The Dance of the ‘I’ and the ‘I Am’ - Personality and Presence - Form and Formless

Kerry Jehanne-Guadalupe

Questing, Requesting, and Questions

On a vision quest several years ago, I sat alone in the woods within a ten-foot-wide circle formed from dried tobacco, mugwort, and bear root sprinkled on the ground. Free from distraction and without food or water for three and a half days, I entered the quest with a single request: a vision from Spirit.

I had participated in vision quests before and had beautiful, insightful experiences. This one, however, was profoundly different. Instead of symbolic images or insights, the vision I was given was my own psyche—the good, the wonky, and the imprisoning. Being shown my personal conditioned inner world proved far more challenging than any physical hardship previous quests had required, including enduring long hours beneath the scorching sun.

Alongside this vision came a clear message from Spirit: If you want to live and love more expansively, you need to see and deconstruct the prisons you have created. If you want freedom, you must recognize where you are holding yourself captive and find the key that releases you.

I understood that Spirit was not pointing to external programming—media, education, religion, or social conditioning—but to something more intimate and difficult to face: the internal structures I had built over years of living my life. Spirit revealed the places where I had tethered myself from within.

Over those three and a half days, I ventured into the cul-de-sacs of my own psyche. I witnessed how often I perceived life through the lens of past experience rather than through my essence—how I lived from my personality structure instead of from Presence.

By “personality structure,” I am not referring to personality types such as introvert or extrovert, sanguine or melancholic, artistic or pragmatic. Instead, I am speaking of the unique configuration each person develops—an interwoven pattern of behaviors, emotional responses, physical states, and thoughts shaped by lived experience.

I include physical states of being as part of personality structure because our bodies participate in our inner world; they register the biochemistry of our emotions and the neural patterns of our thoughts. The body remembers, reacts, and reinforces the psyche.

What became unmistakably clear on my vision quest was that I had, in part, allowed my essence to be overshadowed by my personality structure—by psychological norms and their corresponding emotional and physical states. The phrase “losing oneself in thought” took on an entirely new meaning. The self I had been losing touch with was my essence.

It was very apparent how easily I could live from personality rather than Presence—how an aspect of my conditioned inner world, unexamined and automatic, could overtake my way of being in the world without reflecting who I truly am.

This realization gave rise to deeper questions: How do I free myself from holding my essence captive within my own conditioned inner world? What is the key to escaping the prison of conditioning?

Spirit’s response was simple and profound: My essence is the key. The key is not held by personality, because the psyche cannot liberate itself. Only essence can do that.

While on my vision quest, Spirit emphasized that I needed to connect with my essence to make any significant changes to my personality structure. Without that connection, no meaningful or lasting transformation of the personality structure could occur.

A Death of Old Ways of Life

Recently, friends and clients have been sharing that they feel as though they are bumping up against walls they themselves inadvertently created. Many have described this moment as distinctly different from the inner work they have done in the past— the heavy-duty trauma work, the deep, painful processing of past experiences. What feels most present now, and often quite loudly, are the limiting beliefs, emotional patterns, and behaviors that quietly took shape as life unfolded. I can relate.

Several clients have described this phase as a kind of death—specifically, the dying off of patterns that once sustained them but have now become intolerable:

I feel like I am going through a death process of ways of being that were slowly killing me.

I grew up believing that I was born to serve others at any expense to myself. That belief worked for decades, and now it feels like it is killing me.

It used to be easy to swallow my truth, but now I feel the impact of doing so. It is soul-crushing. How have I not felt the weight of this all along?

If it was not safe to speak as a child, we may have formed a belief that speaking is not safe—one that followed us quietly into adulthood. What once protected us can become an internal prison later in life. Strategies that ensured survival in the past may restrict authentic expression in the present, limiting our capacity to live as the fullest version of ourselves.

A plethora of beliefs can form as we navigate our lives and adapt to circumstances, relationships, and expectations. It is striking how a personality structure that served us well in one decade can become suffocating in the next. There often comes a moment when patterns we once endured—or barely noticed—begin to press heavily upon our well-being, no longer ignorable, no longer sustainable.

One way I understand my own experience is that I can be running a personality program—a default operating system written through repeated thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses over time. At times, I have unknowingly handed over aspects of my free will to this program. Yet this realization does not bring dismay. Instead, it arises from essence, as though my higher self is gently illuminating my default settings. That illumination brings spaciousness—a sense of expansion beyond confinement.

For myself, at the level of personality, as well as for others, this phase feels like a necessary unraveling—a significant developmental threshold marked by letting go, recalibrating, and emerging anew. Though challenging, it carries the unmistakable quality of a rite of passage: a transition from living on autopilot to consciously choosing who we are becoming. It is the movement from default settings toward the intentional cultivation of the next version of ourselves.

Adapting or Adjusting?

Our bodies can become conditioned to the emotions we habitually feel and the thoughts we repeatedly think. Each thought–emotion pairing generates neurochemical signals, and over time, the nervous system adapts to their presence. When familiar chemical patterns are absent, the body can register this change as a disruption and signal the brain to restore what feels known.

For example, if resentment has been present for years, the body may grow accustomed to the biochemical state associated with resentment. When that state is interrupted, the nervous system may experience a kind of withdrawal, prompting the mind to generate resentful thoughts in order to reestablish the familiar internal environment. This process applies to any long-standing emotional pattern—fear, anger, jealousy, shame, or chronic feelings of unworthiness.

The mind, body, and emotions are connected, linked, inseparable, and inextricable; they are impossible to separate. Therefore, it is not just belief systems we may need to release, but also our emotional habits connected to those beliefs, and the physical body's norms related to thinking/feeling in specific ways. This ensures that we are not mind-locked, heart-locked, and body-locked within personality patterns that no longer support our well-being or fullest expression.

This is why a daily practice of connecting with essence can be so vital. Regularly orienting toward Presence helps prevent the psyche from mistaking conditioned narratives for total identity. Such practices support nervous system regulation while creating space for new patterns to emerge.

I use the expression fairytale-nightmare to describe the experience of everything in one’s life being good—healthy relationships, meaningful work—while old emotional and mental habits continue to run quietly in the background. It is the experience of life is good, but one is conditioned to the past mental and emotional habits—an external fairytale of love and blessings, and an inner nightmare of habitual thoughts and emotions.

I have been genuinely amazed at what we, as humans, can adapt to, habituate to, and normalize. Adaptability is a skill that allows us to acclimate to changes in our lives. We can adapt to a new normal, such as caring for a loved one who became ill and accommodating their needs. We can also adjust to a high-stress level, which, over time, can settle into the body as a baseline state.

At some point, we may need to ask ourselves, does the norm I have adapted to need adjustment?

Just because something has become normal does not mean it is healthy. A norm simply reflects a pattern that has become standard, usual, or typical. Even when an experience is widely shared or culturally reinforced, it does not automatically mean it supports well-being or wholeness. While we may temporarily settle into certain norms, if they remain unquestioned, they can shape years—or even a lifetime—of living. This is why it may be essential to allow our essence to illuminate our norms and ask: Is this necessary, or is it merely familiar?

We can also over-identify with our thoughts and emotions, coming to know ourselves—at the personality level—primarily through how we think and feel about ourselves, others, and the world. Over time, these internal patterns may come to be mistaken for identity. Yet when Presence knocks at the door of personality, something shifts. We recognize that we are not limited to our conditioned perceptions. We are far larger than the stories we have learned to tell ourselves.

Acknowledging our multidimensional nature allows love—rather than habit or fear—to guide perception. From this place, adaptation gives way to conscious adjustment, and living becomes an act of alignment rather than endurance.

Personality and Presence

In my daily life, I am increasingly aware that my essence is observing me at the level of personality. This observing intelligence feels loving, spacious, and quietly wise—something I am learning to meet with greater presence. I am also learning, at the personality level, to step aside enough for the power of essence to do its work: to help me outgrow aspects of my personality structure that no longer serve my becoming. It feels to me like a dance between the “I” and the “I Am”—between personality and Presence, form and the formless, weight and weightless.

I sense that our eternal Presence offers not only guidance but the energy required to shift constricting patterns within the personality structure. Our life-giving essence points us toward the deconstruction of what no longer brings life, inviting a return to original design. There are moments when our emotional, mental, and physical makeup is ready for a makeover—and essence knows when. If the personality has entranced us into hypnotic rhythms of thought and emotion, essence, I believe, is the key that unlocks the trance.

We may be conditioned into a personality program, but we are not permanently confined by it. We are changeable and adaptable. If we can adapt to stress, we can also adjust to new baselines of joy. Our soul—our essence—is stronger, wiser, and more luminous than any conditioned pattern. It carries a perspective that restores the preciousness of life and reorients us toward what truly matters.

There are many pathways into essence: meditation, art, dance, prayer, play, breathwork, and acts of service. Another way to anchor into our essence, to allow our essence to be more present and expressed through our personality, is to feel the feelings of our essence, like joy, love, connectedness, and gratitude.

Years ago, I was introduced to the practice of cultivating positive emotional states, particularly appreciation. Until then, it had never crossed my mind to practice emotions, as emotions were feelings that came and went like they had a life of their own. Practicing positive emotions is not about bypassing pain or avoiding emotions that need to be felt. Rather, it is about preventing difficult states from becoming the default, and about gently establishing a new emotional baseline.

Love, joy, and gratitude are feelings of connectedness: feeling connected in our hearts, connected to others, connected to life beyond ourselves. They are fundamentally relational states that arise from connection. In these states, we naturally feel more open and expanded. It is here that Presence meets personality in a profoundly healing way, allowing life to be lived not from habit, but from wholeness.