When we make the decision to be authentic, we course correct towards very different coordinates. We head towards more adventure and more vividness, deeper friendships, and greater meaning.
Leaving behind the conditioned habit of being externally sourced, we set off to become sourced from within.
The color of life comes from inside us. Things outside of us can stimulate us, support us through resonance and mirroring, to feel what we already are, but it is always our own nature and subjectivity that makes up our lives.
When we embrace this, and decide to live from the richness of our own insides, emanating outwards, rather than outside in, life returns to magic.
Authenticity Goes Against our Conditioning
The external conditioning has been a trick of some sort, like a captured dolphin doing a flip to get an external reward. We have been trained and controlled to perform a stereotyped, predictable, templated appearance of a human being, rather than to express and be what rises up in us organically.
The world would look quite different if we chose to connect first to what is within us, and worry secondarily about whether or not other people approve of who and what we are, and whether it resonates with them.
When we are externally sourced, we are very open to manipulation and social engineering. We have no inner authority. We are vulnerable to being gaslit, bossed around, shamed and blamed. Living our lives as though we belong to someone else: to whoever and whatever we take as an authority.
Authenticity is the Truth That Sets us Free
Authenticity is the truth that, as promised, sets us free. When we are authentic we choose kind words, but don’t dally with falsities about ourselves and what we know.
We speak words meant to illuminate, rather than words meant to confuse, mislead, and cloud. We do not play games or manipulate. We set ourselves and everyone else free from the psychological burden of lies.
There is an enormous psychological benefit to telling the truth. Parts of us suffer when we say something that the body knows to be untrue, as the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance illustrates. Incongruence harms us, and it opens up the door for negative things (like addiction) to sit in our being, regardless of our original intentions.
Addictions don’t like the truth, as you may have noticed. The truth sets us free from addictions and all other kinds of possessions and bindings. Not unkind words or bluntness to others – but rather our honest admission, to ourselves, in the privacy of our hearts and among trusted friends.
Authenticity Is the Root of True Friendship
The first result of being authentic is that those who cannot stand who and what we actually are by nature, will realize they don’t like being around us, and will move on out of our sphere. This can be frightening, or bring on heartache, but it is actually good.
When we can understand this not as a reflection on us, per se, but more an expression of those people’s own resonance or non-resonance, it can be easier to stomach. We don’t all have the same taste in music, we don’t all like cilantro, and we don’t all deeply connect to each other’s soul essence energies, and that’s ok.
When we self-approve our authenticity, we can also permit people who don’t resonate with us to go ahead and take leave of us. We give them our full blessing, as all have the freedom to move towards what they like and away from something that feels bad to them.
The Life-Changing Power of Authenticity
The exciting corollary of this shuffling of friendships is that those who do like us, who feel more comfortable around our truth resonances than around our well-meaning fakery, will gravitate towards us naturally, too.
These people will be harmonious to us, we will fit well with them. These will be the type of friends we can truly prize: people who genuinely like us for who we actually are, rather than for who we have pretended to be.
Perhaps the greatest opportunity for us, is that when we stop lying to ourselves, when we stop seeming rather than being, spirit finally has space to fill us out from within. We swing the inner doorway of the heart wide open.
We let all the good things come flooding in, the gifts spirit has been saving for us: humor, creativity, resilience, meaning, connection, and unconditional, loving presence. That’s the life-changing power of authenticity.
