Authenticity is a word that you hear
flying around self help circles and
psychology offices and
spiritual communities all the time.
I myself am leading an authenticity movement
But what the hell does that mean?
In this episode I'm going to tell you
"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 are 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 of that lotus.
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 what 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.
To understand more about this process,
I encourage you to watch my video titled:
"Fragmentation, The Worldwide Disease"
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.
Step 1 .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?
2. 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 incongruencies 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.
For this reason, I want you to watch my
Ask Teal episode that is titled:
How to Call Bulls#!t on Denial.
3. 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 to 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 than that
to admit it to the world.
But this is absolutely a prerequisite
of 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.
4. The heart of being authentic
is to be vulnerable
because of the process I described earlier
where we hide our vulnerability
behind protector aspects of us,
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 express
“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.
Being authentic might look
something more like this…
“That was terrifying, it made me feel
like I was invisible and didn’t matter.”
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.
For this reason, I want you to watch
my video titled:
How To Express Your Emotion.
5. 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 are also the doorway to
discovering the subconscious limitations
you have which are preventing
your authenticity.
Look, we don't understand emotions and
we don't understand what they're there for
so I want you to understand emotions better
for this reason I'm going to ask you to
watch my video titled:
The Emotional Wake-Up Call
6. Become aware of your thoughts
and of your 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.
Step 7. 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 hiiii"
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.
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 week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com