Becoming Real: Journey To Authenticity A New Book Published in the Fall of 2003 by DC Press, Sanford, Florida SAMPLE FROM BOOK Foreword My friend and her husband were excited about their new little northern Idaho farm. In their first year, each day revealed another unexpected treasure. The little pond along the path from their front door to their driveway was pleasantly housing a few little fish dancing through life under the warm summer sky. One of their favorites was Charlie. Fall, then winter, blanketed the property with ice and snow. Janet and Bob, both city folk, would sometimes discuss their sadness at missing their little finned friends. Then one bright spring day while walking by the pond now teeming with life, there appeared Charlie, in back of their reflection, in the small sea. Back to life! Back to life! David Irvine’s wisdom will quickly help you get over the hard, cold winter of your life and bring on springtime — again and again. You will come back to life without even moving from the spot from which you are reading this book. Your new world is simply a new mindset. There is so much information that moves deliberately to the center of yourself — your own private, precious real estate will be designed and decorated by you. Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again, and home is your own unique center, community, character, and calling. All yours. Why are you looking elsewhere? Where have you strayed? You are the best you and your best moments all combined — moments when you are being congruent with whom you truly are. The author walks you, on solid ground, through this journey to the center of yourself. Two millennia plus ago, Socrates asserted, "Know thyself." A century ago, the Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard concluded that the most common despair is to be in despair about not choosing, not willing to be oneself. The deepest form of despair, he said, was to choose to be other than oneself. "To thine own self, be true!" preframes a theme you will discover consistently throughout this book of wisdom. And Carl Rogers, a half century ago reframed neuroses not as a disease, but a blocking of growth. The challenge is to grow and become the one you that you truly are and to counter the loss of center that occurs when one "morphs" into the "shoulds," "oughts," and "musts" of well-intentioned friends, role models, and authorities. In such cases, we again find ourselves frozen in winter with nowhere to move because we have nowhere to move from. We are lost in non-being. We are outer-directed. If you and someone else are exactly alike, one of you becomes unnecessary! We have to dress heavily for the winter, wearing a huge, heavy mask. Authenticity is the process of letting this burden down, moving lighter and brighter, and more cleanly. The tension of being discovered is removed. And your community begins sensing that you have it together. You are who you are. The answer is what this book is all about — the process of authenticity. David Irvine’s ideas are different because they are deeper. Many books teach surface change, such as how to change a behavior. This book will offer you gems to find your whole being. Being change is broader and deeper than behavior change. It’s like finding your lost car — not just finding the carburetor. Plus, when you make a whole change, you change many behaviors as a result, don’t you? If this book is in your hand, it will soon be in your heart. You will be totally moved intellectually, emotionally, professionally, socially, and spiritually by the treasures of wisdom, the development of solid concepts, and the practical ideas you can use within minutes. Here you will find memorable quotes, compelling stories, and fireside-like chats of family experiences. There are so many stories and analogies that each one is like finding another toy inside the same Cracker Jack box! All this, and yet curiously, there is an underlying written and unwritten message as you journey through the book to "relax." Just relax. You are going back to the one comfortable place in the universe where you truly belong. Back to the center of yourself! Dr. Lew Losoncy Author of If It Weren’t for You, We Could Get Along! How to Stop Blaming and Start Living Introduction to be nobody but yourself, in a world which is doing its best, night and day to make you just like everybody else, means to fight the greatest battle there is to fight and never stop fighting. — ee cummings The great Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan, who introduced many important teachings to the West in the early twentieth century, offers an excellent metaphor for the development of the authentic journey. He compares the light of our spirit, our authentic self, to the light within a diamond. Just as the diamond must be cut to show its complete glow and brilliance, so must the authentic self be shaped to fully express its beauty. There are many insights, principles and philosophies that can be used as unique tools for cutting, shaping, and polishing your raw stone into the brilliance it is meant to be. Distilled from a variety of cultural, religious, and spiritual traditions and practices, along with storehouses of wisdom, the approaches to the authentic self that are described in the following chapters are insights and reflections to support you on your journey. You will see, as you read my story, that my life is akin to the Buddhist proverb, "nanakorobi yaoki" — fall seven times, rise eight times. Truly, my life, which is my own greatest teacher, has been a tale of many ups and downs. I will share my experiences, my stumblings, and my falling and getting up again as it happened, in the hope that you may learn from my journey told in an authentic way. This book had its beginning in 1989 when I ended my psychotherapy practice and embarked on a new calling. I took my understanding of families and family systems and adapted it to the workplace in order to support and guide leaders to be more authentic. Over a decade later, I began writing a book on authentic leadership, based on my learning and experiences of working with a wide range of leaders in both the private and public sectors. The early manuscript expressed my belief that the leadership development field is at the end of the ‘flavor of the month’ era with temporary and superficial formulas for success. For many years I have consulted with and have been teaching leaders in hundreds of organizations to shift from positional power to personal power, from success to significance, from "getting by" to greatness, and from "programs" to a lasting cultural change. With this thinking in mind, a first draft of the original manuscript was finished in the spring of 2001 and focused on what it takes to be an authentic leader. I passed that initial text to some of my trusted friends, clients, and colleagues and discussed the project with them. From the dialogue the realization emerged that in order to be an authentic leader one first needed to be an authentic person. Authentic, life-giving leadership will then emerge from this new consciousness. With this insight, I set aside my writing about leadership and instead began to practice what I teach in this book. I followed my heart and have written this book on the personal journey to authenticity. Living the authentic life requires a dedication to seek, discern and move toward the truth about yourself. It requires a commitment to renewed consciousness, renewed connections, and renewed courage to act in the face of new awareness. But perhaps even more importantly, it requires gentleness and respect for being a more fully integrated human being and bringing that humanness to the world around us — to our workplaces, our communities, and to those closest to us. In the post-modern age, many live frantic and fragmented lives, often forgetting that we need love, companionship, internal unity, generosity, and time to read, reflect and take idle walks — to be rather than to always have to do. The human spirit needs to be fed as much as the human body needs to be fed. Living authentically asks the question, "What is really going on — both inside and outside of you — that prevents you from being yourself?" The path is about bringing more of who you are to what you do. Authenticity comes from within. Rather than living up to the standards and the mores of the culture, authenticity is much more about progress and honesty and realness. My goal in writing this book is to help release authenticity within you. The promise of living life authentically is not freedom from pain or immunity from problems, but rather inner peace and self-respect in the midst of the external turmoil. As you liberate yourself by courageously letting go of the need to comply with how the world tells you that you should be, you begin to experience ordinary life as having value. You begin to live life from wisdom rather than from habits. You will experience freedom. You begin to feel the sustaining contentment that comes from knowing that you are a part of something larger than yourself. You embark on a journey of discovering “this is who I am” with a calm certainty, even amidst the chaos and uncertainty. My oldest daughter, Mellissa, who is a potter, has taught me much while I watched her carefully mold a vase. Making pottery involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hands, telling her what it can and cannot do. She has to "feel with it," pay attention to it, and work with it, rather than work on it. And if she fails to listen, the outcome will be a disaster. Sculpting our interior lives is very much like this. It is the relationship with the clay that shapes us — as we shape it, it shapes us. Before embarking with you on the journey to authenticity, I will begin with a few "traveling tips." First, respect yourself. Your journey to authenticity requires that it be uniquely your own. No one can prescribe the shape your diamond is meant to be. Just as there is a multitude of ways to discover the God of your understanding, so too are there numerous roads to the growth and expression of the authentic self. I have chosen strategies that have been useful to me and are applicable on a daily basis. Everyone is unique, and our needs change over time. You may not relate to some of my experience or you may be in a different life stage. Each of us has to do the work of releasing authenticity in our own unique way. The value, it has been said, of another’s experience is to shine a light, not to tell us how or whether to proceed. Rather than driving yourself toward a goal as you read this book, I invite you to enjoy the pleasure of new awareness. Relax and enjoy the learning process, even in the moments when you might be uncomfortable with the new insights. If you miss something when reading the book for the first time, don’t worry. Perhaps you’ll pick it up the second or third or even the eighth time. Above all, take what fits, and leave the rest. Second, festina lente. This advice from the Roman emperor Augustus means "make haste slowly." Be patient with yourself and those around you. Living life authentically requires perseverance and persistence. The journey of authenticity requires that we remember that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly, and that direction is more important than velocity. Aim for progress rather than perfection. Expect to succeed, but over the long haul. There are no quick fixes here. Be gentle with yourself. Small, steady, incremental steps are more important that huge leaps, especially when the leaps are followed by colossal crashes and disappointment in ourselves. Third, as you read this book and reflect upon its application to your life, keep an open mind. Socrates said, "Wisdom begins with wonder." One of the qualities of authenticity is the willingness to be open or receptive. Openness is not necessarily the same as agreement. As a person who has conformed to others’ wishes and wisdom considerably in my life, I often take on what others say too readily, only to find myself resentful afterwards, conforming to someone else’s views that didn’t fit my own. Be a student, but not a follower. Everything I say needs to be weighed and debated in your own mind, matched against your own experience and perceptions, then integrated with your own being before calling it your truth. Whatever desire or inquisitiveness brings you here, it is my hope that by reading about my experiences, you will connect more deeply with your own. This is what the authentic journey is about. Fourth, remember to "sit while the credits roll." Many people seem to be in such a hurry to get out of a theatre after a touching movie. Maybe it is the discomfort of being in another world and coming back to reality or maybe they were not touched at all or perhaps they just had an appointment to get to. Regardless, I am learning to let life touch me and to sit with the stirrings. When my spirit has been moved in a dark theatre, I sit while the credits roll and let the experience sink in. Give life the same opportunity to touch and shape you. Take time for the important events in your life to strike home, to affect you. Don’t be in a hurry. If something stirs you or even irritates you as you read, sit with it. Write about it. Talk about it. Mediate or pray about it. Try to resist the temptation to run from it by shifting too quickly to your next experience. The journey to authentic living is through the heart. Learning to be still when discomfort surfaces can be a vital way to access your authentic self. In a culture that reveres celebrities and materialism, I am writing to give some needed balance by recognizing the authentic value of every human being, not for what we have or even do, but most vitally for who we are. Some are called to extraordinary achievement. Most, however, are called to acknowledge extraordinary value simply in our humanness. The book begins with my own humanness, my own honest, authentic journey to authenticity. The four sections of the book that follow my story are intended to support and guide you in your journey. Each chapter outlines one of the four vital life-sustaining tasks that provide the framework for authentic living. The first task on the authentic voyage is to find your center — to quiet yourself enough to listen to the voice of your heart, to listen to what you don’t hear in the demands of your daily affairs. In my work as a psychotherapist, teacher and consultant for more than twenty years, I found that there can be no real peace or contentment without recognizing your spiritual nature. In the words of Teilhard de Chardin, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are rather, spiritual beings having a human experience." Finding your center brings you to this awareness in your own unique way. Authenticity calls us to make the shift from being a thermometer, where we are simply an indicator of our outside environment, to finding an internal thermostat, where we can regulate the internal temperature, and thus find inner solace, strength, and wisdom, independent of the outer climate — of health or sickness, success or failure, a long life or a short life. The second task of authenticity is to nourish community. The authenticity journey is an individual one, but it can’t be done alone. We need allies, confidants, mentors, and intimate relationships along the way. Connecting with a community means asking yourself, "Who supports me?" "Who am I accountable to?" "Who will hold me to my promises?" The price of community is some vulnerability, a risk of rejection, and possibly some frustration and pain that comes from deciding to be in relationship for the long haul. The promise of community is deep fulfillment and connection in belonging to something larger than yourself. You are not alone. The third task on the journey of authenticity is to build strong character. Character is the outcome of living a life in accord with your deepest values and virtues. Strong character enables a person to make consistent choices under diverse situations based on principles rather than emotions. Character is about tapping into the strength of a well-developed conscience and thereby choosing courage over comfort. The fourth task on the authentic voyage is to seek your calling. "Why are you here?" "What are you meant to do with your life?" These are the questions that shape and measure your authentic life. Calling connects you to your stewardship — the development and expression of your unique gifts in the service of others. Authenticity asks you to get to the heart of what your life is meant to be about. At the conclusion of this book I have included an appendix entitled "Exercises for Further Reflection and Action." This section is for those interested in going further along the authentic journey in a more practical and concrete way. This section is meant as an extended "workbook" for those who wish an experience in deepening their authenticity with some reflections and specific calls to action beyond the insights and inspiration. Best wishes on your journey. Back to Books and Articles