How To Find Yourself: Advice From The Poets

Many of the people I work with describe the primary experience that brings them into therapy as one of feeling lost. 

 It is probably not surprising that for several decades now it has been common for people who are on a path of self-exploration and self-development to express their quest in terms of “finding themselves.” 

 We all get lost at some point in our lives. If you feel like you have lost your way, here are some thoughts on how to find yourself as described by some of my favorite poets.

1. Get Lost

“There is a voice inside the body,” says Michael Blumenthal in his poem, ‘A Man Lost By A River.’ He suggests that the feeling of being disconnected from yourself is the result of being unable or unwilling to hear that voice. 

Generally, it is the plans and ambitions that we impose upon our lives obscure that inner voice. To even consider letting go of those plans can cause intense anxiety, because it feels like a loss of control. 

And it is. 

Sometimes the only way back to yourself is to wander–inadvertently–off the path:

But sometimes, lost, 
on his way to somewhere significant, 
a man in a long coat, carrying 
a briefcase, 
wanders into the forest. 

“Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man,” wrote Carl Jung. “Too much civilization makes sick animals.” As a species we have built up a marvelous capacity for reason. However, it has come at the cost of our connection to the non-rational realm of instinct. In our individual lives, when we lose touch with the voice inside the body we become sick animals. 

In the forest of your being is where you can recover the wild and undomesticated parts of your nature. Leaving behind a lifestyle or way of being that you have outgrown can feel risky, even unreasonable. But it is undoubtedly life-changing:

and his life is never the same, 
for this having been lost – 
for having strayed from the path of his routine, 
for no good reason.

Read the full text of Michael Blumenthal’s A Man Lost By A River.

2. Love What You Love

We are awash in a sea of marketing messages telling us who we should be, how we should live, and what we should love. Is it any wonder that sometimes we lose the thread of our most authentic self? 

Social media only adds to this internal disconnect. Comparing ourselves to the seeming perfection of our Facebook friends’ well-curated lives can lead to feelings of inadequacy and depression. 

Contrast that experience with these lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘Wild Geese’:

You do not have to be good. 
You do not have to walk on your knees 
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. 
You only have to let the soft animal of your body 
love what it loves.

Now read that first sentence of the poem again and feel yourself being released from the notion that there is one right way to be. 

Mary Oliver locates the source of wisdom in the same place as Michael Blumenthal: “the soft animal of your body.” Do not look outside yourself for the answers you seek, she is saying.  Give up comparing yourself to some external ideal of how you should be. Your own heart knows what is worth loving. 

If you are used to adapting yourself to the expectations of the external world, it can be hard to let that go and turn back inward. But the surprising thing is that when you do begin to listen again to your own heart, you find yourself once more at home in the world:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination, 
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting- 
over and over announcing your place 
in the family of things.

Listen to Mary Oliver read the full version of Wild Geese.

3. Throw Yourself Like Seed

When things feel out of sorts, you might find yourself saying, “I need to collect myself.” Others may offer you advice like, “Pull yourself together.” Miguel de Unamuno’s advice, in his poem ‘Throw Yourself Like Seed,’ is altogether different.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field

You do not need to hold on to yourself, says Unamuno. You need to give yourself away. Don’t pull yourself together. Scatter yourself. 

Unamuno’s perspective is very similar to that of Victor Frankl, who believed that it is only in the giving of ourselves to our life tasks that “happiness ensues.” And all of this accords with the research that shows how depression can be alleviated by volunteer work. 

So, instead of working on yourself, maybe you should find ways to work for others.

for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds; 
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself. 

Read Throw Yourself Like Seed by Miguel de Unamuno

4.  Die and So Grow

And so long as you haven’t experienced this: 
To die, and so to grow, 
You are only a troubled guest 
On the dark earth.

In his poem, ‘The Holy Longing,’ the German poet Goethe uses the image of the butterfly to express his ideas about growing through dying. Just as the caterpillar “dies” to become the butterfly, in Goethe’s poem the butterfly “dies” to become the flame of a candle. This is not to be understood as a literal dying, but rather as a process of transformation.

Personally, I don’t believe that it is the essential thing that we finally come to know ourselves as the caterpillar, the butterfly, or the flame. It’s not as important what we are transformed into, but that we become transformable, that our fixed notions of ourselves dissolve, become more fluid, more flowing. 

The question is not ‘What should I become?,’ but rather, ‘What is the flame, the larger life, that I can die into?’ 

Read the full text of Goethe’s The Holy Longing here.

5. Stand Still

David Wagoner’s poem ‘Lost’ takes us back once again to the forest. It is based on a Native American teaching story about what a person should do when lost in the forest. The advice is as startling as it is simple. Stand still. 

This, of course, is one of the central teachings of many religious traditions. The Tao Te Ching says, “Let the mind become still.” In the Psalms we read, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism all have forms of meditation, which is a way of stilling the mind and the ego in order to feel the movement of Ultimate Reality however it may be experienced.

The final words in Wagoner’s poem express this same idea with a beautiful simplicity:

Stand still. The forest knows 
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Read Lost by David Wagoner.

How To Find Yourself? Lose Yourself.

It’s true that none of these suggestions for finding yourself is “actionable” in the conventional sense of the word. In fact, they are all different ways of saying the same thing, which might be expressed–unpoetically–as, “get out of your own way.” But just because they are not active, don’t be deceived into thinking that they are, therefore, passive, or, for that matter, easy. 

In a sense, each represents the poet’s own version of wu wei, the Taoist concept of non-striving or “the action of non-action.” They all express the idea that there is a larger life ready to open to us beyond the usual concerns of the everyday — a life that is “more you than you, more I than me,” as Alan Watts once phrased it. 

Poetry has the ability to point us to this larger life in a way that ordinary language simply cannot. So, perhaps one of the best things that you can do to find yourself is to pick up the works of your favorite poet, open to any page, and start to read out loud. For, as Mary Oliver reminds us:

“Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

Do you have a favorite poem that helps you find your way when you are lost? Please share it below in the comments.Take good care.