Untethered to Anchored: Returning to the Practice of Being With Ourselves by Ellie Bass

In one of my recent private growth groups, we began the way we often do—by checking in with each other’s lives. These openings are rarely small. They tend to reveal the deeper currents running underneath the surface.

One woman shared that she was preparing for a trip but feeling physically exhausted after long stretches of work. Another spoke about the heaviness she has been carrying—concerns about health, the tension of family relationships, and the larger political realities pressing in on her sense of stability. Others shared a quieter but familiar experience: being busy, even productive, yet still feeling strangely untethered. What became clear in our conversation is that many people today are living with a subtle but profound disorientation.

For much of human history, identity came with clearer structures. A person knew their place in a

family, a community, a profession. These roles came with expectations and rhythms that gave shape to daily life. They were not always easy, but they offered a kind of scaffolding for the self.

Today many of those structures have loosened. Roles overlap, shift, or dissolve altogether. Particularly for women, identity can become a complicated weave of responsibilities and expectations—professional, familial, relational, communal. And when the structures around us are less defined, the inner experience can begin to feel unstable.

People begin to ask questions quietly inside themselves. Where do I belong? Who am I when the roles shift? What holds me steady?

Several women in the group described exactly this sense of being untethered. Feeling down despite being deeply engaged in meaningful activity. One reflected on a long history of feeling taken advantage of in relationships, which still colors how she experiences connection today. Many noted how physical depletion makes it harder to maintain patience and warmth with the people around them.

These experiences are not simply emotional fluctuations. They are signals that something deeper is asking for attention.They invite us to turn inward. One of the questions I posed to the group was deceptively simple: What are we doing when we are not doing our inner practice?

If our practice is awareness, reflection, noticing ourselves, cultivating presence—then what is happening when we are not doing that? What is our center in those moments? Because whether we recognize it or not, something is always centering us. Habit. Reactivity. Anxiety. The need for validation. Old narratives about who we are or what we deserve. If we are not consciously practicing awareness, something else will take its place.

And that realization shifts the entire frame of the conversation. Practice is not something we do for twenty minutes in the morning or occasionally during meditation. Practice is the orientation we bring to our lives.

The practice is always.

Every moment presents an opportunity to notice what is happening inside of us. The irritation while washing dishes. The heaviness in the body when we receive disappointing news. The subtle tightening when we feel overlooked in a relationship. These moments are not interruptions of life. They are the material of life.

This is why the work of building a relationship with ourselves becomes so essential.

For many people, identity rests almost entirely on roles: wife, mother, professional, friend, caregiver. Those roles matter deeply, but they are not stable foundations for the self. Roles change. Children grow up. Careers shift. Relationships evolve or end. If identity is built entirely on roles, then every change in life can feel like a small identity crisis. But if identity includes a cultivated relationship with the self, then something deeper remains steady beneath those changes.

In many spiritual traditions, including Judaism, we speak about the soul as a calm and observant presence. Thoughts and emotions move through us like weather systems: intense, shifting, sometimes overwhelming. But the deeper self has the capacity to watch those movements without being completely consumed by them.

The practice of awareness strengthens that observing presence. It allows us to pause instead of reacting automatically. It creates a small but powerful space between stimulus and response. And inside that space we regain our freedom.

Sometimes we express how frustrating this process can feel when the emotions themselves are uncomfortable. Many of us would prefer to bypass that part. But learning to stay present with our internal experience is precisely how the relationship with the self deepens. Connection and trust with self happens when we stay. 

One of the women in my group shared a small but meaningful moment of this process in her own life. She recently returned to a few simple forms of self-care she had neglected—getting a facial, taking a walk, allowing herself moments of restoration. What began as small acts opened a larger reflection about how her identity has shifted over the years, from being primarily a caregiver to inhabiting many different roles.

That awareness allowed a new question to emerge: how do we consciously evolve along with the changes in our lives? Our relationships must evolve as we evolve. The ways we speak with one another, the expectations we hold, the dynamics we participate in all require adjustment as we grow. Otherwise we remain stuck inside old versions of ourselves.

But the deeper invitation is even more personal. Perhaps the central project of a human life is the relationship we build with ourselves.

Every other relationship in our lives may change, deepen, fracture, or end. But one relationship accompanies us from the moment we are born until the moment we die: the relationship with our own consciousness, our own soul. Alongside our relationship with God, it is the only relationship that never leaves us. And yet many people spend surprisingly little time cultivating it.

We learn how to be good students, good partners, good parents, good professionals. But very few of us are taught how to be in relationship with our own inner life—to understand our patterns, our reactions, our preferences, our fears, our strengths.

This is why even small exercises can be powerful. I shared the story of a friend who once spent time simply exploring scents, noticing which ones she liked and disliked. It sounds trivial, but it was actually a way of rediscovering her own internal responses rather than living entirely according to external expectations. Learning what we genuinely feel, prefer, and experience is part of rebuilding the relationship with ourselves. And as that relationship deepens, something remarkable begins to happen. Our external relationships become healthier. We respond with more clarity. We recognize patterns more quickly. We stop expecting other people to stabilize emotions that we ourselves have not yet learned to hold.

In this sense, inner work and relational work are not separate paths. They unfold together. Life then begins to look different. Every moment becomes an opportunity to practice awareness. The difficult conversations. The moments of irritation. The quiet sadness that appears unexpectedly in the middle of the day.

None of these experiences are wasted. They are invitations to return to ourselves.

If the practice is always available, then the real question becomes not whether we practice occasionally, but whether we are willing to live our lives as a practice—to approach our own inner world with curiosity, patience, and courage. And if we do, the untethered feeling many people experience today begins to shift.

We may not recover the rigid structures of the past, but we discover something deeper: an internal anchor that moves with us wherever we go.

A relationship with the self that becomes steadier, wiser, and more compassionate over time. And from that place, we are far more capable of showing up fully for the people and the world around us.