Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about authenticity. A statement I want to first offer you is we want to be careful not to mistake being authentic with being who we've always been. Do not mistake being authentic for being who you've always been. Authenticity is a tough one because what is it actually asking of us to be authentic to what aspect of our experience.

If we're feeling maybe weak in a moment. It's like, I can't do this and the narrative moving through our mind that's saying like, I'm no good. Should we be authentic to that? And then go, yeah, I am no good. And, you know, get caught up in our own self pity. Right.

Yeah. I guess you could make an argument if for that, if being authentic means just meeting whatever is arising in the moment. However, I think there are different layers to what is arising in the moment that we really want to pay attention to on the journey of being authentic. There's a difference between being authentic to your past self and being authentic to the person you're inspired to become. And a lot of times the experience that is arising is an experience related to a past pattern of condition, conditioning, a past way of relating to a certain experience that actually feels outdated.

And when that arises, we also have this other voice that kind of knows that that is an old pattern. And that feels like, you know what, actually, I want to try something different. Well, to follow that voice, that's saying, I want to try something different is not overriding your present moment experience. Like some could argue that, right? That the, the pain or the reality of what's arising right now is saying like, I should just not try or whatever the pattern might be. But then there's this other voice that's saying, wait, I can try.

Like, which one do we follow? Well, if we are inspired to be authentic to the person where excited to grow into, then we're going to follow that new voice rather than that older pattern of self. And that is a form of authenticity. You're being authentic to what feels most alive in you right now in terms of how you want to relate to the other experiences that are there. Sometimes we do want to be authentic to that older self or experiences were going through related to that older self of just like feeling sad and I just want to be in my sadness. I want to be in my self pity.

Right. There's a difference between sadness and self-pity. We can be sad and that's just an organic expression of our humanness in relationship to what's arising. But then we could go through patterns of like, woe is me. And sometimes right, we can do that consciously.

It's like, I'm going to give myself a period of time to consciously go into this and just let myself feel really bad for myself. Sometimes working through that pattern can be an important way of releasing it. But we can let that be inspired in the moment of like, does that feel really important to me? Does that feel like the authentic response to this moment? And if yes, then we follow through with it. If, no, if we're more inspired by something different, a new way of being, then responding to that is what authenticity looks like in that moment. So again, key take away here is that we don't want to mistake being authentic for being who we've always been.

And there's a big difference between being authentic to your past self and being authentic to the person that you're inspired to become. So see if you can bring this into your day as you're exploring, like what does it look like to be me, authentically me, which is something we're all navigating. And it's a big journey and I'm wishing you well on it. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.