Over the years, I have watched how certain buzzwords and phrases become part of the spiritual/personal growth jargon. They’re hot for a while (even if people struggle to offer a definitive explanation of what they mean), and then some fall out of fashion after being overused, or proven to actually mean nothing truly transformative or even real at all after they’ve been road tested for a bit (for example, “Do what you love and the money will follow.”). Other words and phrases are definitely valid consciousness ideals to aspire to, yet they are often not fully embodied as both concepts held in the mind coupled with the necessary actions taken to actualize them. Instead, they are tossed about to give us a lovely spiritual appearance while in certain company if we feel it makes us sound enlightened to pepper our conversations with the latest consciousness lingo.

Although we generally mean well when using them, some buzzwords and phrases can be weapons of mass spiritual self-destruction when used by the oh-so-clever ego to make us feel superior over another whom we smugly feel “just hasn’t gotten it.” I don’t need to list particular words or phrases that have become popular to illustrate this; if you have been involved in spiritual/personal growth for even a short amount of time you know what some of them are, and if you are radically self-honest, you may see that you too have sometimes adopted them in an ego-inflating manner.

With all that said, I’m going to discuss a word that is fairly popular in the spiritual/personal growth lexicon at the moment: authenticity. I admit to using it rather often myself. It’s a word that has many interpretations depending on the person using it, especially what it means to be authentic and the values applied to that characteristic. In one basic description, authenticity means being true to your self – but then the subsequent question arises, “Am I to be true to my lower self (ego-driven) or higher self (non-ego-driven), and which is more authentic?” This is a very good, and very important question, and the answer depends upon your own priorities at any given time – and what you have decided all of this authenticity stuff means. For the sake of the nature of this column, I am going to go with my hope that most people who are reading this wish to place their energy and attention on higher-self authenticity, even though you may not be fully living that intention and its companion commitments and actions in the present.

It’s fairly safe to say that none of us likes being around phony people, but it’s also fairly safe to say may of us act phony in select situations, and some of us many be so disconnected with who we are (or never knew in the first place) that we are actually phony most of the time. We may act a certain way because of an image we wish to project or a situation or social structure within which we want to fit. There is actually a buzz-phrase sentiment that we should “fake it until we make it” real - which I find an extremely fascinating idea to espouse. Does this mean we will become authentically fake if we work on creating the illusion hard enough?

I read an interesting article by psychotherapist Dr. Evelyn Sommers on the psychotherapy.net website titled “The Tyranny of Niceness.” She writes that for a long time she described herself as a “nice” person, but discovered that her niceness was inauthentic because she was not expressing what she felt was her true self. She instead followed an internal pressure to keep up her socially approved appearance of what she thought being a “nice” person was, and by doing so, feel accepted – even though this behavior created extreme anxiety within to try and maintain. She describes her painful inner experience in a very profound way:

“There was a black hole in my existence, an interruption of my authenticity that manifested in a real disconnection between what I felt and thought and what I said. And the more I prevented myself from voicing my authentic thoughts and feelings the more I lost opportunities to hone the skills of honest, direct expression delivered in ways that are kind and respectful of the other person. When I did speak, my words were often fueled by anger - appearing as irritation, sarcasm, impatience - that blanketed a fear of rejection.

“Through self-reflection and observations of others I made the connection between silencing/suppressing my authenticity and being nice. Later, I saw that the connection applied to many of my clients. I saw the same patterns: suppression of thoughts and feelings, deep wishes for acceptance with a concomitant fear of rejection or judgment, anxiety, depression, and erupting frustration. These features were bound together by guilt, shame and fear.”

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