From Performance to Presence, the Courage to Be Authentic
How listening, discernment, and self-trust lead to authentic living and restorative community
Welcome to this edition of Walking the Liminal!
I’m glad you’re here! And if you’re a new subscriber, a special welcome!
Authenticity: The Courage to Belong to Yourself
Authenticity begins with a U-turn, shifting from an outer focus,
to something closer to the bone, an inner alignment with our core.
Reflecting our passion and purpose, what we believe and value.
An embodied sense of belonging with life itself.
Challenging when we live in a world that rewards compliance and banishes difference. While keeping us in a hyper-vigilant state of anxiety, braced between fight, fawn, or flight.
On the public stage and in our private feeds, we see ongoing performance; curated and polished identities, deception dressed as truth. Even using vulnerability strategically. It’s challenging to know what authenticity even is. What and whom to trust.
To be authentic is to stop negotiating your soul for approval.
This requires listening…
not for applause or leverage, but for truth.
Staying with the question long enough for coherence to surface,
for the deeper current of who you are to emerge.
It’s rooted in self-awareness,
carried by honest expression,
steadied by consistency.
Learning to live unapologetically as YOU!
The Seven of Cups - What Will You Choose?
This month the Seven of Cups has appeared once in a personal reading and twice when I asked for guidance with writing. I pay attention to repetition…
In traditional decks, a figure stands before seven shimmering chalices, each offering something alluring. In the deck that I pulled from, we see the charlatan. A manipulator. A conman with polished charm… a predator. (Sound familiar?)
The warning is clear… beware of superficiality and indulgence, in yourself and in the world. For this archetype entices us to trade discernment for fantasy, to sell our depth for status or distraction. The charlatan thrives on confusion and our hunger to feel chosen or secure.
It would be easy to condemn him. But this isn’t merely a warning about deception “out there.” It’s an initiation into discernment within. Here the charlatan becomes the trickster, not creating your confusion, but revealing it. He exposes how easily we’re seduced when we don’t know ourselves.
In a world of infinite options, choice becomes its own labyrinth.
The Seven of Cups asks: Are you choosing from clarity or from craving?
This card warns: Beware the intoxication of possibility without embodiment.
Not every cup is meant for us.
So beneath it all, the question is simple and piercing:
With all these options…
Who are you?
And from that knowing what will you choose?
The Cost of the Mask
As I shared in my essay on inversion and on listening, my parents’ inability to accept who I was, resulted in me stuffing down my longings, desires, and passions by trading them in for a sense of belonging, first at home, then with my peers.
When we live out of alignment, something in us knows.
For me it was the emptiness.
The contraction and tightness in my body.
Where my yes was hesitant. My no swallowed.
I felt split in two. Performing what was expected outwardly while privately unraveling behind the scenes. Managing my pain the only way I knew, by eating my incongruence away with food. Trying to fill the gaping hole in my belly, the chasm within.
Over time, this split erodes trust, not only between people but within ourselves, which it did for me. And without self-trust, listening becomes distorted. We no longer know which inner voice is fear and which is truth.
Authenticity as Spiritual Practice
“Hitting bottom,” was the impetus that I needed to reach out, to seek help around my eating disorder and to heal this disconnection with myself and life. This wasn’t an easy journey, it took years to be able to say, “I’m healed from this addiction.”
This involved entering the 12-step program, getting personal therapy, opening to sacred presence, spending time in spiritual practice and applying all this to my daily life. Healing doesn’t come in 10 easy steps. Or a pill that guarantees quick results. It comes from commitment, doing the nitty-gritty work, showing up again and again even when I was afraid to. And most importantly learning to forgive myself when I couldn’t.
I had to rediscover who I was, what mattered to me, what’s my physical constitution was needing, and what do I even like. This meant listening deeply. Discerning what was authentic for me and what wasn’t. I had to learn to love myself, to be the parent that my mother and father couldn’t be.
This took me on a life long spiritual journey that’s still unfolding today. I’ve spent time with many spiritual traditions, dove into the mysteries, gave myself to ritual and became a minister and a spiritual doula.
What I have discovered is the importance of being true to myself. Moving as love and compassion, honoring the particular way the divine chose to move through me.
Listening teaches us to recognize that frequency.
Possibility invites us to live from it.
Authenticity embodies it.
From Authentic Self to Authentic Community
I’ve been reading an amazing book by Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging. It has totally inspired me, some of which is reflected here.
What Authentic Community Isn’t
Authenticity doesn’t stop with the personal.
The move toward authentic community requires a shift in context, an examination of the mental models we unconsciously inhabit.
We’ve inherited a worldview shaped by scarcity, competition, and individualism:
⇨Scarcity whispers: there’s not enough.
⇨Competition insists: someone must lose.
⇨Individualism declares: you must make it happen.
Under this context, a community’s purpose revolves around solving and fixing problems. Authentic community is infinitely more than that.
What It Is
It begins with seeing that we already possess the resources required to reduce unnecessary suffering in our world and to create an alternative future.
Not as optimism, but as a stance.
A collective decision to see ourselves not as a bundle of needs, but as a field of gifts.
An authentic community says:
⇨We’re a community of possibility, not a community of problems.
⇨We exist because we belong, we’re interdependent.
⇨Who we are is rooted in our abilities, generosity, and accountability.
It means leaders aren’t saviors but participants.
It means the members aren’t clients but co-creators.
This requires a radical realignment…
Instead of asking, “What is missing?” we ask, “What is present?”
Instead of asking, “Who will fix this?” we ask, “What can we create together?”
Instead of organizing around fear, we gather around contribution.
The Thread That Binds
Authenticity is about coherence.
When a person is coherent, others feel safe.
When a community is coherent, people belong.
And true belonging, doesn’t require you to edit your essence. It asks you to offer it.
The invitation is simple, but not easy:
⇨ Where are you still performing?
⇨ Where are you withholding a gift?
What would shift if you trusted that who you are isn’t a liability to manage, but a contribution to make?
Authenticity frees us from the exhausting labor of pretending.
Collectively liberating us from the ideology
that we’re separate, insufficient, and alone.
Listening awakens awareness.
Possibility reorients imagination.
Authenticity anchors this as integration.
In this essay we explored authenticity, another component of restorative communities. Let’s take this deeper together! I would love to know how this landed with you. Here are some more questions for consideration…
⇨ What longing have I silenced in order to belong?
⇨ When do I feel most coherent, where my inner yes and outer yes align?
⇨ What is a unique and authentic way that I show up in the world?
Offerings:
I offer tarot readings and one-on-one sessions, a held space of reflection designed to accompany your inner explorations, integrations and alignment with the rhythms of life. If this resonates, feel free to send me a message or visit my website for more information.
Thanks for reading!
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Gorgeous as always, my friend! I love the question about what longing I've silenced in order to belong. I guess the times I've done this is to feel a belonging with other living humans. How interesting! With non-human and/or non-alive-right-now kin, I feel a sense of belonging no matter what and so can always be authentic. I also remember learning from a teacher once that being authentic with ourselves is really the important thing. So if we're wearing a mask because that's what we need to feel safe, but we acknowledge to ourselves that we're wearing the mask, then we're still in coherence. I rather liked that viewpoint...the allowance that sometimes masks are necessary (as long as we can admit it to ourselves). I'm SO loving this series on the Peter Block aspects of community. Can't wait to see what's next! 💖💖
“What I have discovered is the importance of being true to myself. Moving as love and compassion, honoring the particular way the divine chose to move through me.” Love the way you phrased this, and I have discovered the same. I also LOVE the aboriginal art you shared.