There is a similarity between my personal experience of losing my original identity through closed adoption

and the isolation endured by the spiritual self (atma) while practicing Patanjali’s Yoga meditation.

This meditation consists of limbs 6, 7 and 8 found in the Yoga Sutras and is summarized in verse two of the first chapter, 'yogah chitta vritti nirodaha’. This means that one abandons everything it normally, naturally, understands itself to be, including the mind and emotions. Deserting all that one depends on for personality. All of it. Nature’s design that keeps the core-self identified as the mind is interrupted, leaving the core-self to fend for itself.

It’s left alone.

No thoughts, no emotions, no memories, no sleep. (Patanjali says specifically no remembering, imagining, perceiving correctly or incorrectly, and no sleeping during the meditation session.)

Nothing to relate you to the idea of you in the mind.

Separated from your natural (not spiritual) identity.

Like a newborn baby who finds itself without its mother, without her smell, sound or vibration, having the natural continuum of life interrupted.

This article is about the rare person who is a total adoptee. Statistically we’re about 1% of the population. This is a child who grows up, and may always remain, a legally classified person. Meaning, their genetic family background is kept secret from the child and its adopting family – this is meant to facilitate, for the adopting parents, the experience of a 'natural' family.

This is an infant legally surrendered by its mother, for one reason or another, and placed in a permanent foster home. While the adoptive parents have permanent legal responsibility like any other parent, the ideal is that the child will simply assume and accept, even after being made aware of his/her adoption, the lineage of the genetically unrelated adopting family.

This is a child who will never at any time during her or her upbringing receive any self-identifying information regarding families of genetic origin in these situations. An adoptee has no access to even health information and their birth certificate is sealed in a file while a new one is issued with the adopting family name.

Past, deleted.

When it came to Catholic style adoptions, children were systemically conditioned to be quietly accepting of the situation. Books available to me at that time on adoption seemed to encourage little else but a sense of gratitude that I was somehow 'chosen', even though in reality an adopted child figures out early on that they were simply the next in line. The subtler, more sinister message the child often picks up on is that it is his or her responsibility to provide a kind, loving, infertile adoptive couple the opportunity to be parents.

No pressure there!

The child is left to somehow internally manage this oddity of nature, alone, with no counsel. The secrecy of the matter creates an inner shame often resulting in an insecure, yet, introspective person.

Sounds like a decent set up for an aspiring ascetic, maybe?

An adopted child could be compared to a person living with a form of amnesia. The person with amnesia knows they must have a past, they must be someone and that they must have relatives and that the memories of those family members must be contained in the very cells of their living body.

But for the life of you, you cannot access the information.

You cannot remember.

It’s hard to speculate, but do you think it would be possible for you to simply relinquish your past, surrender to your fate and construct a new identity based on the lineage of another family line?

Or do you think some of those memories and attachments might fight for survival?

I tend to think the psyche holds on.

And it is programmed to do so.

Just because physical bodies can be separated doesn’t mean the same for psychic energies. We are not just physical beings. Those familial energies keep flowing between people on subconscious levels whether bodies are present or not. The psyche of the adopted child will relentlessly reach back into its ancestral past, but every single time it tries, on the conscious level it is met with a blank wall of amnesia.

We often spend many life times with and as our ancestors. Over and over we may reincarnate through one another, strengthening the attachment bonds with every rebirth.

A person seriously practicing a detachment process like yoga should be very analytical regarding what role family engrossment, meaning genetic attachment, plays in our inability to break the cycle of rebirth.

In the 1970’s and for decades before, if you were to find yourself white, teenage, pregnant, unmarried and Catholic, your chances of leaving St. Whoever’s Maternity Center for Unwed Mothers (where you went to find help) with your baby was slim to none. These young women’s babies were 'marked' for adoption even before the birth mother had any inclining that, behind the scenes, there was a married couple very anxiously waiting for her baby.

The research and history of a worldwide baby trade has been done and made public. The Catholic Church played a large role.

Even though the baby swap era was in large part driven by the desire of infertile married couples to raise children from infancy, these parents were, in one sense, innocent in their natural and often overwhelming instinct to be parents, while also being victims of the times and the powers that be in our world.

The psychology of infertility as it relates to reincarnation is a topic for another time - suffice it to say that it is not their fault, they are not to blame. It must be said too that in terms of reincarnation, one certainly does not have to be born directly from another person to be their child. We are all interrelated when it comes to our past lives and sometimes we take strange routes to get back to each other.

To understand the psychology of an adoptee (the adopted child) as it would compare to sacrifices made in yoga, you, the reader, would have to be willing to contemplate how it might feel to have never met any of your family members. You would have to imagine growing up in a home with unrelated people. You have to imagine that you have never known, seen, or heard anything at all about your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings - any and all genetic kin. You would have to contemplate how it would feel to have never looked into the eyes of any one you are genetically related to. You know nothing of the circumstances of your origins. Whatever happened before you were placed with a surrogate family is a void. You would have to imagine that at the time of your birth, decisions regarding your destiny were made that resulted in your natural family history disappearing from your life.

Spending the first half of my life with such a lack of self-identity reminds me of what it is like doing Patanjali’s meditation which I've done many times.

This might seem like a strange comparison but bear with me. During Patanjali meditation when the core-self (atma) has no access to its familiar (family) parts (vrittis), parts that promote a ‘secure’ self identity (ahamkara), the core-self can go through a long period of self-questioning and feelings of isolation and loss.

For the core-self, the mental and emotional internal feelings and ideas displayed in the mind (citti vritti) are the old ancestors, the beloved family members who secure your place in this world.

The core-self (atma), just like a newborn baby, is interested in one thing. Identity. When we are born in a physical body we first call this identity, “Mother”. At first we cannot distinguish ourselves from her. Through touch, taste, smell, sound and sight she is our first relative and our dependency on her for identity is all consuming and non-objective.

In Patanjali meditation the core self is expected to stop itself from running back to the mothering security of thoughts, feelings, visualizations, mantras and stand on its own, reaching upward, inward and outward for connection with something more. However, something more could take a long time to get to. We may have to wait a while.

Adoptee babies lack the experience of the natural continuum during the usual human experience. They are often removed from mother’s presence at the moment of birth to prevent eye contact, much less physical touching. The electro-magnetic pulsations of their connected hearts are suddenly severed forcing an experience of individualization, no longer unified with the mother’s vibration. Without those first inner touchstones and normal reassurances between natural mother and child, adopted babies who wait days or weeks for placement with someone to nurture them at all, can grow up feeling lost.

I grew up lacking a foundation in identity. I may have appeared fine on the outside, but on the inside I relentlessly questioned everything about myself and about families, mine and others, and the meaning of family. I studied families, siblings and their distracted mixed up obsession with each other –yet they all seemed so rooted.

As an adoptee everyday your mind wonders to those people, somewhere out there, that you came from. What happened to them? Do they think of you? You go on about life but every day you remember and feel the hidden shock that you are a sort of nobody again and again.

Although I had already done a reunification with bother sides of my biological families when I was 25 years old, when I was 40 years old I received my once classified original birth certificate from the State of Illinois in the mail. There was no name in the first name box.

And only my mother’s last name in my last name box. I had had no recorded first name all those years.

In 2013 I began contemplating taking a spiritual name. Often when taking a spiritual name it will start with the same letter as your given name. For me that’s E. I found a beautiful Sanskrit name that started with and E and when I looked up the meaning of the word, the meaning was, ‘nameless’. The message to me in this life is so abundantly clear. When it comes to our bodies and our families, these things are only temporary and essentially we’re all a bunch of nobodies. It is our spiritual identity that is everlasting. This life brought this lesson into clear and sometimes painful awareness.

Eventually, my guru gave me the name devaPriya Yogini. Yogini is a title or category of being and deva means ‘gods’. Priya means ‘dear to’. So the name means “Yogini who is dear to the gods”. With this designation I am reminded to aim my awareness not toward Earthly circumstances but toward higher spiritual endeavors. It reminds me I am much more than human.

Bottom Line

The core-self finds itself in the same predicament as the adoptee when forced to practice Patanjali’s meditation. It is shocking for the self to realize how lacking in security and identity it really is. Its little spiritual arms and legs flail around in there, looking for someone or something to pick it up and give it meaning. I have a theory that this self-isolation period of Patanjali’s plan causes avoidance within some people. Avoidance of meditation as well as even a deeper subconscious avoidance of accepting the existence of the spiritual self which involves taking responsibility for one’s existential situation. This avoidance from my perception, promotes attachment to non-individualist ideas of ‘oneness’ that we see so prevalent in the mish mash of the new age culture.

In new age oneness ways of thinking, rather than taking seriously that the self exists, the ego (ahamkara) rationalizes that there is no one there, that we are all the same, all for the sake of avoiding the responsibility of being a self.

You may be able to run from your self, but I do not think you will ever be able to avoid running back into your self, here in this life, or another.

As fate would have it, I was left up to wonder who I was and I experienced the same thing when I started seriously applying Patanjali’s method to my meditation. The real me was left up again to fend for itself, to find its own personhood and to bravely yoke (yoga) itself to something higher and greater.

On both levels, I have found out. On the physical/psychological, I did find my origins. I experienced the reunification with my bio-families.

On the existential side, through the practice of yoga, I found the true self, the eternal me that understands the greater significance of our supposed losses.

Loss motivated my interest in existential things.

Still, sometimes the eternal me feels alone and isolated in meditation. It runs back to the mind again and again for identity and I don’t always reach the levels and states of meditation that I need to in order to feel connected to my spiritual parents.But I know they are always there and that sometimes you have to leave up the “old you” to discover who the “real you” is.