Bringing Authenticity Everywhere
Llevando la Autenticidad a Todas Partes
A reflection on how the effortlessness discovered in intimate, open settings can be brought into all of life's circles, and how boredom and resistance in social situations are invitations to see through the mind's interpretations.
Bringing Authenticity Everywhere
A reflection on how the effortlessness discovered in intimate, open settings can be brought into all of life's circles, and how boredom and resistance in social situations are invitations to see through the mind's interpretations.
The sharing that you can feel that quality of openness with another person is quite a privilege. There are different phases in this process. When the resistances are down, it is not work at all. It is simply flow.
When everything else feels like work
If everything else feels like work, that is an interesting thing to explore. How is it all work? Maybe it is not, either. Perhaps rather than putting on the mask, you can play. Treat it like theater, not like labor. If there is a sense of effortlessness in certain settings, a feeling of just breathing, just being, just loving, just opening, that same quality does not have to be confined to one place.
When you enter a community where there is a lot of pretending going on, where people put on a mask of "I'm doing great," and the openness does not exist, that can trigger a pulling away. You feel like you have to play a game, and there is an effort that does not exist in more open communities. But this is probably a really good area to explore. You can come to a point where it is effortless in those circles as well: to be natural, and even if being natural sometimes means playing a role, it can come from a place of play, of free and creative interaction. If something in you is still protective in those circles, there is still something there to work through. It is just a different dance.
Boredom is a mind thing
Sometimes boredom arises, a disinterest in the topics being discussed. You can have fun playing along for a while, but then you get tired of it. There is a pull to go deeper, a growing intolerance for inauthenticity and a longing to just be authentic. But that is exactly where you can bring authenticity. You can relate from that place and see what happens, without any attachment to a particular outcome. There is a place where that could be loving and fun. Obviously, you choose which circles to do that in and which not. Some family gatherings, some groups of friends, some work environments. But the boredom itself is really a mind thing. If you are not believing the illusions of thought, you cannot be bored.
There could be a sense of "I don't want to be here right now because I don't have the energy for it," or "this is not something I find fun and I want to be somewhere else." That is different. But boredom, when it has that particular quality, is mind. It is the interpretation that there is nothing here that is interesting or important, or that you have been here before many times and you do not want to be here again. None of that could ever be true. Every moment is unique and has never repeated. It has the most incredibly alive and interesting reality to it, and the deepest nature of reality is only ever now.
Go without a plan
You might not need to have a plan when you walk into a social situation. Just go and be as you are, and see what happens. But really try to see through your interpretation of things, the story that things are not fun, or boring, or too inauthentic. You might realize, first, that reality was not really as you thought. People are more interesting than you assumed. And second, because you see them that way, you are with them in a different way. They might shift how they are, and you might shift how you are, and that can create a whole other experience, just by one person not going into their belief system. This can go deeper and deeper, more and more subtle. Any relationship you are in can keep deepening.
This is essentially about taking what you discover in open, intimate communities and living it in other parts of life. Integrating it.
The isolation phase and what comes after
I remember being very extreme and very picky about who I spent time with. I had a lot of internal reaction to people I did not want to be around. I think that was a very valuable step, and I still am quite selective with my social time. But my experience now is that where I used to find things uninteresting or boring, that simply does not happen anymore. Any person in a taxi, in a café, in a group of friends where we have nothing in common, in a group of people I do not relate to: I can find a very deep interest in them and in whatever is happening. But I think that first step of withdrawal was necessary, to really not get pulled into hollow social forms.
There is something people sometimes call the isolation phase of awakening, and it resonates for many. It is a phase, and everything changes and flows. But beyond it lies that aliveness, that capacity for seeing aliveness in everything, everywhere, in everyone. And you can create that. You do not have to wait for it to arrive.