1. Why aren’t we in authenticity all the time?
My goodness. My goodness. Joni L Davis here. You can call me Aunt JD. Please think of me like a sweet Aunt who has time for you and shows great curiosity about you. One of the things I’m curious about you is your authenticity, I can tell you always want to be authentic. You know, relaxed inside so you can be fully free to be you. I also know you really want others to be fully authentic with you. You know inherently how we can trust each other when we’re authentic.
Each week I’m answering questions for you about authenticity. There is a lot more going on inside of you than you may realize. You’ve got you’re authenticity in there, which is your connection to your Essence qualities like loving kindness, curiosity, determination, openness, reliability, purposefulness, or adaptability. You’ve also got some aspects of you in their that don’t know how to be authentic yet, like your defensive strategies of blaming, shaming, should-ing, shutting down, criticizing, controlling, fighty anger, and being right. Can you feel the difference in your inner body when you read the Essence qualities you have inside compared to the defensive strategies you have inside? Read out loud to yourself the two short lists again, this time paying close attention to how your inner body responds to each of the words. Notice how you relax inside when you read the Essence qualities and how you tighten or brace inside when you read the defensive strategies. That gives you a lot of information about the impact of these two different aspects of you on how you function from the inside out.
Authenticity Question This Week:
Why aren’t we in our Authenticity all the time?
It’s complicated and we’ll discover it piece by piece as we go through this learning process together. For now, I’ll simplify it into a snack sized bite. Defensive strategies were passed down from your family of origin (FOO). One of my favorite acronyms, giggle. Your FOO also passed down some powerlessness beliefs. These beliefs are big gnarly scary beliefs about your sense of self, like whether you’re good enough, or worthy of being considered. Your powerlessness beliefs require defensive strategies to try to protect you from feeling powerlessness fears. All of this can run under your awareness because powerlessness beliefs and defensive strategies get passed down through your unconscious processes. These are procedural memories about everything from bringing a spoon to your mouth without spilling stuff to how worthy of love you feel you are.
I know that’s a lot but that’s even the snack sized package. We’ll learn more details in the upcoming postings. The most important thing for you to get from this this time through is, you know all those things that you watch other people do to get stuck and get in their own way from getting what they want. That’s their powerlessness beliefs and defensive strategies kicking in and hijacking the person out of their authenticity. Here’s the secret precious one. You do it too! Everyone thinks they are the only ones not doing it because it’s running in their unconscious processes. This exploration we’re having together right here will help you start to bring these unconscious processes into your conscious awareness. Yikes! And Great! Because these unconscious processes are keeping you from your authenticity.
You can teach yourself to notice the shift that happens physically inside by noticing when you’re tight and bracing and when your relaxed and in ease and flow. Take a moment to tune into your inner body. There’s more valuable things happening in their than you every imagined. I know, I know, I’ve done it too. I had so much resistance to turning my attention to my inner world when there were so many things to think about in the outer world. I even walked out of a Don Miguel Ruiz talk because he kept saying the same thing over and over. He wrote The Four Agreements for goodness sake! I didn’t know how to shift from my thinking mind which needs the step by step physical/tangible procedures to my experiencing body/mind which transforms through experience. You may not know how to do this either yet. Why is it important? Oh, just a little thing like you can’t be authentic without this skill. It’s an internal skill. An internal action. It shifts us from identifying with our thinking mind that thinks it can integrate a concept just by understanding the concept to our experiencing selves where we instantly integrate the concept so it’s in us and we can talk about in detail and use it in our actions.
Can you remember a time where you read something and then were excited to tell a friend about it but it came out disjointedly and you realized you couldn’t explain it as well as you thought you understood it? That’s your thinking conceptual mind in action. It doesn’t know how to integrate the experience, so it’s in your whole self. You can’t use a concept to transform something until you’ve had the actual body-felt experience of learning the concept by noticing your experience in your body of the concept. Taking a moment to notice how your body responds to what’s happening to you is the skill that integrates a concept into your unconscious procedures so it’s there to activate and use when you need it. You’re learning to become the caring and curious observing awareness of your own insides as the way to integrate new information into your whole being. Don’t worry my friend, we’ll keep building on this skill in the next explorations. It takes a bit to get it.
This is the first skill I want you to practice precious one, so you can know when you’re being authentic or being hijacked by your powerlessness beliefs and defensive strategies. Did you know that about 50% of people can actually feel their experience of powerlessness inside and the other 50% can’t. The 50% that can’t, can feel themselves identifying with their defensive strategies though. When we’re in defensive strategies our inner bodies, especially in our chests, solar plexus, and bellies, get really tight, heavy, and bracing, attempting to protect us by resisting what’s happening to us. When we’re in our Essencey authenticity our chest through our bellies are open and relaxed. In defense we stop our internal energy from flowing for a bit. In Authenticity we feel the power of energy moving freely within us.
Practice noticing these shifts internally all day long. You may marvel at how often your’e bracing or guarding compared to free flowing inside. No worries, all can be transformed. (We’ll explore transforming in future posts). You will also run into the issue of having really good intentions right now and totally forgetting to do any of this as your day gets going. That’s totally normal too. It takes some reminders to notice and change some already established patterns inside of you. Use your creativity to come up with some ways to remind yourself to do your check-ins. Your authenticity matters. Show yourself it does by following through for yourself in this weird new way of noticing how your body responds. Maybe you’ve heard about regulating your nervous system. Well, this is the inner skill you can develop to regulate your emotional and nervous systems. Who knew that this would be the pathway to greater authenticity for you?!
In this post we explored about what keeps us from being authentic and discovered it’s powerlessness beliefs and the defensive strategies that erupt from them. We explored an internal skill that you can develop of noticing how your body responds as the way to integrate concepts into your mind and body so they are both in sync about what you’re learning.
In the next post, we’ll get curious about how this noticing how our body responds affects our perception of what’s actually happening. Can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait to explore more with you Sweet Bud.
