DAY 576

authetincity

Every year I choose a single word that usually helps me to define my inner work throughout it. Often I find difficult to select the right one but this time I knew that my word for 2015 would be authenticity since the beginning of December. I felt that the time to stay totally true to myself had come and I was ready to try it, maybe because my 50th birthday was near.  I hadn´t thought too much about the word, it was a sudden revelation, it came into my life without asked for permission and I accepted it gratefully. 

I was planning to write about my commitment to stay authentic when the year started but I suffered an important loss in January (and new ones in the upcoming months), and I didn´t feel like writing about my word, or about my circumstances either. In fact, I don´t want to talk openly about it yet. 

I have questioned my need to stay quite many times. I wondered why I was not able to share my feelings here or why I was so reluctant to look for new possibilities or ways to overcome my quietude, my loneliness, my sadness… why I was not fighting against all this through new activities,  why I want to be isolated in my little world by myself… why I was not demanding consolation...

I blamed myself on being so strange till I understood that I was simply embodying the word that had hit me months ago. I was simply giving a concrete form to authenticity by allowing myself not to be strong and competent and constant and careful and diligent, by allowing myself to act according my own vision without considering social conventions, others expectations or even my own criteria about how I should behave, how I should be.

And suddenly I realized that this was indeed a new twist of my inner work. Being authentic was leading me to distinguish in a much more accurate way between the stereotyped image of myself that I had perfected along my life and my true, highest self, to distinguish what really moved me from attachment or prejudices, passion from ego.

I never meant to reexamine the manner I deal with suffering or unease when I chose this word back in December. In fact, I thought I was already clear about this issue, about my responses related to caring or fighting. I never meant to peel a new layer off my conscious only to discover that after letting go many conditionings I still had to keep doing it, that (after this big, long journey) I still want to rescue, save and redeem the world (how arrogant can I be!).

But it happened… and thanks to this, a time of sorrow has become much more significant. Now searching for this kind of authenticity is part of my daily practice and I am planning to go more deeply into it along the next months.

I would like to have you all by my side, your support means a world to me.

Much Love, dear friends

Z.