I guess that this topic touched close to my heart because of the long-life implications of the battle between being authentic and genuine to my truth and facing the consequences of doing so. The feelings of safety and welcome that we experience as children determine in many ways how we make sense of the world and the threats that we might need to face. This exact mechanism brings forward our self-preservation and automatic coping mechanisms once developed out of necessity. As with many self-beliefs, the belief of being authentic starts to create a form in the early years of our lives.

We observe how the world (our parents, family members, classmates, teachers…) responds to our way of life, our interactions, questions, and interests, and we start to evaluate how safe/ unsafe it is to express what it is in our heads. Those early interactions shape the intrinsic mechanisms and programming that will outline future interactions and experiences.

I look back at my life, and I can see the impact that had on my young self to express what it was in my head, how I saw the world, and the so many whys that I had about how ‘things’ function, as many of them didn’t make much of sense for me. Then I discovered that maybe my culture and environment were not able to hold my questioning or being welcoming of the way I saw life on this crazy planet. For many years, I rumbled in this battle that was life, trying to figure out how much of me I could expose, how much of me the other could hold without judging or diminishing. And with time and years, the feeling got more and more subtle, and the fight became an embrace and a subtle dance in which I felt open to share, open to be in congruence and contact with who I was, am, and want to be. It is a long journey for many of us, but the destination is a beautiful place to be.

Until the next one, Om Tat Sat.