3-23-23 Authenticity seems to be a popular topic lately. Stew and I did a Warrior’s Circle a few weeks ago on it because it had come up in quite a few client conversations. If you want to watch it, let me know and I can send you the recording…it’s a good one. Here’s a few more thoughts I had. The authentic self or, as they called it in a recent article I just read, the essential self, or higher self, or God self, is where we want to reside in more of our moments. It’s what we talk about every week in the Warrior Circle – Love as our true nature; living, believing, and acting from that essential truth. I often call this my HeartSelf, or Big Self.

Nothing to argue about there, right? After all, it’s what we all want. The problem arises in what we are actually making “authentic” mean to us. Often, we make being authentic translate to being perfect. However, it’s impossible to always show up as our best self and, therefore, we use that as evidence that we’re not being authentic in the world. Often, when we’re in our humanness, we’re experiencing messiness, feeling the difficult feelings, and being unskillful in our relationships or at work or in our lives. We’re making mistakes, falling down rabbit holes and clawing our way back up. And then we try to hide it from the world, and very often from everyone else.

This was my life for a long time.

Breaking down the walls I had built up around my heart, through self-inquiry, and learning to live more in, and therefore from, my heart, allowed me to accept my humanness. Being honest with myself, and others, and surrounding myself with compassion allowed me to express that humanness in healthier ways.

My friends, messiness, difficult feelings, and confusing thoughts are part of the fullness of life because we are both human and spirit in a body.

It is inevitable that I am sometimes going to present “imperfectly”. Making myself wrong or bad around that only occurs when I put expectations on myself about being perfect or always presenting nicely, or as superwoman. I have many labels I can put on myself that will absolutely guarantee I will fail. And when I let my humanness convince me I’m a horrible person because of that, I believe I don’t deserve and will never deserve to say – to believe – to claim myself as an elevated being, healer, teacher and inspirer.

The paradox of being alive is to be able to know we live in both worlds. The magic key for me is to enfold myself in compassion when I am immersed in my human suffering and can’t seem to find my way to the light. Then my seeming faults can become a bridge rather than a wall. We all have our human stuff and I’m doing the best I can…and so is everyone else!

So I am human AND I am also the spirit of Love. It always helps when I can remember that the light is there, within me, maybe buried deep, but it’s there and I will access it again. To be continued…

Today is a good day...and I make it so!