What kind of a gap between public and private self do you experience in your daily life? Do you find yourself thinking one thing and doing another? Do you make choices in favor of what others might think of you? Do you let your story-telling run you? Do you find yourself playing a role in your story rather than being yourself? How might your life be different if you allowed yourself to live from a truer place within? What would it take to bring you back into alignment with some truer sense of yourself?
The gateway to authenticity lives in the gap between your public and your private self. A gap is a space created by a misalignment between what your Awareness knows and what you are actually living. The gap is created when you allow your public self, the story you show to the world, to become something other than the Awareness inside your viewing screen. When you lose the alignment between your Awareness and your actions, you lose your essential connection to your truth. Authenticity, then, grows out of the re-alignment of your truth with your actions. Carpenters have a term they call “truing up” when they bring a piece of wood, or a line, or a level back into alignment with the design of their building. Authenticity is a kind of personal “truing up” that you undertake when you align your actions and behaviors with your True Self. Put simply: to live authentically in the world, you must behave in alignment with your own truth.
Without taking yourself on a guilt trip, do you know already where you are out of alignment in your own life? I cannot tell you where you may need to “true up” in order to feel the joy of living an authentic life. I cannot tell you whether you are hurting yourself or others by living out of alignment with your own True Self. In fact, I rarely have to tell my clients what their essential truths are; they come to me already knowing. They come to me because the gap between the roles they play, the stories they tell and their private dreams of how life might be becomes too wide to navigate on their own. Our work together often focuses on finding the gateway within the gap and walking through it to their own authentic presence.
Internal, External, Eternal
In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne tells us to “Be True, Be True, Be True.” It is no accident that he does so. By simple repetition he points to an important structure for our own restoration of personal truth. First, we must be true to ourselves: true to our own values and Awareness. Then, we must be true to others: telling our truth and living our truth. Finally, we must be true to the BIG truth: the truth that we are all spiritual beings having this human experience. We are coming from love, manifesting love and returning to love. In the face of this simple three-step admonition, our work becomes clear. We must “true-up:” align ourselves internally, externally, and eternally. It is not easy to do this in a world which elevates the glitz, celebrates the glamour and rewards the fake, but in order to be “true” to ourselves we must find a measure of authenticity to bring into the world. Change yourself and you change the world: be true, be true, be true!
If you have any questions about this topic or any struggle you are facing in your life, I would love to help. Simply reply to this blog or email me at [email protected] and I will be happy to respond.
With love–
Dr. Laurel Ross