This meditation helps us to shed identities and agendas.  We have many identities in life, ranging from our personal qualities (our personality), family roles, how we think of ourselves (e.g., liberal, vegetarian, loving etc.),  professional identities, cultural, ethnic, and religious identities, and many more.  Likewise we have many agendas, some of them are life-long aspirations, and some are today’s (or this moment’s) agenda.
We always carry some identity and some agendas with us.  Even a Buddha has an identity (e.g., “Buddha”) and agendas (e.g., to liberate all beings).  The purpose of this meditation exercise is not to get rid of our identities and agendas, but to examine them, see them more clearly, and release any holds they may have on us.  Can we have an identity or an agenda with no attachment to it?  Can we be more fluid in adopting identities and agendas?  Can we recognize they too are impermanent and “empty of a separate self”?

As always, We start with Shamata, stopping and calming the habitual mind.  Coming back to my breath, creating peace and space within myself.

The first exercise is to observe my identities and name them.  We then just write them down on a piece pf paper.  At different times different identities might come up, personal ones, social ones, ideological ones, etc.  We usually have countless identities we use at different times, but a few of them tend to be quite strong and come up a lot (even all the time).  The list can be very long, but we start with just a few identities.

In the second exercise I take each identity I wrote down and contemplate who would I be if I did not have this identity.  Allowing myself to just sit, in the spaciousness of meditation, with not being this identity.  I take note of any identities I feel resistance in letting go off.  I can later look more deeply as to why a particular identity generates stringer attachments.

In the third exercise I recognize that my identities are like masks: we put them on and take them off according to needs and circumstances.  I see that identities come and go.

The forth exercise is to look at my agenda, right now and agendas that run as themes in my life.  I write these down on the piece of paper.

In the fifth period I contemplate not accomplishing these agendas.  Who would I be, how would I feel without these agendas.

I contemplate my agendas and see the coming and going and changing.

In the sixth exercise of this meditation I ask myself “after I peel all the identities, let go of all the agendas. what is left?”  I sit with the question and the “what is left.”

Let the Buddha sit, let the Buddha breathe: I don’t need to sit, I don’t need to breathe.  This is a phrase (and meditation) Thay came up with to encourage us to release.  I just sit and allow the Buddha to sit for me, letting go of my ideas, identities and agendas.

The meditation produced a sense of joy and lightness, and also the question of “if we have no agenda, how would we be motivated to do anything?”

I believe we cannot “get rid” of agendas, but we can let go of our attachments to them.  I can have an agenda like helping people, fixing a leaking roof, changing something, etc., and I can pursue it, but I can also release my attachments to the results.  I simply do the work, and I accept that the end result may not be the one I intended or wanted.  There are many things that are hard to let go of.  Most of us find it very hard to accept that the roof is still leaking after we fixed it.  This applies to our physical roofs as well as to the various emotional leaks/bleeds we have.

Can we come to terms with the leaking roofs of our lives, keep fixing them, knowing that leaks might still occur?  As a meditator, I aim (“I have an agenda”) to be able to do that again and again…