Living Authentically - Honoring Your Unique Spirit

Living authentically means honoring the spirit within. It means making choices to live a life that is in alignment with your own core values. Deciphering personal core values can be difficult. Most of us have grown up with the voices and opinions of others echoing in the back of our minds every time we’re faced with a choice regarding action. These voices are difficult to simply dismiss.

It takes personal courage to veer off the well-trodden path of popular opinion. But when we make living authentically a priority, the trek towards spirit onto a path that is uniquely our own, is well worth the effort. Most of us encounter pivotal moments in life where we’re called upon to either live a life reflective or our own values and our own unique spirit, or continue along the path dictated by the expectations of others.

My Own Journey Towards Living Authentically

Upon graduation, I accepted a job in a typing pool in an engineering company. My dad had lined up an interview for me as he had previous dealings with this company as the manager of an affiliated project. As my dad was well known to management and highly respected, I knew that my getting hired was pretty much a given. I worked at this tedious job for a little over a year at which time the company was forced to lay-off a good portion of its employees due to cut-backs. I was upset for about 20 minutes. I believe my dad thought it was the end of the world. My feeling of new-found freedom was only marred by the fact that I still had absolutely no real idea what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing.

Once again, the “university” issue came up with my parents. I decided to meet them half way and agreed to attend college. After all, I had parents who were standing by, more than willing to support me in attaining a higher education. My luke-warm attitude towards it all left me feeling like somewhat of an ingrate.

I leafed through the college catalogue of classes, hoping something exciting would jump out at me. “Interior Design, now there’s something I could see myself doing,” I told my parent’s as we sat down to discuss my plans. “You’ll never be able to make a good living doing that,” they both agreed. Surprisingly, I readily accepted their opinion regarding this. Mere hours later, I pin-pointed my ‘new’ career. “Rehabilitation Practitioner, that’s what I’m going to be,” I told them that night over dinner. Working with mentally handicapped people appealed to me on many levels. It was something I could see myself doing that would bring a certain amount of personal satisfaction, and would also fulfill my parent’s wishes at the same time. I completed the two year course, received my diploma and began working in group homes with mentally handicapped adults. I’d spent two relatively fulfilling years within the same group home when the singing bug bit me, hard! Sometimes living authentically means having the courage to admit that we've had a change of heart. Spirit after all, is not static.

My brother had started singing in a rock band several years prior. He pretty much lived on the road, performing and traveling from town to town with a group of musicians. Living authentically seemed to come easy to him. My parents were not at all pleased about my brother’s choice of career. I absolutely knew what their response would be if I were to tell them that I also wanted to quit my job to pursue a career singing in a rock band.

I see this juncture of my life as one that is absolutely defining in terms of living authentically and choosing to honor my own unique spirit. I knew with certainty that my decision regarding the crossroad that lay before me would have life altering consequences.

I knew on a deep level, that if I did not follow the urging of my spirit to pursue a singing career, I’d never forgive myself. I knew if I gave in to the fear, the spirit within me would wither. It felt to me like I was being offered the choice between a life of mediocrity, lived according to the expectations of others or a life of my own choosing...essentially,a life filled with the freedom to be myself! Although I was terrified of making the leap, I really didn’t see that I had any other choice if I was to live with myself.

Telling my parents about my choice was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. They were mortified. “You can’t do that. You’re being ridiculous,” they told me over and over again, right up until I started packing for a six month road-trip with my first band. The sad part was, their sentiments echoed those of my own inner skeptic. Despite this my courage and my will to honor my spirit prevailed. I can still recall the bitter-sweet feeling as I said goodbye to them in their front entrance. I loaded my suitcases into the trunk of the drummers car with my doubts at war with my confidence.

While the first year of band life was difficult to say the least, circumstances improved steadily with each year I spent singing. More than twenty years later, Singing continues to be one of my strongest passions and one of the aspects of spirit and self that positively defines me. I cannot begin to imagine my life had I not taken that chance so many years ago. The memory of making that difficult choice and disappointing family in the process, to honor the urgings of my spirit, is one that to this day has a profound effect upon my inner confidence and overall perception of self.

What’s interesting is that as my parents came to see just how passionate I truly was about singing/songwriting and performing, their acceptance of my choice increased…I suppose it didn’t hurt either that they came to see that I could actually support myself doing it! I'd like to think that perhaps through my actions I offered them some lessons on living authentically.

This leap of faith to venture into uncharted territory and go against the expectations of those surrounding me has paved the way for many other excursions into the unknown. My varied career forays include; selling sculptures and jewelry I created from clay, reading tarot-cards and more recently, writing. My largest leap of faith, and the one that I’d say has had the most profound and positive effect upon my spirit is that of choosing to become a parent.

My struggles with authenticity these days are much more likely to revolve around smaller, more trivial day to day issues rather than the larger life changing choices. These choices involve such things as having the courage and confidence to go against popular parental opinions; To parent my children in the personal and unique ways that resonate with my spirit. I actually have found that becoming a parent threw me into an entirely new arena in terms of the struggle to remain authentic and true to my spirit. There is nothing quite like the raising of children that ignites and incites strong opinion within parents. Similarly, there is no other endeavor or task that causes as much insecurity and indecision as parenthood. As a result, many parents it seems feel a strong need to have others approve of their parenting skills and related choices. Many express this need by judging the performance of others parents around them, just as they (often) unwittingly judge their own. This is a game I’m simply not very interested in playing.

Each year that passes, I find it a little easier to honor my own personal values as a parent without succumbing to popular opinion. This being said, my son just turned ten and I’m suspecting we’re very likely heading into a whole new level, complete with brand new challenges to achieving authenticity.

Honoring our spirit and living authentically involves making choices on a day to day, sometimes moment to moment basis. It’s not something that we accomplish simply by making one life decision towards authenticity. Each time though that we honor our spirit, it paves the way to do it again. Living authentically means having the courage and confidence to honor our unique personal values regardless of what others around us are doing or thinking. No doubt, some days this is far easier to do than others. On a really good day, I can send my seven year daughter off to school, proudly wearing her pink fuzzy jacket with orange T-shirt underneath, purple stretch pants topped by a multi-tiered black velvet skirt, sparkly chiffon neck scarf, and hair that's been slicked over to one side with half a cup of sparkly hair gel, with a smile on my face!

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