Authenticity is a hard pill to swallow but if you don’t swallow it, it will swallow you, only after it chews you you up first. Any then, only then, once swallowed, do you realize you’ve been swallowed up by your own inauthenticity. You literally start to fold onto yourself, disappear, fade and vanish deeper into your protective cocoon, only half alive do you carry on living. Half owned, half in your power, half present, half dressed for the real world of true living colour.
I’ve realized over time that playing head games with yourself can teach you a whole lot, in the most self-sabotaging way possible. It’s akin to driving 180km in a 30km zone. You might get there faster if you don’t kill yourself and another in the process but those chances of dying or killing go up by 70%. It’s creating the perfect—self-sabotaging—conditions for disaster, at it’s finest level of self-ghosting and to the detriment of your relationship to self and to those you love. This especially becomes apparent over time.
People hate authenticity because it shakes up their too structured brain patterns. It challenges them to step-out of their shells and it awakens them from self-delusion. All of these are very uncomfortable at first, all of these create spirals of awakening that are accompanied by cognitive dissonance. Such a dirty word for those of us used to pushing our own self-limits and heart walls of protection down but we do it because it’s beneficial, not just to the little me ego, which so dearly wants to be protected but because it helps others move forward in their evolution too and it helps mankind progress towards clarity of vision.
What the perfect manipulator can do in 30 years, the authentic generator can do in 3. Yes there are times to listen, like when another person is speaking. There are times to check in with the mind and heart before speaking, like when you’re in a serious conversation with someone and you’re not just rambling about for play. These all have nothing to do with vulnerable authenticity. What comes out after the listening and checking in, is true authentic communication, the invaluable exchanges that change the face of human awareness, in a way that manipulation can never do, because authentic communication is based in Self-Love, manipulation is based in the Me-Mind.
Censoring too much of what is trying to come out, is exactly what limits our capacity to grow, to teach, to love, be loved, and to feel safe in simply being who we are from the inside-out. Limiting free-flowing exchanges is created from the mental fog of self-entrapment. The more judgmental we are with ourselves the more we play games with ourselves and others. The more we are inclined to ego-tripping and soul side stepping. The more we are inclined to hiding behind our own illusions rooted in self-worth issues and lack of confidence.
Look at every thought of censorship-manipulation as layers of illusion on the onion of self, the more authentic we are about what is trying to arise, the more we strip down the layers of protection that are no longer serving our highest good. It’s nice and cozy (lazy) sitting back on our throwns of mental chess, reigning as the kings & queens of the internal matrix board, shuffling around pieces carefully enough to save ourselves from a self-proclaimed fall from grace or into the painful rabbit hole of disillusion and god forbid we exhibit too much emotion or show off our weaknesses.
We can sit their for decades, shuffling pieces from one side to the next, filling our void, plugging holes of self-worth issues with silent smug manipulation but are we truly embracing our lions’ stalk or its raging courage, the same one that will sky rocket us (timeline fling us) towards our destiny? No.
The only way I’ve learned from anyone is through example and I can tell you that watching the fall and rise of someone who dares to speak their truth–whatever it happens to be in that moment–has been the biggest example to me of how to keep evolving in this world. A world that will try at every corner to hold us to the status quo of soft slavery (the biggest silent manipulator), to bullet-proof hearts and medusa minds simply brittled by self-judgment and self-contempt as they live sheltered lives of self-imposed limitations.
If you can’t sit still and be ok with being the observer to your own folly as it arises then you will never have the privilege of awakening to your shadows and all the other self-limiting internal mechanisms you’ve built up over the years that have kept your feet dragging. Healing requires us to put the chess board away and to worry more about what our souls are wishing to express rather than rooting ourselves in the false belief that we can control life’s unfolding or another human being’s destiny.
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