Authenticity is a word that you hear flying around self help circles, psychology offices, and spiritual communities all the time. I myself am leading an authenticity movement. But what the hell does that mean?
Your true self is who you are at your core. The portion of you that is unconcerned about what others think. Building lasting connections requires you to learn how to be your true self. When your words, actions, and behaviours constantly reflect your inner identity, you are authentic.
In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.
Brené Brown
1. How To Be Authentic?
Something that is authentic, is not copied. It’s genuine, it’s real, and it’s true. As authenticity applies to a human beings, we must follow the reality that each and every person comes into this life as a unique expression of source consciousness.
This means, each person comes with a unique essence, like an energetic signature and our unique purpose and unique thoughts and unique feelings and unique desires and unique needs and unique role within the greater universe is embedded in that essence.
Our process of progression through this planet should be a process of unfolding. Kind of like when a flower blooms. So you can recognize each person as if they were a lotus blossom. Their unique essence, which is encoded with their purpose and everything else that we think has to do with authenticity, is like a pearl inside that lotus.
When you’re authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy.
You meet people that you like talking to. You go places you’ve dreamt about. And you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled.
Neil Pasricha
Now… if we are allowed to unfold it naturally opens, exposing that pearl but the process of socialization on planet earth does not go this way. If we allowed an unfolding of the authentic aspect of each person the parenting and socialization process would be a process of enabling a child to unfold.
If we did not interfere with this process and simply met the unique needs of the unique child in front of us, it would naturally happen this way. But we live in a world where the process of socialization and therefore parenting, is quite often an impediment to the process of unfolding.
When we come into the world, people do not look at us as if we are a lotus blossom and like it’s their job to help us unfold so they can see the mystery and the magic and the present in the gift of who we are.
Instead they look at us like we are raw material that needs to be molded. Almost like we do not have an innate essence and they know what’s best for that person to become so let’s shape them into that.
They tell us that certain things are acceptable and if we are those things, we will be good and be safe. And other things are unacceptable and if we do that, we will be bad and unsafe. So naturally all of these vulnerable aspects of us, anything that might be real about us, that might be unacceptable have to be hidden from view.
We begin a process of splitting ourselves. We put forward only the things about us that make us loved and safe in the world and the rest we keep hidden. It is as if we will not let certain lotus petals open and therefore keep the pearl hidden so as to fit into the world, be loved and feel safe.
What this means that our personalities are in essence, totally fake. Because the parts of you that you put forward to the world (your personality) – those are just the things that kept you the most safe and most accepted in the world. And that changes based on whatever external condition, culture, fill in the blank, you grew up in.
Our personalities are merely the part of us that we identified with or developed so as to stay safe and away from vulnerability in the specific situations that we were raised in. We suppress, reject, deny and disown the aspects that make us vulnerable or get us disapproved of in the world.
By doing this, they become subconscious. They are buried outside of our awareness and we do not know they even exist.
We can only be authentic to the degree that we currently know ourselves. That’s scary, it means we can only be authentic to the degree that we are self aware. That’s scary, because the majority of us is suppressed into our subconscious.
Long story short guys – we are not very aware of ourselves. Most of us are basically copies. Copies of what we saw succeeding in other people. We are not genuine, not real and do not reflect what is true at our core. Our commitment to unfolding usually ends up being something that we have to take charge of and allow to happen in spite of the world.
We end up having to sort through illusion to find what is real about us. The process of becoming authentic, which is finding your essence again and following that and allowing it to be shared with the world is no different that the process of awakening.
And so, for the sake of awakening, I will give you some tips about how to be authentic.
2. Disharmony between Inner and Outer Self
The simplest way to understand authenticity (aside from discovering your innate essence) is it’s the conscious mending of the incongruences between your inner world and your outer world. That means, whats on the inside is exactly the same as what’s on the outside.
This is the opposite of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. I know that many of you have heard that. So obviously, if there is a sheep that’s in wolf’s clothing, or a wolf that’s in sheep’s clothing, either way, it’s not authentic, because what’s on the inside is not a direct reflection of what’s on the outside.
There are all kinds of inconguences in the world when it comes to people. For example, let’s take a guy who hates his work. On the inside he really wants to do something else, so you could say that his external job does not match his internal desires for what job he wants to have. That’s inauthentic.
When a person says they like someone or acts as if they do, when the truth is they hate them and want to be nowhere near them, this is inauthentic.
When a person says they are not artistic, because they suppressed that inside themselves long ago, this is not authentic.
When a person denied how they feel because they have learned certain feelings are not acceptable, this is not authentic.
When we care so much about seeing ourselves as good that we cannot admit to aspects within us that wouldn’t seem so good, we are inauthentic.
When we have two Facebook accounts, one for the people we know from work and family and one for the things we are actually interested in that they would negatively judge us for, we are inauthentic.
When we are gay but we pretend to be straight, we are being inauthentic. To be honest, our entire society is based on pretenses. But the time has come for this to end, it is one of the greatest barriers to awakening.
So the question to live by is: Is there any incongruence between my outer self and inner self?
3. Admitting the Fakeness
It is a far bigger deal to not even admit to or not even realize, even worse, that there is an incongruency between your outer and inner world, then it is to just deliberately choose to be inauthentic.
I would love if we lived in a world where 24 hours a day every person could be authentic, but let’s just be honest – none of us can take that amount of honesty.
And on top of that, the world is not set up for that, right? If you walk in to your boss today and say “Look, I hate you – that’s the reality!” it’s not going to go so well for you. So what’s more important, far more important than mending all the inconsistencies so that there isn’t any, is being conscious of those incongruencies.
For some of you, there may be times that call for you to be consciously inauthentic. These scenarios which force us to question our own potentially limited perspective and also consult our own conscience, are a dramatic call for us to awaken.
But proceed into authenticity knowing that becoming authentic is much more about becoming aware of what is REAL and from there, you get to consciously choose how to share that realness with the world and what part of it to share according to your own continually evolving and expanding perspective.
The biggest adversary to authenticity is not pretending. It is denial.
4. Willingness to be Shamed
If we want to be authentic, we have to develop the willingness to look bad to ourselves and to other people. Now, that may sound easy, right? No! The single biggest attachment that our egos have is to the sense of being good.
Shame is the #1 enemy of the human ego and shame is about “there is something bad and wrong about me” so it’s a lot easier said than done to admit to things within us that other people or even we would judge as bad. It’s even harder to admit it to the world. However, this is an absolute requirement for authenticity.
We have to face and work with what is REAL about us. And REAL includes both sides of the spectrum – positive and negative.
Here is the reality – most people are only willing to be authentic when they have been inauthentic for SO long that the pain has become SO extreme, that suddenly the consequences of being authentic are worth it.
But I’m asking you to be authentic before you get pushed up against that kind of a wall. Accept what is real about yourself, regardless of whether you judge it as good or bad.
To a certain degree all people wrestle with what is. We could say it is part of why our species is so incredibly progressive. We weren’t satisfied with sitting in caves and banging on tools and so we built this entire society that you see before you.
Now we can say that it’s a thing of beauty but it also gets in our way. If we’re unwilling to accept something we’re constantly fighting against what is to the degree that we don’t even want to admit it’s there.
Acceptance is the opposite of denial and avoidance. What does it mean to accept something? To accept is to recognize something as valid or correct. Doing this makes your being consent to receiving it and digesting it as truth instead of fighting to not acknowledge it and not take it in.
Remember that acceptance has nothing to do with condoning something or condemning something. It has nothing to do with whether you want to change something or not. It is simply about being able to acknowledge something as valid enough to let that acknowledgement in instead of fight to keep it out.
5. Be Vulnerable
The heart of being authentic is to be vulnerable because of the process I described earlier, where we hide our vulnerability behind protective aspects of ourselves, whatever keeps us safe, so a lot of our real truth is hidden in those vulnerable aspects.
A lot of us think we are expressing the entire truth about ourselves and how we feel when all we’re expressing is something that keeps us safe. So we’re only expressing the truth through the aspects of us that kept us safe, not the vulnerability behind it.
Here is what I mean – You could think it’s authentic to say, “you know what, you’re just too self centered to pay attention to anyone except yourself and where you want to go.” This is actually just defense. And it only represents our anger, when that is a small fraction of what is real.
One of the best ways to express yourself authentically is to ask yourself in these scenarios you get into – what is the opposite of defending myself right now? or – what is it that I’m trying to defend? Whatever you are trying to defend is the vulnerability that you need to be authentic about.
Relative to authenticity, expression is about telling the whole truth, not just parts of it. That includes a whole range of emotions.
6. Know How You Feel
The root of authenticity is knowing how you feel and admitting how you feel to other people.
We are living in the emotional dark age – one thing that we are most shamed for and this doesn’t matter what culture you were growing up in, it’s the case today – is how you feel. We are not validated for our emotions. So our own access to our emotions is super, super limited.
But your emotions function like a compass, they’re telling you at all moments of the day where you stand, what you’re thinking, your reality at this moment. So if you have no access to your emotions and you can’t admit them to yourself, you don’t even know where you stand. You can’t do anything with that. You can only work with something that’s REAL.
You also can’t communicate to other people in a way where they can do anything with your emotions. They can’t improve the way you feel if you don’t even know how you feel.
In the same way that a compass tells you where you are located in space and what direction to go, your emotions tell you what vibration you are currently holding and what direction to go to improve that personal frequency. So that the circumstances of your outer life are in alignment with your inner life, your essence.
Your emotions can also lead you to the subconscious limitations that are preventing you from being authentic.
Look, we don’t understand emotions, and we don’t understand what they’re there for, so I want you to understand emotions better.
7. Be Aware of your Thoughts and Beliefs
Beliefs and thoughts are a funny thing – because they can either be a direct reflection of your essence or they can be the very thing covering up your essence.
The reality of me is that I may be thinking a thought like “no one will ever love me”. That thought may be preventing me from uncovering my essence. The thought itself may be an illusion, but it is still real because I am really thinking it.
And I can only question it and discover that it is an illusion if I can admit that it is there. I can only change a core belief once I know that it is there.
I want you to become conscious of the fact that truth and illusion are both part of what is real.
8. Watch Your Own Actions
Most of us do not see ourselves objectively, we don’t see our actual actions.
This is because when we’re walking through our life we are looking through our limited perspective, we’re not looking at us looking through our perspective like other people are. This is part of why it is SO much more obvious to you what’s going on with other people. However to other people it’s kind of obscure. So I want you to get into the habit of objective viewing.
One of the best ways to do this is to sit down and to begin to meditate just like you would any other meditation. But when you close your eyes you’re going to imagine stepping out of your body, so that you’re watching you. Practice with this a little bit. Then what you can do, is you can take that perspective, but go to watch yourself over the course of the day.
Obviously, if you’re a fly on the wall or a bird, you’re not intimately related to the person that you are, and so it’s easier to see the reality of how it is to see you in the world interacting with other people. This is what objective viewing is all about.
So pretend you’re watching you have an argument or you’re watching you in any number of scenarios. This is one of the best ways to become honest about what is REALLY you.
Another thing that’s so awesome about this objective viewing process is you get to see how inauthentic you are. You get to see those moments when you may be standing there and somebody you can’t stand comes up and is like “Hey!” and you’re like “Oh hi” You’ll see yourself do that. It gives you a lot of information about who you REALLY are and how you REALLY feel in this moment.
If you wanna really take this to the next level, film yourself. But it’s also the best if you can film yourself when you don’t know you’re being filmed. I don’t know how you’re going to achieve that one, but let’s say that you decide to film yourself.
What I want you to notice is how tense you feel in your body when you know that someone’s watching. How different your actions become when you know that there’s an audience. That is an indication about how inauthentic you’re actually being. If you even have that sensation it’s inauthenticity.
You can only work with something that is real. Unless you know and admit to what you really think, really feel, really want, really need and actually do, you are working with illusion and you are not going to get anywhere. It’s like building a castle on thin air. It is inevitable that it will crumble.
Anything in life can either be true to our unique essence or the very thing that is preventing us from uncovering that unique essence. Literally anything you do that makes you more self-aware is a step in the direction of authenticity.
9. Conclusion
Authenticity is the highest state that a person can achieve. In the years to come, authenticity is going to replace the concept of enlightenment as the true goal of spirituality.
We are going to be journeying closer and closer to our essence. This is really really good news, because it means that our life and the society around us is going to be one that helps us unfold as people instead of becoming the very thing that molds us, suppresses us, and keeps us completely hidden.
Have a good Day.
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