Authenticity is just not lying to yourself
Worksheet included
If I had a name for this blog it would be Mindfulness and What It Means to Be Authentic. That grating feeling when someone is lying to themselves is something I’d like to be a part of stamping out in this world. Through education in self-lessons and personal responsibility I know we can make communication easier and so make the world a better place for humans to live in. I want to make lying to ourselves and others less common.
I know this:
People contain multitudes, all but the smallest slivers of time
Among the multitudes there is always a moment-to-moment dominance heirarchy and you have to acknowledge what’s on top before you can get below it
Being with these multitudes socially requires some damn cool people
The multitudes can be quieted and led by having a strong purpose or mission
I currently lack a strong purpose or mission. The multitudes are speaking.
“But Sam, doesn’t this mean we are all schizophrenic? I’m not comfortable with this idea.”
Take it this way — you probably want both pizza and pasta, (or choose your two favorite foods), rest and action, a job and to be free and unemployed, to love and to throttle your children. In you are competing desires. In them are coexisting sensations, thoughts, and feelings. And they are layered.
The way people work around competing desires is more often than not at the end of a whip. A little flagellation motivation did hurt someone. Lots of them.
Suppression at times probably does just make something fade. I think more often it pressurizes things badly.
So what do you do when you have a lot of competing thoughts, feelings, and ideas, a sense of being blocked or stuck and negative about ever finding a way out of it?
For ladies, it’s good to keep tabs on roughly what part of your cycle this occurs in so you know to be less surprised or afraid of it, assuming that it starts roughly the same time of your cycle each time. It may be simply time to check your orientation and adjust the course of the ship. Occurring out of cycle sequence could be a wonderful insight into some more deeply bothersome going on.
Some of you might recall that a few years ago I was writing a book focusing on showing you how to bring out shamanic qualities in your life, “We Are All Shamans.” I haven’t worked on the body of text for a while but the main thrust was that becoming present and accurate about your multiple perceptions and your ability to communicate with them would allow you to sink below the surface of “shoulds, coulds, and woulds” and into deeper intimacy with yourself, allowing you to more freely exist in the world.
Often we are afraid of acknowledging what’s really going on in us, or we don’t know how to do that. I came up with a verrrrry simple tool to ID and record it for yourself.
I learned from Shaman Durek that you can connect the conscious with the subconscious through writing or via speaking out loud. The conscious mind views these as material and concrete, which it looooves.
So I made the gingerbread man. Or woman. Or fairy. Idc.
When I’m feeling lost or overwhelmed, I simply draw a crude shape with space inside and either prompt myself with the thing I’m mostly stressing over or just begin recording on the shape what it is that I’m seeing, thinking, or feeling. The writing may take the shape of drawings, colors, or words. I did this yesterday in a fit of negativity, drawing amongst other unrelated doodles. This session was particularly wordy. When a thought popped up I paid attention to the words and then identified what parts of my body the words were coming from, adding as much description of the sensations or shapes accompanying them as I could.
You may see that the center lower part of my belly originated the words “I can’t make more money” and was responded to by the thought “Why??” (anguished - in an anguished tone) from the back of my left ribcage.
The point of these things for me, until I get enough other people contributing their research, is to unstick being and feeling stuck. Acknowledging what is actually happening inside me, separate from being identified as actually me. It works quite well for that. After doing this, a smudging of palo santo, and a good night’s sleep, I felt a several-days-long negativity bubble shift into a pleasant space today.
It drives me crazy when people say they are one thing and clearly they are in denial of something beneath the surface. People are ashamed of what they think, experience, and feel. You being able to witness and accept your own thoughts goes much farther than my promises to love you through speaking it out loud. In this exercise, you would witness where that shame was coming from, mark it and the sensations images and words you experience with it on the body place they came from, and then something new would happen.
Try it out yourself and see what you find. This activity is to clarify overthinkers, stop a spiral, weed through justifications, and get space from second-guessing yourself by taking a moment in real time to identify what is going on inside of you/moving around through you.
You can get this exercise delivered free to your inbox here: https://samantha.kartra.com/page/gingerbreadfree
Or by hitting download below for slightly more ritualized instructions. I prefer doing it with my eyes open lately, contrary to the instructions contained here.
Those who want deeper in-depth instructions on how to have a conversation with yourself, your spirit guides, and beyond would do to enjoy this course of 4 videos.
Here’s why I haven’t been posting about this more. A confession. I don’t know why anybody would want to follow my advice while I don’t have material gains to show for it. Can advice truly come from a person who doesn’t have a lot of money? I wrestle with this a lot. If the stuff I said worked, wouldn’t that mean that I would have increasing amounts of money to show for it? I always thought so.