I recently found out that my name means something different than I thought it did. Thank you Google.

A little back story here. My family of origin is comprised of two very different cultures. My Mom had always liked the name Sarah, but what she liked even more was the pronunciation of Sara in my Dad’s culture. It’s different, there’s no hard R sound like there is in the States. It’s softer, longer. It is pronounced that way in other cultures too I discovered as I traveled around the world. But my Mom wanting to cement this pronunciation, changed the spelling. That is why I have a W in the middle of my name. She wanted it to be pronounced properly. But realistically what happened is that it became its own thing. It is its own thing.

I could write thousands of words on how this name has affected me and interplayed in my life, and maybe someday I will, but for right now, I want to share what happened recently, which is that Google finally catalogued a meaning for my name. Basically since Google began, I have been looking up my name. Since my Mom essentially made up the spelling 2 decades before google came into existence, I had little hope that it actually had a meaning besides the same meaning as Sara.

Earlier this year or maybe it was late last year, I googled my name yet again, (yes boredom and curiosity), and I finally got a hit. There was some town or village in Saudi Arabia with the same spelling. It had some other letters and a dash in front of it, but there it was in clear letters “Sawrah.” I was stunned, so I went deeper. It was clear some texts that had not been previously translated had made their way to google in between the last time I checked and this time. And now, there were meanings of the name listed. I couldn’t believe it! My Mom had “made up” the spelling as far as she knew. She had even considered a U instead of a W. So apparently, it is now listed as an Arabic name for girls, and it means revolution, uprising or excitement. The pronunciation is completely different in this listing, but the spelling is the same. There is also some sort of sorority slang relationship to this name too that I don’t’ quite understand, but also always comes up in Google.

This brings me to this Sawrah, meaning me. I could not believe this definition, because first, we are Persian and I am sure that this name would not have flown if it was deemed to be an Arabic name (long torturous history between the two, look it up). And second, I would never be mistaken for a revolutionary or creating an uprising, I’m often reserved and quiet. Or at least that is what I thought…

Lately, I am wondering if my name isn’t actually a little prescient for how I live my life and the work that I am starting to expand. The inner journey that I encourage everyone to go on IS revolutionary. Knowing yourself at that level IS revolutionary. It CAN create an uprising, just not the way you might think of it now (outward, violent, upheaval). This revolution, this uprising, is from within. It casts light upon shadows, it changes you, it heals you, it moves, shifts, and changes, every system of belief you have held onto about yourself, and THAT is revolutionary.

So perhaps, I am lot more aptly named than I ever thought. Though I have always loved my name and I could never be named anything else, I was taken aback when I found this definition. Now I am in relationship with it, learning about it, dancing with the boundaries that are there, the excitement that is there, the excitement of knowing, truly knowing yourself underneath all of the human gunk that is not yours. Imagine if everyone could find that place within themselves. Be in truth with themselves. Live from truth instead of trauma. Imagine, the revolution that could come from THAT.

Though it would be a quiet one at first, full of inner work, listening and silence, the shifts created by each individual person would not be so quiet. They would ripple out to everyone they met, and those ripples would become the waves of a tsunami through the culture. Imagine, if we had self-soothing, and emotional intelligence tools that allowed us to make different choices in times of stress and struggle. Imagine. That is the danger of a quiet revolution. It is dangerous to the status quo. It is why we are socialized to produce not to pause. It is why we are told to consume instead of know and recognize what we already have both inside and outside. If you have emotional stability and a semblance of peace, you won’t emotionally buy to fill needs that will never be met by stuff.

I maybe be an idealist (I absolutely am), but I’m not even talking about Utopia or anything here, but what if, that person that served you at the car dealership didn’t lash out at you because of misplaced projection and emotion from their own life; if they had the tools instead to know themselves, know that they might be in a triggered state and handle your transaction with that knowledge, from that place of awareness. Imagine how different that would be for you. Maybe they wouldn’t yell at you, maybe you wouldn’t get triggered and yell back at them, and then take that energy into your next interaction with someone and causing a line of heightened interactions through the rest of the day. That simple shift, that simple change (well not simple), could change the day of everyone you interact with.

I get it though, it’s hard to be that conscious and that aware, it takes a lot of attention and intention and well, love. You have to want to do it. You have to be willing to fail over and over again as you learn. And really, our patterns and habitual behaviors are so much easier. We already know them. We don’t have to “get to know” new behaviors and patterns. We don’t have to wonder about the unknown of new choices. We get to stay in our “comfortable” box, even if it is causing us pain and suffering over and over again.

This is where revolution comes in. Revolution at its core is a challenge to set of ideas or a system, often forcibly and often in relationship to government. But in my case, and in the case I am examining here, it is a revolution to overthrow all of your ideas and stories about yourself, and the ideas about how and what a good life is and is made up of. An internal revolution is an overthrow of the internal system you have had and held onto and lived your life by. Maybe it came from the outside, and is full of shoulds and other people’s opinions. Maybe you got to those beliefs by some other way. But the key thing here is, are they really yours? Have you examined them? Why you believe what you believe? Do you really believe what you think you believe? Can you go deeper? What do you want to keep and what do you want to discard? What is your truth?

This is a call for an internal revolution, a quiet non-violent revolution, an examination of how your beliefs and ideas run aspects of your life without you knowing it. This is a call to dredge the subconscious to create space for the new, to create space for healing, and to create space for all that is coming. And it all starts with curiosity about you internal landscape.