Your essential nature is consciousness, unborn, uncreated, untouched by suffering, the true source of happiness. But this inner reality is hidden behind a veil of ignorance, and as a result, we identify ourselves as being male/female, young/old, healthy/ill, etc. when these attributes actually belong to the body, not the true self, atma.
Swami Tadatmananda is a traditionally-trained teacher of Advaita Vedanta, meditation, and Sanskrit. For more information, please see: https://www.arshabodha.org/