ALTAR OF AUTHENTICITY

“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. (…) It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. (…)I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

The Deepest Questions

Soul doesn’t speak in the language of societal roles and jobs. When revelation of the deepest parts of our identity occur, it is rarely in terms of job description or study program that it expresses itself. Yet, when we choose to live a truly authentic life, it is well and truly those underworld threads of identity that illuminate and animate our daily choices. When questing for self-knowledge from a connected heart, the questions that tend to haunt us may sound like “who am I?”, “what are my gifts?”, “what am I called to serve?”, “how may I have an impact?” “who are my people?”, “what is mine to speak?”, “how may I be heard?”...All too often, we tend to seek answers to these questions with our minds, and with haste. Misguided, or unguided, by our consumerist culture, these fertile and courageous questions to ask, although vital gifts as such, can be lived as yet another source of performance pressure or anxiety, or deemed unnecessary luxury or indulgence. Faced with that, we all too often end up either discarding them in order to fit in and “get on with life”, or sink into isolation and confusion.

But if these questions harass us like wild fire coursing through our psyches, it is well and truly because this is exactly what they are: fire! Within them, they hold the spark to ignite a life of meaning and purpose, they carry the flames of our true calling, they comprise the ambers of what will truly nourish and sustain us to stand rooted in this world. They speak of our passion, our longing, our life-force. What if we re-entered in relationship with the fire of these pressing questions?What if we stoked them, danced with them, stared into them? What wild flames of clarity and vision might they ignite within us?