Living Authentically

I recently began to listen to Aydashanti’s retreat, “From Awakening to Liberation.” It’s a great selection that I highly recommend listening to, and I’m only about 15% through it. The first hour was a discourse on Awakening, the first of three phases to Liberation. The retreats are done satsang style, and after the first discourse, attendees are able to ask Adya questions regarding the discourse. The first question was decent, but the following questions resulted in some really great insight. A woman asked about Choice and Free Will vs. Fate and Destiny. Adya’s answer, that all answers depend on where you are coming from, was clear and concise and it really allowed the concept to gel. (Which is funny as we’re trying to get away from concepts!) He said that if you are coming from a relative perspective (the ego), then you probably feel like there is such a thing as choice. If you are coming from the absolute perspective, then there really doesn’t seem to be free will at all. But you can come from both at the same time, and while that might result in a paradoxical answer, the paradox does not make the answer wrong.

That flowed into a question about living authentically. A woman said that she had been living a spiritual life for a decade and was feeling drawn to move on. But when she envisioned moving on, she felt guilty about not living up to her highest potential. She would no longer be feeding the poor children or helping others expand. She asked Adya what she should do and he threw it back at her with “What do you FEEL you should do?” Because WHATEVER she felt she should do, THAT is what she should do. The key is to be authentic with your feelings. She might be feeling to move on and someone else in her exact situation (which is impossible for anyone to be in the EXACT situation) might feel that they should remain, and both would be exactly right in going with their feeling. He said that someone could be living in a cave and another could be feeding 1,000 children and both could be living authentically.

This inspired me to take it one more step. They had been talking about living authentically in making decisions to move forward, but it did not address living authentically in the past and in the present moment. As I mulled this over, it struck me that THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT LIVE AUTHENTICALLY. The fact that you have done something indicates that it WAS authentic. The fact that you are in a current situation, by default, means you are in authenticity. Because we do what we really want, from our true Self. Our egos may tell us that we are in agreement with what is unfolding or not, but if we have done something, that is exactly what we ultimately wanted to happen.

For example, let’s say that Kitty is facing a decision about whether she should move for employment. She may have job offers in Boston, Montreal, San Francisco, and she might have the option to remain in a Las Vegas position with minimal job security. At the present moment, she may FEEL that she should either stay in Las Vegas or move to San Francisco, but that she should not take the positions in Boston or Montreal. And if she chooses to remain in Las Vegas in accordance with her intuition, then she is living authentically in the moment.

But let’s say that a month from now something disastrous happens with her job in Las Vegas and she ends up moving to Boston in three months, a place that she didn’t feel right about moving to. Was she out of alignment? No. What mattered was that she was in integrity at the time that she made the decision to stay in Las Vegas. Who knows what lessons she experienced or what she avoided by not moving to Boston immediately. (From the absolute perspective, she missed nothing because she was always going to delay three months moving from Vegas to Boston. From that perspective there wasn’t any choice; the choice was only from the relative perspective.) But working within the context of living authentically, AT THE MOMENT SHE MADE THE DECISION, SHE WAS IN INTEGRITY. The very next moment was a completely new situation. Things in the world changed. And as time went on (which is a valid concept from the relative perspective), many factors surrounding the situation changed. If she had been tuned into her intuition about this throughout the whole period, she would have noticed a shift in her feeling about it. At some point, if she had checked back in, she may have even noticed that her feeling had changed and that she it was now authentic to move to Boston, in spite of her genuinely authentic feeling about staying in Las Vegas before.

The key is to become aware of our feelings about our present situation and then go with our intuition. That is how we start to live authentically IN THE MOMENT. And by living authentically in the moment, our paths unfold the way our true Selves genuinely want them to unfold.