Don’t Worry About Being Your Most Authentic Self
Happy new year to you! I hope the entry into 2024 has been feeling good to you, with whatever rituals at whatever pace feels right to you helping to guide and ease the transition.
One thing that stood out to me among all the year-end round-ups was that Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2023, because of the dramatic uptick in searches for it last year, was authentic.
The dictionary offers multiple definitions of the word, including “not false or imitation” and “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” It also notes that “with the rise of artificial intelligence…the line between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ has become increasingly blurred.”
And there do seem to be a lot of people out there trying hard to “be their most authentic selves" these days, don't there?
But here's the thing:
Your most essential, core Self is naturally authentic.
Which means you don't need to do anything to manufacture the quality of authenticity within yourself.
Authenticity effortlessly radiates from you when you're in a reasonably regulated, embodied — connected to the felt sense of being in a body rather than being lost in thought — state.
Being authentic actually requires zero thought and (hard as this can feel to wrap our conceptual minds around) zero effort.
Your core essence is already 100% authentic.
But the work we can do is to dust off whatever's been obscuring that naturally authentic essence from radiating out more effortlessly from our core.
That intentional inner work can look like:
Practicing dropping out of your head and into your internally felt sense of living in a body, one sensation and feeling at a time
Clearing out the cobwebs of limiting beliefs that feel true about yourself but aren't actually True about your Self
Dialing back the habit of spinning on a hamster wheel of constant doing and planning
Shifting from walking through your days with constant external focus toward turning your attention inward with lots of intentional pauses to check in with your internal state
Shifting your attention consciously away from mental narratives about who or how you think you should be and toward how you actually are
Exploring how aligned your actions, choices, and relationships are feeling with your deepest core values
Creating space in your days to regularly connect to a sense of quiet inner stillness and presence
Focusing as much or more on enjoying the process of whatever you're doing as on the outcome
Get in the habit of (re)connecting with your core Self and tuning into the subtler internal energies that course through you as life force in a moment-to-moment, sensorial way, and your most authentic Self will shine more brightly through you from there.
I'll leave you with these words on authenticity from a favorite spiritual teacher and writer, Elizabeth Lesser:
"How will you know your authentic self when she arrives to greet you? You'll feel a sense of at-homeness, a lack of pretense, nothing over-produced, a wholeness. You'll know her as the 'genuine article’ — like an organic apple or a one-of-a-kind couture dress. Unique, different, imperfect, yet exceptional. That is your true nature." - Elizabeth Lesser
So here's to you reconnecting to that natural state of at-homeness that's always available within you and letting your outward mode of being in the world flow naturally from that uniquely-you center this year.
With Love,