing our two life situations I could glean insight into why it was so hard for me to create the resources necessary to be self-sustaining and independent. At that time, I assumed that if you change your thoughts, your life would change as well. After all, in some way, I did see proof of this. My friend made no connection between her thoughts and how her life was playing out. It seemed logical to me that in her unconsciousness, she would be recreating the same pattern and somehow getting into relationships that presented her with familiar challenges. If she were to change her thoughts about love and relationships, I imagined her situation would surely reflect that change. At the same time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was very conscious of my thinking and beliefs around money and was working on them actively but could affect no significant change in how my reality worked. I had success but only in managing my experience of reality. The reality itself remained immutable.

There had to be something informing our realities, and it was hiding in plain sight. Neither her unconsciousness nor my consciousness could see it—much less affect it in any way.

Next thing that I thought about is how our respective realities were repeating themselves. In every iteration of a new cycle, both my friend and I seemed to choose the exact same components out of an infinite supply of possibilities. Things that repeated for each one of us were simply a reality we woke up to every day. It reminded me of an old adage that says, Wherever you go, there you are. It’s a wise observation, pointing to the fact that our personal realities seem to follow each one of us no matter where we go in our lives.

But I was puzzled. If something is reality, wouldn’t it be the same for everyone, like the weather or the fact that every human being has a heart, for example? But our realities were vastly different from one another. There were things that always showed up for me in my reality, which never showed up in her reality, and vice versa. For example, wherever my friend went, she always found amazing opportunities to create money. She was always at the right place, at the right time. Money was easy for her. Love, on the other hand, was not. She struggled to connect with people, and when she did, the relationships were toxic or abusive. In contrast to her, I struggled with money, but love was something that came readily to me. It was easy for me to connect with people. The types of men my friend dated simply didn’t exist in my experience. Whatever was shaping our experiences was unique to each one of us.

Both she and I tried to improve and change our lives to the best of our understanding and abilities. Each of our individual realities contained something we didn’t like. In spite of our efforts, we each kept connecting to the same kind of people and circumstances. There was struggle built into our respective realities, but the realities themselves seemed to reconstitute without struggle at all. Something much more powerful than our conscious wishes and intentions was at play. A creative, intelligent force from inside each one of us seemed to be operating with the precision and accuracy of a surgeon. If we could know what this force is and understand how it is creating our reality, could we direct it to create anything we want?

It then occurred to me that if this was a creative force, it had to have a point of origin, a creator. But what kind of creator would create a reality that they didn’t like or didn’t want? Unless, I thought, "the reality that exists, however it is, is exactly what the creator wants!" I felt that familiar feeling, when you intuitively know that a hunch or an idea is true. I decided to abandon my old path and travel down this unexplored terrain that would lead to the breakthrough I’d been looking for.

My old path of exploration was based on an understanding that I was separate from the reality I was living in. A reality that was independent and outside me. I believed that people could, at most, influence reality—the way someone may wear clothes that attracts attention or the way an inspirational speaker can move people to action. I used to believe that the only real control anyone has is over their thoughts and feelings, their personal experience of reality.

I started wondering if the lines we draw between us and the world outside of us were not as rigid as I thought. After all, the facts of life were pointing to something I couldn’t yet explain. The circumstances that repeated for me and the people around me were not limited to our inner experience; the repetitions included real people, places, and things, all part of the outside reality over which I used to think we had no real control. If those circumstances only came about as a direct result of contact with the world, I could explain the repeating connections away simply as preferences, behavior, and even choices we make in our subconscious mind before our thinking catches up to it. But when I realized that some of the circumstances arranged themselves precisely and followed a familiar script without any direct input from people, it made me wonder. For example, my friend meeting someone online who is eerily similar to several of her exes.

It was especially interesting to look at the parts of the repeating reality that we didn’t like and were on a quest to overcome. It is the quest to close the gap between the unwanted and wanted that occupies most human minds; we all want to change the world because we don’t like what is happening in it. I wondered if both the reality that looked unwanted and unchangeable and the conscious awareness that it should be different were both intentionally created into existence simultaneously, by me—the creator of this reality—and not as opposing forces, but as a part of the same, single intended reality.

As far as I could see, anytime there was something unwanted or absent and a desire to change it or acquire it, the intention was always to achieve some form of wholeness. If I can get ‘love’ right, thought my friend, I could finally be happy. Then I can actually live. If I could only make my own way in the world, I thought, and earn enough money, I could finally be free, be me and do the work I came here to do. Love, peace, resources all seemed to represent a path to a state of completeness, which, in turn, seemed to be a gateway to living fully.

While I identified wholeness as the goal within the reality, I still needed to answer what kind of creator would have a divided reality as a goal. If I looked at the whole of reality as one-united-thing, then the creator who is behind the reality must have an equal interest in both sides of this reality: having and not having; bondage and freedom; love and the lack of love; etc.

But why? Why would an intelligent, creative force bind itself to a self-created reality in which it would exist as finite and limited and have to struggle to become whole through meeting conditions and overcoming difficulties? 

Unless why isn’t the right question. Maybe the reality doesn’t represent something a creator is trying to achieve, but instead, it represents the creator herself. Wouldn’t that mean that a creator is flawed, separated, or divided? Or would it seem more likely that a division or a flaw would be the attribute of something created and not the creator? Would it be something embedded in the creator’s very nature that doesn’t belong there? It occurred to me that it could be a thought that the creator generates and holds about the Self. If that’s true, then a thought about the Self becomes a rule, a boundary, a limitation reflected in the creator’s world.

And then, suddenly, in a moment of insight, it all came together: we are not just creating our realities; we are the realities we live in.

At the center of reality is the point of focus of the creative energy, Identity. If the Identity—or the thought the creator has of Self—contains a flaw or a limitation, the reality in which the creator lives will represent this flaw in all aspects of itself. Instead of simply being a conduit of creation, it becomes a point of distortion. To change reality, one needs to look nowhere but inside one’s own Identity: who you decided you are.

This thought about Self—an I am—would be invisible like water to a fish, but it would find residence in every part of that creator’s reality, reflecting and reinforcing the creator’s I am. The reason our respective realities look so real to us, I thought, is because our I ams are real in our realities.

Limiting Identity manifests as a problematic reality. The solution to problematic reality is radically simple: if there is a persistent problem in your world, there is a thought that you are mistaking for who you really are.

Shifting from seeing yourself as separate from the world you live in to understanding that you are your world may be counterintuitive, but I invite you to take the leap with me. You only have to believe this enough to test it out. Once you see that this works—that you work very predictably—the possibilities for creating what you want will be endless. Relationships, money, work are all areas in which real changes are possible. What is also possible is transformation in realities that we share in our society: violence, racism, and poverty, to name a few, are examples of what we can start changing from the place of any one creator taking full responsibility for all of their experience.

This book is a new conversation on some not-so-new themes like thought, wholeness and oneness, peace, creativity, manifestation, and freedom. Everything that has ever made sense to me on my own spiritual journey has found alignment and residence in an understanding of Identity at the heart of experience. I hope it will do the same for you.

All the examples in this book are from real people. Names, places, and other identifying information have been changed to protect people’s privacy.

Thank you for picking up this book, and welcome to life the way it was meant to be.

Chapter 2

Beginning of the Journey

As I was feeling my way through confusion and fear that filled my own experience, precious lines from the Indian poet, Kabir, kept replaying in my mind, until things finally came together and made sense. A message from a mystic, written down six centuries ago, became a voice in my heart, which kept pointing back to the same question: who are you and what do you know? I wanted to offer this poem to you as we begin our exploration together.

We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves the birds and animals and the ants

perhaps the same one that gave a radiance to you in your mother’s womb.

Is it logical that you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?

The truth is that you turned away yourself,

and decided to go into the darkness alone.

Now, you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew,

and that is why everything you do has some weird failure in it.¹

Every time I read and re-read this poem, it sent shivers up my spine. My body responded to his words as it does when I recognize a deep truth before my mind has a chance to process it. I knew that Kabir’s pointing to forgetting wasn’t unlike other spiritual teachers and disciplines. In my intellectual understanding, Kabir, and other prophets and mystics, were pointing out that we have walked away from the truth and forgotten something that was once available to us, like a person who moves away from his homeland and then slowly forgets street names in his old hometown. This understanding of forgetting explained my own focus, and that of the larger spiritual community, on trying to find this lost information by exploring the terrain where we think it might be discovered: subconscious mind, past lives, other planets, numbers, insights of gurus, and holy books. By the way, I am not belittling any of the paths that people use to find themselves; I have benefited greatly from exploring them myself. However, I realized that the reason we were so slow to achieve progress, and so stuck in our old realities, is because if the words forgetting and remembering were a clue and an instruction, we completely misunderstood them! Consequently, the more we focused on remembering who we are, the further we moved away from actually realizing it. After years of meditating on this concept, I now see that the forgetting Kabir points to is not really forgetting, as we usually understand it.

It is not an absence of thought or memory, but the presence of a thought-reality that became a partition between us and everything else. This partition is Identity.

From behind this partition, we begin creating our worlds, forgetting it is a tool of our own invention and not who we truly are—a definition of Self that penetrates every part of our creative experience and has to be incorporated in the fabric of everything we form. If you break a hologram into hundreds of little pieces, each individual piece will contain all of the source information of the original image. Identity behaves in the same way: it is as small as one thought and as big as a whole universe, with each part of that universe echoing Identity’s message.

Seek Ye First Who You Really Are

I know that you’ve picked up this book because your experience of