Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
What Does It Mean to Live an Authentic Life?
1.1k Plays5 days ago
In this episode of The Art of Authenticity, Laura explores how authenticity has evolved for her over time. What began as a question of passion and success became a deeper inquiry: Who is the “I” that’s living this life? Laura points to a felt sense, a deeper intelligence that lies beyond the thinking mind, that can’t be located in time or space, yet informs everything we do.
Drawing on poetry, lived experience, and the Akashic Records, she reflects on authenticity as deep listening, surrendering control, and allowing life to move through us with clarity and flow. Authenticity isn’t self-definition – it’s a relationship with an infinite, unknowable sense of self that’s always communicating, if we’re willing to listen.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Authenticity
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey you
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Art of Authenticity. um I wanted to share today about where I stand on this conversation of what authenticity and authentic life means to me today.
Balancing Success and Passion
00:00:42
Speaker
um When I started this journey, I spent a lot of time thinking, writing, coaching, blogging about authenticity. And i thought about this intersection between success and passion.
00:00:59
Speaker
What does it mean to have a life that... meets those two needs on your own terms. So some people feel very much driven towards a certain amount of success. Maybe they want two, three homes. Maybe they want an airplane, who knows? And some people ah don't care about that and they don't define success that way. It could be that they're doing the job of their dreams.
00:01:22
Speaker
Whatever it is that you define, what an authentic life looks like for you, where that intersection of having the passion you want, doing the thing that you feel connected to the people you feel connected to even the financial success that means something to you. How does that get defined on your own terms?
00:01:43
Speaker
So i did that for a really long time. And I really thought about what it means to get to this place. And I touch the center of my chest and I say, what is true for me?
Spiritual Understanding of Authenticity
00:01:55
Speaker
i don't point to my head, my thinking mind. I point to to my chest and I ask, what do I truly want?
00:02:04
Speaker
what is true. And so i took some time because i started thinking I've got to go deeper into authenticity. And I didn't know what that meant.
00:02:15
Speaker
And for those of you who are newer, I mean, I found this Akashic record, the energetic space of your soul's history, everything you've ever done in all of your lifetimes.
00:02:26
Speaker
And it got me thinking about what the true I means when we ask this question, like, what is my purpose? Why am I here? How do I find that feeling of connection to a sense of myself where I feel aligned and good and free and my internal life is matching my external?
00:02:49
Speaker
So it became a spiritual conversation for me when i asked what what is this i You know, there's the intersection of having the life you want with the passion and with the success trajectory that matters to you. But like, who is this I that...
00:03:05
Speaker
You are in relation to. So T.S. Eliot has this poem that I'm obsessed with. And he's got this one line in the four quartets where he says, the still point of the turning world.
00:03:18
Speaker
there is a sense, a grace of white light still in moving, right? So I think about this a lot. um What is this space, this this sense of self that is still in moving? What is the i that we connect to? Well, I have my mind and I have my thinking thoughts. And in there, I think this and I think that. And I have conflicted my own mind about what is true for me.
00:03:50
Speaker
So it can't be my mind because my mind is in a constant conversation and a lot of it I don't necessarily think is, is accurate.
Inner Self and Felt Sense of Being
00:03:59
Speaker
So then I go into this deeper sense of i and i listen more carefully to what is a sense of felt sense within, and I've taught this and I'll teach it again, but I teach this method to help people get to this sense, this, um, it's like a, a knowing within yourself. you know How do you know you love something? Will you feel it inside yourself? And you say, yes, that is true for me. Do you like a certain color?
00:04:27
Speaker
Yes. How do you know? i don't know. I just i just know. So when we listen deeper and we ask what is the eye it becomes the spiritual question of like, well, i can't touch it. It's not my thoughts. It's not my brain activity. It's another sense. So so what is it?
00:04:46
Speaker
And I'm 54 years old and I'm thinking, well, I'm thinking, I don't know who I am. i can't say, oh i am And fill in the blank. I am 54. Well, I'll be 55. I have blue eyes. Well, that's not who I am. So so who am I? And it's this elusive white light still and moving, this sense, this grace that T.S. Eliot said so beautifully. So then what does authenticity really mean? And what does it mean to have an authentic life when we start to move into this deeper question of who am I?
Akashic Records and Self-Connection
00:05:21
Speaker
Well, this for me became a conversation of, well, okay, so there's this Akashic record. It's this energetic space of my soul's history. And when I have a reading, i am given information that can affirm and connect to the sense, which is mind blowing. Literally the mind gets blown because the mind's like, well, how does that work? Well, the question is, if I can't point Well, I point to the center of myself and say, I, but I can't find it. So if I can't find it, where am I? I'm not just my thoughts. I'm not just an emotion. Emotions come and go.
00:06:01
Speaker
So who am I? Where am i And i think we're we're everywhere and nowhere. We're energy. We're waves. And so my voice is moving through this microphone all the way out to this recording and now out to you. And it's coming into your ears and it's coming in waves. And those waves are immediately creating neural nets. And so where am i Am i the wave the that's moving through?
00:06:30
Speaker
um And coming to your ears, am i this physical body? Well, if i don't have my arms, I'm still me. So at what point does the physical body decay? And I i no longer say that's me.
00:06:45
Speaker
So this elusive sense of i that I can't point to, that I can't touch, that the Akashic Record seems to store. It's stored everything I just said, and everything I'm going to say is informed myself.
00:06:57
Speaker
by this informational system. So authenticity to me today is about this profound and deep listening within.
00:07:10
Speaker
That is still true. But this sense of i has become more than just ah ah a little connection. It's a connection to an ever- present,
00:07:23
Speaker
um infinite ah sense that I can't locate in time and space, much like the non-dualists might say, but I do believe it's connected to the signature of me, the soul stamp of me, the vibration of me, whatever languaging makes sense to you. And that,
00:07:47
Speaker
That signature is coming through the physical form and expressing as Laura in this lifetime. If it came through another physical form, a frog, it would express differently as frog energy, but it would be the same energy coming through Yeah. And this time it's coming through this person we call Laura.
00:08:11
Speaker
So what does it mean to live an authentic
Listening to Inner Energy
00:08:13
Speaker
life? It means I listen to this energetic space of me knowing I'll never no That it's part of the unknown, that it's intangible and infinite and endless, and it's knowable in a small sense.
00:08:30
Speaker
But when I do listen to it, when I truly hear its calling, and I'm willing to take action with the mind. It may not be the easiest path.
00:08:41
Speaker
And I can't guarantee that my life will be um one that always feels pleasurable and avoids pain and has a certain amount of like, I don't know, right? Like simplicity. But I know that it's deeply enriching and fulfilling.
00:08:58
Speaker
And i know when I don't try to control that process, I drop into flow. And when I can drop into flow, the serendipitous qualities of my life go way up.
00:09:11
Speaker
And when that happens... the things that I quote want or the life that I'm quote looking for seem to happen in an instant until my mind comes back online and notices that and desires to control that flow with ideas of what it thinks is happening. And then I let go.
00:09:31
Speaker
So i still think it's finding this intersection of a life that means something to you in terms of, you know, how you want to build success or passion.
Conclusion on Authentic Living
00:09:41
Speaker
And those things are nice and and important. But I think this deeper question of the deeper eye and this unknown sense of self that um is quite beautiful, a white light still and moving, as T.S. Eliot would say,
00:09:57
Speaker
is the true self and it's always there and it's always working to communicate through you into the world so that you can shine brightly and be at your highest potential.
00:10:13
Speaker
if you're willing to listen. So that is my current view of what I believe and authentic life looks like. Yes, we want to build one on the outside, but building a relationship to this deeper sense of self as an endless eternal sense that we'll never know and we can't know, but nonetheless is the driving force of our life if we're willing to listen.
00:10:38
Speaker
That's where I feel flow comes from and ease comes from and what I believe is true. So thank you for listening and i will see you on the next episode. Thank you.