Seeking authenticity

(Nimue)

How do you know when you are being authentic? Can you be a spiritual person without also being authentic? When happens when your spirituality asks you to deny parts of who you are?

We follow spiritual paths because we want to grow, learn and improve. Most of us exploring spirituality are motivated by a desire for guidance, insight and support in living in the best ways we can. Paganism doesn’t tend to go in for demanding people deny parts of themselves because we embrace diversity. However, the drive to be a better person naturally suggests that we can’t assume ourselves to be good people.

A lot of religions seem to treat humans as fallen, degraded, in need of tight rules and radical effort in order to be good enough. And it has to be said, plenty of people are out there doing truly awful things. Quite a few of them do so in the name of religion. But then, it’s pretty easy to blame and shame other people for getting things wrong, or being intrinsically wrong, and considerably harder to look at yourself on those terms.

It’s important to ask whether we have the space to be authentically ourselves, and whether we are allowing other people that space. There’s a lot of power tied up in this – who is able to dictate what we do, and who are we able to dictate to in turn? How do we handle difference? What happens when someone else’s apparent authenticity impacts badly on other people’s wellbeing? What do we allow? What do we refuse? A person with power can excuse a lot more of what they do on the basis of ‘just being myself’ where a person with little or no power is not allowed the same leeway. The colour of your skin being an obvious case in point here.

I’m starting to ask these questions as I explore what it means to have the space to be authentic. This is very much work in progress right now. There’s a lot I don’t know about myself, and that lack of self knowledge has come from not having the space for my own feelings. As that changes, I’m learning to have preferences, and not to just crush down things that might be inconvenient to other people. What does it mean to be truly authentic? How do I know what’s real inside myself? I have a lot of questions to ask, but I think answering them will be a fertile experience.