Reclaim Your Authentic Voice: Drinking From The Well

by Dr. Lynda Klau

We all yearn to be real, to feel connected to ourselves and to others. Often, however, we lose this connection. We’re not living from our deepest passion, but we cannot find a way to bring it into our lives. We yearn to be more successful at work, but we lack the courage to take the necessary steps. Or perhaps a personal crisis, such as divorce or illness, has shaken our foundations. To survive, we let fear push down our true feelings, so that the creativity and wisdom we long to bring forth remains buried and unborn. In this way, we remain unconscious of and avoid our entire spectrum of emotions and beliefs, from fear to anger to loneliness to love, and we never transcend them to discover the authentic self within that is filled with wisdom beyond convention.
 Paradoxically, to live from our authenticity means two things: on the one hand, to connect with our innermost "core" truth—that unchanging place in us that receives our deepest inspiration, intuition, and insight—and on the other hand, to honor the feelings and beliefs of our personal self, ingrained in us by our parents and society. In other words, to live authentically means preserving an openness and natural harmony between our hearts, our bodies, and our minds. Once we have aligned with our truth at this "core" level, we can embrace our personal self from a perspective of understanding, compassion, and freedom—in other words, from our "wholeness." To be authentic, therefore, involves honoring all of who we are: our thoughts and feelings and bodily sensations.

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