When we’re young, we don’t yet know who we are. But very quickly, we learn that the world responds to us.
Be funny and people laugh. Be beautiful and people look. Be smart and people praise you. Be nice and people approve. Be successful and people are impressed.
So we begin experimenting.
Who should I be?
What makes people like me? What makes me belong?
We start constructing ourselves from the outside in.
A personality. An image. A projection.
Then we begin trying to convince ourselves that the projection is real.
The difficulty is that other people are looking at us through their own conditioning: their desires, fears, expectations and histories. One person admires what another criticizes. Someone understands us. Someone else completely misunderstands us.
And if we don’t know ourselves directly, we begin looking into all of those shifting mirrors to find out who we are.
Approval lifts us. Criticism collapses us. Attention makes us feel real. Rejection makes us question ourselves.
We grasp at people’s perceptions, hoping they will stabilize this fragile idea of who we are.
But they can’t.
Because it was never stable to begin with.
That is the beginning of insecurity.
Authenticity begins when we become brave enough to turn around and look within.
This is where meditation becomes something much more intimate than quieting the mind.
It becomes the courage to meet ourselves. Everything.
Every reaction.
Every jagged emotion that would ordinarily take us out of the moment.
Jealousy. Fear. Anger. Shame. Wanting. Insecurity.
The desperate need to be understood. The desire to impress. The impulse to defend ourselves. The part of us that wants to run. The part that wants to attack. The part that begins spinning an elaborate story so we won’t have to experience the raw feeling underneath it.
Authenticity says: Stay.
Don’t abandon yourself now. Don’t turn the feeling into a story. Don’t turn it into someone else’s fault. Don’t make yourself wrong for experiencing it.
Just look. Feel. Breathe.
Stay close to what is actually happening.
There is something extraordinarily tender about learning to do this.
Instead of continually correcting ourselves, we begin accepting ourselves.
Instead of demanding that we become someone better before we deserve our own kindness, we give ourselves room.
We begin making friends with the human being who is actually here.
And slowly we see something remarkable. Our reactions aren’t who we are.
Anger comes and goes. Fear comes and goes. Jealousy comes and goes. The need for approval comes and goes.
Even the identities we have spent years protecting come and go.
Yet every time one of these things arises, the mind says: This is me. And then builds a story around it.
We construct a kind of phantom self out of reactions, memories, wounds, desires and other people’s perceptions. Then we spend our lives defending the phantom.
Meditation begins exposing the illusion. Because something is aware of all of it.
Something sees the anger. Something sees the fear. Something sees the personality trying desperately to hold itself together.
What is that?
This is where authenticity becomes more radical than simply “being yourself.”
At first, authenticity means: Stop pretending to be someone else.
Then: Stop pretending to yourself.
But eventually: Stop holding so tightly to the person you think you are.
As that grip loosens, something softer emerges. You become more vulnerable to life.
Not fragile. Open.
You don’t have to protect yourself from every uncomfortable feeling.
You don’t have to defend every opinion. You can discover that you were wrong.
You can be misunderstood without disappearing. You can change. You can laugh at yourself.
You can allow another person to see something differently without needing their perception to become yours.
There is less armor.
And beneath the armor is the tender, open, awakened heart.
Perhaps this is what we’ve been protecting all along.
Not our strength.
Our tenderness.
The heart that can be hurt. The heart that loves.
The heart that doesn’t know what’s going to happen.
The heart that stands before the enormous mystery of life without having all the answers.
The ego continually tries to protect that tenderness by constructing identities, explanations and defenses.
But awakening moves in the other direction. It makes us courageous enough to become undefended.
To let life touch us. To feel deeply without becoming lost in what we feel. To love without needing to possess. To remain open even when the moment isn’t what we wanted.
And then authenticity stops being something we perform. It becomes the absence of performance.
Less image. Less defense. Less pretending. Less phantom. More presence. More honesty. More tenderness. More life.
We begin by trying to discover who we really are. And somewhere along the path, we discover something even more liberating: We don’t have to work so hard at being someone.
We can simply be here.
Open. Aware. Tender-hearted. Strong. Awake. Alive.