I’ve spent the last 3 years of my life living and working in Authentic community.

Any conflict, I’ve faced. Any beauty, I’ve witnessed. I’ve watched hundreds of people walk into my group’s space and leave a little shaken, a little stirred: aware of a new potential inside themselves: this thing called “authenticity”. Authenticity involves telling the truth about who we actually are…or who we think we are. I would call it a reveal of the discovery.

For all the beauty of authenticity, I’ve started seeing a pattern among people who frequent my community. I’ve witnessed it in myself.

I start out by telling MY (bolded, capital letters) TRUTH.
It’s a new discovery! I have a TRUTH! And people want to listen to it. Right? They like my vulnerability. They like knowing what I want. And, if I don’t tell MY TRUTH, I might be inauthentic…or, worse yet, I might lose contact with what I think/feel/believe/want to say before it comes out of my mouth. I’ll say it, and I’ll say it quickly and loudly just in case I forget it, or I think you’re not listening.

This kind of TRUTH-telling – while a beautiful step towards self-expression, that is new for many people – is fundamentally disconnected.

I teach Authentic Relating, a practice of sharing deeply and honestly with others in service of greater connection. In this practice, people often bump up against a question of “how do I take this out into the world?” The thought behind this question is, I think, that the world isn’t a place where “my truth” is welcome. We tend to fight against this – “Dammit! Society just doesn’t fit me! I think we should change political systems/economic equations/my job/my relationship/my therapist.”

But, in a world where we have to balance billions of different preferences, beliefs, and human expressions – not to mention the even greater number of cultural and group affiliations, each with their own set of agentic truths and values – it just isn’t feasible to hold “MY TRUTH” as the compass for all that happens in my life. It would be like one cell in a body saying, “Nah…I just don’t want to go to work today.”

 

MY (bolded, capital letters) TRUTH is entertwined with all the other MY TRUTHS out there. Some of them have very little resemblance to mine. Yet, we all need to co-exist in the same world. No wonder we’re scared of people we can’t understand – the mentally insane, fundamentalist Christians, the guy down the street. There’s a factor of absolute terror in knowing that somebody else might not even be able to understand MY TRUTH. I could get thrown in jail for violating a law I don’t even believe in. I could lose the person I love because we have different definitions of “freedom in relationship”. (You’re poly-what??)

All of this is to say, authenticity is a dangerous game to play.

I’m setting up MY TRUTH against the world, and often vilifying the world for not accepting it.

This is where “relating” comes in. I can share my truth, and hear yours, and (ideally) not need to have a “right” or a “wrong”. I can even drop levels deeper in what each of us are saying, to discover the context, values, and beliefs below – places where we probably DO agree. A conflict about forms of love becomes a connection about wanting to be heard and cared about.

TRUTH (mine)
becomes Truth (mine, recognizing that yours is valid too, and questioning/moderating my own)
becomes truth (not even knowing what’s true, if anything).

RELATING (sharing our honest beliefs/opinions/judgments with each other)
becomes Relating (co-discovering reality)
becomes relating (watching a connection unfold, without any certainty as to what it is or will be, or even being able to assume that we will be able to see each others’ point of view).

My “Authenticity” isn’t real. My “Relating” isn’t connected. But, if I take a step back from MY TRUTH – if I see it as a process in change, and a partial one at that – and if I stay in relationship with you even as I say it…

It’s a harder process, but, I think it’s one with more potential for little-t “truth” and little-r “relating”. We might be able to discover something totally unknown about who I am, together.

To understand this, I want to tell a few stories. These are places where I’ve started questioning TRUTH, where the desires that I and others in my community hold have bumped up against the reality of trying to co-exist. I’m still exploring where, in these, my own “Authenticity” lies.

 

The Founders’ War

The first story is one still very alive in my community, and others across the world. It’s the conflict between two of the founders of our practice. My view on this will be subjective (of course), and not meant to cast blame on anybody – I’m more trying to explore my own process of trying to find truth, and coming to question authenticity as a thing that can be pointed at and defined.

This is a long and varied story. To make it short –

The practices of Authentic Relating and Circling were discovered, independently and in different forms, by two men in the 1990s.

Decker Cunov was living with a group of friends. As conflicts began to arise in the group, he began initiating conversations about what was actually happening – relating in the moment about perspectives, truths, and feelings. This conversation of authenticity and empathy became the Soul2Soul community, and then combined with mens’ work that he and others were doing to evolve Authentic Relating and his form of Circling.

Guy Sengstock went to Burning Man, and during an induced adventure, began to “see the Matrix” under the interrelationships of his group of friends. Amidst a conflict on the playa, Guy started discovering, and co-discovering, the essential nature of the people with him – what must be true about each for them to be the person they were. This evolved into the practice of Circling: in Guy and his group’s form, a mixture of breathwork, Gestalt therapy, phenomenology, and whatever else its leaders were interested in at the time.

Guy and Decker met at one of Guy’s workshops in California. They became close friends and collaborators. When Guy’s company began suffering financially, he gave or lent his circling immersions and trainings to Decker. Around the same time, both leaders went downhill – Decker physically, Guy emotionally – putting more tension on the relationship. Guy disappeared from the picture for a couple of years. Decker built circling into the practice I learned at the Boulder Integral Center in 2013: a codified, theory-backed intersubjective meditation, one that anybody could learn. In 2014, Guy reappeared, teamed up with a woman who had left Decker’s organization, and founded the Circling Institute. There has been conflict between the two organizations ever since.

That’s the story. On the surface, it seems like there should be clarity – Guy either lent or gave the rights to run circling workshops to Decker. If he gave the rights, then he shouldn’t be running his own events. If the agreement wasn’t exclusive, then there shouldn’t be a problem. But, despite written contracts and verbal understandings, despite a lot of loving personal history between the founders, the question has stayed open.

In this conflict, I have seen TRUTH, Truth, and truth at war. These men are two of the founders of a practice based on authenticity. They’ve both been very open in sharing their TRUTH, often with care for each other and an openness to other perspectives. But the stories and emotions are in conflict. And for me, confronting the warring TRUTHs is painful. It hurts me and others in trying to build a unified Authentic movement, it stunts potential collaborations, and it catches me between my deep and distinct love for both men, like a heart told to choose its preference of beat.

TRUTH is my story/emotions, and Decker’s, and Guy’s. Around these two men, the Authentic community is being faced with Truth.
Truth is that our practices have spread beyond their gurus, and the greater goal is helping them get out into the world. Truth has caused other companies to spring up and fill in the gaps where in-fighting is preventing collaboration. And Truth is realizing that these battles are inevitable, as authenticities come into contact and refuse to make all individuals the same.

Little truth is watching from the background. I can feel it peering round, at the edge of my awareness.

truth is nonjudgmental, nonpartisan. It tells me that conflicts like this, movements like this, have existed throughout time; that special as I believe mine is, it is no more TRUTH than the Enlightenment was the end of scientific progress. When I follow truth, it tells me to watch…to act when I feel right, and to trust that even if I’m acting from a narrow-minded TRUTH, that everything turns out as it turns out, in the end.

So, on my side, I’ve let myself be angry at the conflict, and caring towards both of my teachers. I feel so much love for both of them, so much gratitude for who they are and what they’ve brought to be. And so much annoyance at not being able to collaborate with them at the same time. I have chosen to move around rather than with them in my own business, making no agreements but connecting wherever possible. And, with the help of many conversations with the wisest of our communities, I’ve become more open to the process of uncertain inevitability…watching history be made, and not needing it to be any other way.

 

Ghost Story

One more example, just for fun. This one still freaks me out!

Our community in Austin is big. There are hundreds of people. As such – sad as this is – we’ve endured a few deaths during our 2.5 years of existence. The most recent was a woman named Deborah, a sensual, mysterious dancer with a penchant for scarves. She died in a car crash during one of this summer’s storms.

I first met Deborah when she came to circling labs, about a year ago. I got to know her because she sent me a message that she was annoyed at me. She went to two labs, a few weeks apart, and in each of them I ended up taking the attention. Since I was leading, she felt left out – desirous of having the attention herself, but also questioning this form of “leadership” that keeps itself as participatory as anyone in the group.

I felt crushed at her message. So much self-judgment came up – as a leader, had I just let my “followers” down? Had I been selfish, in a role where selfishness could be most abused? It made me question my whole identity as somebody who cares about and takes care of others.

But, Deborah stayed in relationship with me about it. I shared how I felt at her message – she shared how her views started to change. Because of her honesty, and because we stayed in connection around it, we became much closer. RELATING from our separate truths became Relating, discovering the subjectivity of our truths together. It was a scary place for me. I had an idea that if I did something “wrong”, I would be judged as a leader and abandoned as a friend. Deborah helped prove me wrong!

So, after Deborah died, I was sad for quite a while. Then, one of my other friends got in a car accident.

Karma was on our side this time. My friend Stellar was fine. The week after her accident, I circled her, in a lab at my house. About 15 minutes into the circle, the woman to Stellar’s left started saying that she sensed Deborah in the room. And Stellar said, “I feel her too.”

All my woo-woo sensors were buzzing. Relational practice – ok. Altered states – ok; we often go into those in circling, where colors start to change and a meditative state of awareness sets in. But ghosts? For Becca and Stellar, what they were sensing was TRUTH, and they were in relationship about it. For me, it was out of the realm of possibility.

And then everybody else in the room started sensing something too.

Even the ones who didn’t see Deborah got a ringing in their ears, a high, tinny sound. We were relating, in the moment, watching something totally inexplicable unfold; and I was watching my fear rise up like a wave – all the things I think I KNOW about reality, coming under fire. “I’m scared,” I told the group.

Gradually, the circle ended. Deborah faded away. We went to dinner, and Becca – the woman who had first sensed our departed friend – shared some of her history with us, things that even after circling with her for many months I didn’t know. She shared how she’s seen ghosts for a long time, and known things she couldn’t know. How she’s had to hide it out of fear. And a little more of my TRUTH began to change.

 

The Process of Authenticity

After 3 years of leading communities, and encountering every sort of capital-T bolded-letters you’re-wrong-if-you-don’t-agree TRUTH, I’ve discovered that authenticity – as in, “my TRUTH is paramount for me to bring to the world” – is itself a subjective idea. I love discovering what’s true for me, through my body, emotions, mind, and environment. But I no longer assume that TRUTH is such a permanent state.

What I feel, experience, want, and believe changes moment by moment and day by day. How I communicate it is also a process in flux. There is no Wrong or Right. The most pain I see is when people attach to their TRUTH as an identity, and die a little death every time it’s questioned.

Authenticity and relating are both parts of a wider whole. In this world, there is no definitive Right or Wrong; there is no ground. This is terrifying. No ground? No certainty by which to know even my own subjective TRUTH? But – in an equally personal perspective – I believe this is the case.

To live in the world, I can’t accept the world, or myself, by degrees. I have to accept ALL of it.

• The society and economics that require me to work a job I might not enjoy
• The genocides that happen from differing views on love and justice
• The conflicts within my own field, and the anger and pain that surround them.

Any part of the world that I resist, is a part that I cannot fully participate in, and therefore cannot fully accept. Any part that I can’t accept becomes something even more terrifying – a thing over which, even in my awareness, I have no control. And if I have no control, the world (and my own self) becomes something I’m subject to, rather than something in which I’m privileged to take part.

I’ve tried to break this down a little more, into the steps that I see authenticity take – going from AUTHENTIC RELATING to “authentic relating…?” It’s a light blasphemy to my field, but I hope you’ll enjoy.

 

Step 1: We discover our truth

For many of us, “truth” is the set of beliefs and values that we’ve been taught – by our parents, schools, religion, and friends. As a first step, we can start getting in touch with the TRUTH that comes from within. We can tune into our somatic experience (what we feel in our bodies), our emotions, watch our thoughts, and even begin to notice the beliefs as they arise. In Authentic Relating, much of this starts with focus on the body, because that’s the most-neglected site in Western upbringing; but any source of input, external or internal, is something that you can begin to distinguish.

Step 2: We start telling our truth

Here is where “Relating” comes in. We start to communicate what’s TRUE for us to others. I like to say that “you know truth by the tingles” – if you’re scared to say something, feel hot in the face after you’ve said it, or feel tingles, it’s probably something true for you. As we begin telling our TRUTH, it sometimes looks like a fire hose that’s been turned on and is soaking everything around. We share all the fears, judgments, hopes, and insecurities that we’ve been holding in for years…and we don’t necessarily do it cleanly, or with a felt sense of our TRUTH-receiver’s reality.

Step 3: People get mad at us

This is where it starts getting fun. When we begin telling TRUTH, the people around us react. They might seem scared, or angry, or even envious. Not only is there a greater possibility that our TRUTH will cause conflict, but the telling also calls them out to identify their own TRUTH (not always a comfortable process), and it changes their familiar image of who we are.

There’s a lot of fear involved in this process. On our side, we might revert to less-resourced patterns of dealing with conflict – fight, flight, or freeze. We may begin to distance from many of the people, communities, jobs, etc. that have until now formed our inner network.

Step 4: We become Transformers

After we get past the initial fight-flight-or-freeze, we tend to open more into empathy. We start being able to see things from others’ point of view, to include different perspectives on the TRUTH and different TRUTHS on perspective. This is like a superpower. Not only can I understand my own perspective, but I can take yours as well! While I tell my TRUTH, I can stay attuned to what you might be thinking or feeling…which will influence what, when, if, and how I decide to speak.

From this place, we can have more empathy for where others are at. As a bonus, me understanding you tends to make you more open to hearing me, so our conversations will probably get less tense.

At this phase, we might start to re-include the parts of life that we’ve distanced, albeit with more discernment about what does and doesn’t fit the people we’re becoming.

Step 5: We develop choice

Our TRUTH becomes something we can witness emerging, but don’t have to be attached to. We become more spacious around conflict and responses. We can see the subjectivity of both our TRUTH and others’, and we can hold our own preferences within that range. If there is no “right” or “wrong”, why not have our own joy as our guide?

We also start seeing larger Truths that feel more true, often Truths that include many perspectives at the same time, and begin trying to live by those while still discovering our own. The discovery begins to feel less like work and more like play.

Step 6: We stop looking

We realize that truth, Truth, and TRUTH are already always here, already always occurring…and we ourselves are both co-creator and witness.

We moderate our grand quests for purpose; we hold our self-examination lightly. We recognize that our bodies, minds, and hearts are not the only source of our wisdom. We begin to take part rather than trying to guide.

truth and relating begin to emerge…

So, what is the matter with authenticity?

Nothing, really. Except that when I hold authenticity as equal to TRUTH and RELATING, I experience pain. The places where the world doesn’t accept my reality, or I don’t accept its, become sources of disconnection and frustration.

When I connect to Truth and Relating, instead of standing opposite to everything, I stand beside it. My authenticity becomes less solid, but also less breakable. I am watching Truth emerge – and I’m doing it with you.

When I rest in truth and relating, “I” don’t even matter. I might not even be able to tell you my TRUTH, because having just one seems laughable! Everything is existing, and that’s all that happens.

Of course, “truth” might be a hard place to live…

And I can’t connect to Truth until I have some idea of my TRUTH…

So once again (sorry guys), there’s no hard and fast answer here. There’s just an interplay. All forms of truth, and all forms of relating, arising and co-arising, creating the world in which we come to live.

 

What a beautiful thing….

 

Love,
Sara