A story from the neighborhood
Compassionate Authenticity: From peace flags and ugly cries to growing beyond the habituation of inauthenticity
There are three people in my neighborhood who have seen me ugly cry. Two are women, one is a man. I have a strong feeling he was my brother previously in different forms. The women live like wings in opposite directions of my house. The man and his family are the ones who live nearest and is the one who, on occasion the peace flag for me.
The other day my husband and I came back from a walk and this man was out, and we stopped to make small talk. Oddly, I was asking more ordinary questions than I usually do, which resulted in learning that our neighbor was about to embark on a family reunion-vacation. Both my husband and I noticed, and shared with one another once we got home and back inside, that he seemed extraordinarily awkward and that it definitely seemed like the didn’t want to talk. I had a strong sense that it wasn’t personal. After talking with my husband, we concluded that he really did want to talk but that he wasn’t allowing himself to be authentic, and so the result was the awkwardness. We felt compassion for our neighbor, and expressed gratitude that the other day we’d had a particularly authentic communication with one of our other neighbors, who is also on my list of “People I have ugly cried with in the neighborhood.”
A little while later I got the nudge to take a brief walk, and it was very short - more than brief, really, because as I walked up toward the street, this same neighbor was out, tinkering with his car. I wasn’t planning on it, but I guess I just went with what seemed right and expressed empathy for a situation he referenced as if it were fine, but that my husband and I concluded he didn’t really feel fine about. At first he re-iterated that it was fine, but it wasn’t ringing true, so I told him it’s just easier if you’re authentic. He told me he didn’t want to be too bratty and vent out this or or that thing, and I reassured him that it wasn’t being bratty, it was being human. I reassured him I knew that he wasn’t going to do anything terrible and that he might just feel better if he expressed what hew as really feeling. FYI, this fellow is a social worker and he does EFT, so it isn’t as though I were telling a neighbor with no fluency in these topics to get more self-honest and open up, although I would if I was led to do so. Also as an aside, my husband and I later discussed how there are, of course people who might take your time to vent in ways you might have to encourage them to honor your needs or set your own boundaries, but usually the people who are super mindful of not wanting to be a burden in their sharing wouldn’t be one anyway. My other neighbor that we aired our dirty laundry with on the curb the other day? She is in the same category. I actually thought she had deprioritized me as a friend and I was trying to be respectful of her space because she is busy and is more “normal” than I am in terms of her daily life - it turned out she was depressed and didn’t want to burden anyone. How often might this happen when we feel like people push us away and they are trying to save us from their own authentic vulnerability by handling it themselves? What if we leaned into being strong enough to be vulnerable, without expecting to be rescued? What if we allowed others to hold space for us and we held space for them in compassion and care?
writes beautifully about this process related to grief, beginning with ourselves:
“Authentic.” My neighbor pondered these words, looking from his yellow and white button down shirt to glance up at me from the corner of his eye, and then looking all the up to face me and look directly at me.
“I think I have not been authentic most of the time for the last 25 or 30 years. After a while being not authentic starts to feeling authentic, except not.”
“Like a well worn road, but not like grass and trees and all the nature on either side, responded.
“Look,” I said, “In 50 years we’re all going to be dead. Our bodies are going to be eaten by worms and our souls will be either having a party in heaven or reincarnated in some other form.”
He nods and chuckles and says, “That’s right.”
“So maybe one of the gifts of middle age is that we realize it is okay, at least in certain places to put all that inauthenticity aside.”
He then opened up about the dynamic that was bothering him, which in shorthand, without giving away his details, he wasn’t standing up for his own needs with extended family, and also he said, work was hard and his car had just died.
I acknowledged the stuff simply by saying, “Yeah…pause. That’s a lot. I get it.”
“I know you do. Of course you do.”
I then invited him to consider that if he were to stand up for his own needs, I was fairly certain he would find he had more to offer others. “I like that way of looking at it,” he said. And then the air shifted, it was lighter, and he told me about the gnomes he was looking for that our two youngest kids used to play with, and that was looking for one of them to put under this big mushroom growing in his yard.
What if we could learn about peace through peace and love through love?
What if we could laugh our way to liberation?
And co-create with our brothers and sisters outside of party lines
Throughing a party where our shared divinity is the common ground
The rigpa
Our earthen bodies
Are of soil and stardust and water and light
And our souls know we are Sophia’s
Delight
To embody as the stars
And invisible
Presence
Within form
To help sovereignty create a new norm
Where heaven on earth is born
The limitless space
In which Divine Soulutions and Soilutions
Can download
And help us elevate
To our sovereign divine potential
As Source emanations
Here to experience ourselves
As both the One and the many
Faces of God
What if we didn’t need to plod
We could simply allow, open, receive
Gestate
Conceive
Divinity as what we are
Birthed into here in this world
That is so beautiful
And in so much need of
Harmony
Freedom
Peace
You
Me
Our whole Inter Universal
Sovereign Divine
Family
‘
Thank you Alicia. I am touched by your post and also your mention of what I wrote. I love how you listened. How you trusted that quiet voice. And what a gift you offered him. It is all quite divine and for sure filled with wisdom and love.