Honouring your Authentic self

Let’s talk about honoring your authentic self.

What Does that mean?

You may have seen a lot of the word ‘authentic’ out there on Instagram online, etc. Recently I saw someone saying that they thought the word authentic is overused — perhaps is it overused? But I’m not so sure, maybe it’s more of a case that it’s being used in the wrong context.

So what is authenticity?

When you came here, when you were born, you are truly authentic and whole. But along the way, especially when you’re a baby up to the age of seven, predominantly, but also sometimes up to the age of 14, you received a lot of outside influence, and that is called conditioning.

You may have created masks, rejecting parts of yourself (shadow), and started doing things that are probably not authentic to you or aligned to you.

As a human being you have a fear of judgment, you want to be like everyone else — that’s human nature, you want to fit into a tribe. So you try and be like everybody else. Then you’ve also got the influence of teachers, parents, TV, social media, news all around you all the time, this begins to condition you to step away from your authentic self, and get lost, get lost in all of these other things.

Deconditioning is a process of releasing the shoulds, healing and moving into a more authentic version of yourself. This can look like working through healing and reprogramming in order to really connect to who you are on an authentic level. And there’s layers of that, it’s not something that happens overnight. You go through layers of understanding who you are on a deep level, and it’s understanding that’s okay.

It’s okay to perhaps be into things that other people are not into. It’s okay, perhaps to want to rest when everyone else is going out. You know, it’s the understanding that it’s safe to be you — all of you. And that, that is the perfect thing to get you to the level of success that you’re desiring, (which is also different for everybody).

Honoring that everybody is different, including you, and that’s the magic. 

There’s so much magic in your authentic gifts, talents and desires. I see it in every person I meet, I see the magic, I see how special you are and the gifts that you have. You’ve just got layers of conditioning, layers of influence and perhaps trauma that has caused you to live someone else’s life, leaving you feeling like you’ve kind of lost yourself.

When you spend time unpeeling the layers of conditioning and getting back to your authentic self, that’s where the freedom happens. That’s where the success is, instead of putting yourself into a box that isn’t right for you.

You probably see lots of people online saying, “You gotta do it this way”, “This is the only way it’s gonna work”, I want to tell you, you can throw that rulebook out of the window. When you begin to understand yourself, your energy, what’s authentic to you, and you then honor that, then success comes naturally.

Finding your authentic self and honoring that is very much a journey. It’s not something that’s going to happen very quickly — it takes time.

For years and years I diligently went to the gym, and perhaps at one stage, I enjoyed it, I can’t even tell you if I did or not. Recently I realised, if I had a choice I would never go to the gym. So I stopped. This was a huge deal, the gym has been part of my life for so many years. But I realised that I wasn’t doing it for myself. I was doing it for everybody else, for what I’m supposed to look like. It wasn’t authentic to me.

So what about you and your authentic self?

Do you know who your authentic self is?

Let’s take a moment to reconnect to your authentic self.

Close your eyes. take a big deep breath. Coming back into your body.

Now just to go back, rewind and go back to when you were a kid. Allow your subconscious to take you back to the exact age when you were the most authentic version of yourself. This can be any age, it could be five years old, eight years old, whatever works for you.

Visualise yourself at that age. Look out of the eyes of that child. What is around you? What are you so lit up by? What do you love? Imagine that your parents were fully supporting you, the world was supporting you to do that thing. What would you be doing? It could be something creative, could be something with animals, could be something with food, whatever that is just see that right now. Just allowing yourself to live that out.

Now let’s fast forward a little bit, moving forward a few years. What were your hopes and dreams for the future? What did you really want to do if money was noobject? If there were no rules. You could create any life for yourself, what would that be? What’s important to you? What lights you up?

OK, now take a breath and come back, opening your eyes.

Finding your way back to your authentic self is a process of looking at all the elements that you love and made you feel whole before all the conditioning, before all of the external influence that came into play and honouring them again, living them out, including them.

Your authentic self is right there within you, it just takes time to unpeel the layers, and by connecting to your soul you will find what’s true for you, what your desires are, not what everybody else’s are.