Living Authentically

“The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.” — Thomas Merton There is no instruction manual for this one. Nobody owns the objective truth on how to live authentically, and we want to say that before we begin. This is a subject that has most often been carried in parables, in stories, in the old myths — pointed at, never pinned down. So Jacqueline and I are not here to hand you a definition. We only know what living authentically has come to mean to each of us, and the honest thing is that even the two of us relate to it differently. That difference is part of what we want to explore together today. We also want to spend some time on what authenticity is not. Somewhere along the way it got confused with saying whatever we feel — every desire, every opinion, every passing compulsion — and calling it “speaking my truth.” We would gently suggest that is often not the authentic Self at all. It is the conditioning on full display, the ego handed a microphone. Which leaves the real question, and the one we keep circling back to: who is the Authentic Self, underneath all of that? What does living authentically actually mean — and why does it come to us through story and myth rather than instruction? Why is “speaking your truth” so often the opposite of authenticity? And who is the Self waiting underneath the conditioning? All of this and more in the next hour.