Guest Blog: Trusting Your Authentic Self

Hi everyone! This week’s post is from, Siobhain, who has been living her own courageously authentic life that has taken her to…well, I’ll let you read her story below!

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Following my successful completion of the Living Authentically course led by the amazing Jennifer Monahan, this is my third article describing what happened afterward in my life.

Rumi is quoted as saying, “Respond to every call that excites your spirit,” or, in other words, follow deeply your intuition.

But what if that call means giving up everything that you have? What if that call means giving up financial security and everything that your friends, family and society tells you that you need? What if that call is a niggling voice inside of yourself telling you to leave everything behind and start on a completely new path?

This is what I learned from Jennifer:

Living authentically is about tough decisions; making choices that resonate from deep within.

Following a call that excites your spirit and trusting deeply in your intuition can be a daunting process.  We are taught from childhood that we must be successful, financially secure and to stay on a good career path.  That we must be logical and rational.  That we must make our decisions from the mind.  We are rarely taught to be irrational, intuitive or creative with our life choices.  And of course, this is why many of us struggle; because we are living according to the values of our society and not of our deeper selves.

So when it comes to living authentically, how can we know if the decisions we are making come from a place deep within our soul.  How can we differentiate our true desires from those being influenced by external factors? Often, it is that same call that excites our spirit that seems completely crazy, irrational and outside the standard boundaries of logical thinking.  When this kind of call arises, how can we trust that our intuition is correct?

Recently I was faced with one such decision.  I was given an opportunity to take a job that would have given me financial stability for the future.  Did this opportunity excite my spirit? No, it didn’t.

What did excite my spirit was packing up a backpack, leaving everything behind and buying a one-way ticket to the Himalayas.  Sounds crazy, right?

So which one did I choose?

I chose the latter.  And now, almost one year on, I can assure you that having experienced the incredible freedom and liberation that comes from living authentically, it is the craziest calls that turn into the biggest miracles and that provide the deepest, most authentic soul-satisfying experiences.

(If you’d like to read Siobhain’s other posts, you can find them here and here.)