The Architecture of Authenticity
If you’re a seasoned reader of my transmissions, you’ve probably come across my ‘formula’ for values = soul before, one that bears repeating, imho…
And if you’re new, welcome! This isn’t the first time you’ll be reminded of the following:
Your values are a portal to your soul, your larger Self.
When you align yourself to your values, you are in a devotional relationship with your soul.
By crafting your big + small intentions from your values, you’re tuning into the frequency of your soul.
Allowing your doing to emerge from this place of Being is embodying your soul.
Giving permission for these values to change and evolve throughout the story of your life gives the soul freedom to create and express.
Living a life aligned to your values means releasing the addiction to external validation, to seeking approval and avoiding disapproval.
Living a life aligned to your values means pivoting your sense of safety away from being liked and approved of - a program that you unconsciously + sensibly put in place as a child - because back then, your safety did depend on conforming to the approval of the adults around you.
Living a life aligned to your soul means gently orienting your sense of safety within, towards the dynamic river of your values.
It means becoming ok with misaligned relationships organically falling away, and making space for connections more in tune with the truth of you.
This is living a radically ensouled life, the antidote to the deep alienation of Self abandonment.validation, to seeking approval and avoiding disapproval.
This is living a radically ensouled life, the antidote to the deep alienation of Self abandonment.
Rooting into this as the nutrient dense foundation of how we live our lives gives us access to authenticity - a word that has sadly become pretty trite and hackneyed these days. So in the spirit of delivering authenticity from the graveyard of banality, and restoring it with meaning and quality, let’s take a closer look at what it could look and feel like in practice.
Our soul’s values are by their nature authentic. But in this age of relentless, disembodied information consumption from the external world (and the subsequent atrophying of the muscle of tuning into the depths + heights our own inner wisdom + intuition, and crucially, trusting them), identifying what the soul’s values are has become clumsy and inaccurate.
Our psyches, nervous systems and energy fields are infiltrated with extraneous energies; with endless ‘shoulds’ proliferating from looking out at the collective and taking on ill-fitting definitions of ‘success’ - which are more often than not, completely at odds with what our soul came here to do, be and experience.
And of course, for those who feel pressured into conforming to parental/familial obligations and definitions of success, there’s a whole added layer of dissonance playing out.
When any of this is happening, we can’t reliably connect with our soul’s values with authenticity. We’re unconsciously running energies that are not ours and not meant for us in our systems = overwhelm, burnout, despair and Self alienation.
So how do we connect with our authenticity? To keep things simple, here are two simple and effective touch points/questions - one of which is self evident in the light of energy infiltrations:
1. How much of this is mine?
2. Is it current? (or is it based in the present?)
(These inquiries don't originate from me but come from an energy working tradition that I practice. Pairing the relevant energetic practices with trauma-informed somatic ones has led to significant shifts both for myself and for clients.)
The result is spaciousness, flow and…the authenticity required to connect with our soul’s values.
Anchoring in the deep waters of our soul-based values, knowing what they feel like in the body, and when we’ve been thrown off center into inauthenticity is deeply transformative and liberating - not least because we can unhook from the absurd soul-suck of comparing and judging (the frequencies around which social media is designed.)
We can then choose to play in that particular virtual sand box if and when we want to, on our own terms.
And most importantly, we get to orient ourselves to our own soul-aligned, evolving definition of success - from where we can invite in the energy of money to collaborate and co-create. Often, this ends up being a relationship based not so much on the surface-level ebbs and flows of quantity as on the deeper, integral quality of the experience we’re having in our generative, values-based relationship with money.
Image: Playful experimenation with Canva’s AI
We get to liberate our relationship with money from energies that are not ours - from artificial financial systems and culture based on struggle, scarcity and harm. And we get to make this relationship current - delivering it from the past, and what we learned and absorbed about money from outdated familial and ancestral imprints.
From this place of authenticity, our friendship with money gets to be richer and more nourishing, not simply through numbers in our bank account, but by the myriad ways we’re working with money to express our soul’s values in the world - which are inseparable from the Anima Mundi’s, the World Soul’s.
And when we’re in our authenticity, with our systems decolonized from energies and meanings that are not ours, we’re more in flow, less in overwhelm, and radically unwilling to override our soul-based values in the name of money.
Explore and play with all of this in the monthly space, Money + Me