What if the Christmas story is about you?
I don’t mean that you are Jesus. I mean that perhaps we have made the Christmas story too small by treating it only as the story of one miraculous incarnation two thousand years ago.
What if it is also an archetypal story about incarnation itself?
A human being is born. A completely unique expression of life enters the world. Something appears that has never existed before and will never exist again in precisely this form.
And the Christmas story says: Pay attention. This matters.
The stars align. The animals gather. Shepherds come in from the fields. Magi travel from distant lands bearing gifts. Angels sing.
The cosmos itself seems to participate in the celebration of a particular human birth.
What if every child deserved to be welcomed that way?
What if you did?
The Deeper Problem Beneath People-Pleasing
I’ve been thinking and teaching a lot about people-pleasing. And the further I get into it, the less satisfied I am with treating it as a collection of behaviours.
There are plenty of books that will teach you how to say no, establish boundaries, become more assertive, stop apologizing or care less about what other people think.
Those things can be useful.
But I think people-pleasing goes much deeper.
It can become an entire identity organized around an unconscious assumption:
I am not fully legitimate.
I don’t quite have the right to be myself.
I don’t have the right to want what I want, feel what I feel, think what I think or take up the space my life naturally occupies.
So I look elsewhere for authorization.
What do you think?
Are you okay with me?
Am I disappointing you?
What do you need?
Who would you like me to be?
Agency, sovereignty and authenticity all depend upon something more fundamental: the felt knowledge that I have an inherent right to be here as myself.
Without that knowledge, the self can slowly disappear.
How the Self Slips Away
Kierkegaard wrote about the peculiar tragedy of losing oneself.
If you lose money, you know it. If a marriage ends, you know something has happened. If you lose a limb, the loss is unmistakable.
But the loss of self can happen almost invisibly.
The self simply slips away.
Usually this happens early. We discover that certain expressions of ourselves threaten attachment, create conflict, disappoint a parent or attract criticism.
So we adapt.
We become good.
Helpful.
Successful.
Undemanding.
Funny.
Spiritual.
Strong.
Whatever is required.
These adaptations may once have been intelligent ways of surviving our circumstances. But eventually we can become so identified with them that we forget they are adaptations.
We begin living somebody else’s version of our life and calling it our own.
That may be one of the great tragedies of human existence.
Maybe You Don’t Need to Find Your Purpose
This also makes me wonder about our enormous cultural preoccupation with finding our purpose.
People spend years asking:
What am I supposed to do with my life?
Why am I here?
What is my purpose?
But what if that question becomes so urgent partly because the self has slipped away?
Maybe purpose is much simpler than we imagine.
Perhaps the purpose of your life is to express yourself.
Not your ego in the narcissistic sense. Not every passing impulse or desire.
I mean allowing this unique manifestation of life — this person who has appeared here, in this body, at this time, in these circumstances — to actually exist.
When I’m doing that, I’ve noticed something interesting.
The question of purpose tends to fade.
When I’m doing me, I don’t spend nearly as much time wondering what I’m supposed to be doing.
I’m already doing it.
I’m living.
I’m expressing.
I’m participating.
I’m here.
The Christmas Story Is About Incarnation
This is where the Christmas story becomes so beautiful to me.
Christianity traditionally speaks about the Incarnation: God becoming human in Jesus.
But what if this story also invites us to contemplate the mystery of incarnation itself?
Whatever name we give to the source from which everything emerges — God, Spirit, Being, Love, Life, the Divine — here we are.
We are expressions of it.
And yet we are ourselves.
That’s the beautiful non-dual mystery.
I am that, but I am that as me.
You are that, but you are that as you.
Whatever the Source of life is, it can only know and express itself as you when you are actually being you.
That gives the loss of self a spiritual dimension.
When you disappear from your own life, something unique disappears with you.
And when you return, something returns to the world.
Imagine If Every Birth Were Treated This Way
Think again about the imagery surrounding Jesus’ birth.
Here is a child born to ordinary people under humble circumstances.
And yet the story refuses to treat his arrival as insignificant.
A star shines over the place of his birth.
The natural world participates.
Shepherds arrive.
Wise people from Persia see something in the heavens and travel across borders to honour him.
They bring gifts and lay them at his feet.
It’s a magnificent image.
But imagine if we understood this as an archetypal description of every human birth.
Imagine parents looking at their newborn child and thinking:
Something has happened in the universe.
Someone has arrived.
This particular expression of life has never existed before.
We don’t know who this child will become.
Our task is not to manufacture that person.
Our task is to behold them.
What kind of world might emerge if children were raised with that fundamental recognition?
Not: You are more important than everybody else.
But:
You belong here.
Your existence matters.
You are legitimate.
And Then Herod Appears
Of course, every great story contains darkness.
The Christmas story has Herod.
Herod hears that a child has been born whose significance is being recognized. And instead of celebrating that light, he experiences it as a threat.
That’s what domination does.
It cannot tolerate a light it cannot control.
Read archetypally, Herod becomes much bigger than one ancient ruler.
Herod represents the forces — familial, cultural, ancestral and collective — that fail to recognize the light of the child.
Sometimes those forces merely neglect it.
Sometimes they shame it.
Sometimes they control it.
Sometimes they violate it.
Sometimes they demand that the child become somebody else in order to belong.
And so the child adapts.
The light is covered.
The self slips away.
People-pleasing is one way this can happen.
Instead of living from the assumption, I am legitimate, we organize our lives around a very different question:
Who must I become so that you will allow me to belong?
The Light Still Shines
But the Christmas story doesn’t end with Herod.
The Gospel of John gives us another extraordinary image:
The light shines in the darkness.
And the darkness does not overcome it.
I find that profoundly moving when understood psychologically and spiritually.
Because perhaps the deepest self was never actually destroyed.
Covered, yes.
Forgotten.
Shamed.
Abandoned.
Driven underground.
But not extinguished.
There remains within us some stubborn spark of original life that keeps trying to come through.
Maybe that’s why, after decades of adaptation, somebody suddenly says:
I can’t live like this anymore.
Maybe that’s why we begin questioning relationships that require our disappearance.
Why we start noticing what we actually feel.
Why we become curious about what we want.
Why we finally say no.
Why we make something.
Why we speak.
Why we leave.
Why we stay and finally show up.
Why, sometimes quite late in life, we begin wanting our own life back.
Something in us remembers.
The light still shines.
You Were Born Legitimate
This is why I increasingly think the work of ending people-pleasing is sacred work.
It isn’t merely about becoming more assertive.
It isn’t about learning a handful of communication techniques.
It is the recovery of a fundamental truth:
You were born legitimate.
You didn’t have to earn your right to exist.
You didn’t have to prove that your feelings were acceptable.
You didn’t need permission to become yourself.
The people who were supposed to recognize your legitimacy may not have recognized it.
They may have been carrying their own wounds, their own fears and their own ancestral inheritances.
But their inability to see your light did not mean there was no light to see.
That’s the distinction that can change a life.
What If This Is Awakening?
We often imagine spiritual awakening as some extraordinary altered state of consciousness.
Perhaps sometimes it is.
But I’m interested in something much more ordinary and much more demanding.
What if awakening means finally realizing, deeply, that you matter?
And then proceeding through your life accordingly.
Not as though you are the centre of the universe.
But as though the universe would actually be incomplete without you.
Because it would.
There will never be another you.
There will never be another person standing at exactly your intersection of history, biology, experience, relationship, consciousness and possibility.
Your task isn’t to become special.
You already are particular.
Your task is to stop disappearing.
The Christmas Story Is About You
So yes, I think the Christmas story is about Jesus.
But I don’t think it stops there.
It is a story about incarnation.
About the miracle of particularity.
About a light entering the darkness.
About the forces that attempt to extinguish it.
And about the astonishing claim that they ultimately cannot.
You are part of that story.
The work of becoming yourself may therefore be much more than a personal development project.
It may be your participation in incarnation itself.
Another light remembered.
Another human being refusing to disappear.
Another person recovering the legitimacy that was there from the beginning.
Another life finally being lived from the inside.
The Magi may not arrive at your door bearing gold.
There may be no star hovering over your house.
You probably won’t hear angels.
But the invitation remains.
Treat your incarnation as though it matters.
Protect the light.
Become the person who arrived here.
And live the life that only you can live.
You only get one life. Let it be yours.
If you’re working to end people-pleasing, recover your own voice and live more fully as yourself, you’re welcome to join me in the Just.Be.You. community.
It’s a place for people learning to stop abandoning themselves and begin living their own unrepeatable lives.
