Meeting Your Authentic Self

The Lightworker’s Challenge: Meeting Your Authentic Self

by Lisa Shaw

In A Sacred Voice is Calling John Neafsy gives insight into the nature of our highest calling, the voice of our spiritual, our authentic self. A standard reading in many theology programs, the book transcends the traditional notion of spirituality as taught in many western institutions and embraces familiar and eclectic examples of spiritual life from literature through Eastern religion. He illuminates the thread of the spirit as unifier among all of us, often using very mundane world examples. In one breath he speaks of Black Elk, and in the next, he shares the lessons of Jiminy Cricket. Above all, he encourages the inclusive spirituality which so many Lightworkers embrace by following that unnamed inner/higher voice.

What is that voice? It’s the “I Am” which beckons us to higher levels of thought and deed, the thump in the heart we know as compassion for all living things. It’s neither prescriptive nor dogmatic. It’s knowing that sometimes we must, without clear reason, forego the avenue we’ve been sold and opt instead for what Frost calls “the road not taken. ” It’s the Divine whisper from within. We see it when Joseph Campbell distinguises between the priest and the shaman: the priest, is “a functionary of society” (schooled, trained, in essence, created from an external institution) whereas the shaman experiences physical and psychological transformation, often painful, from within, hardly a matter of choice.

Neafsy identifies this as the inner voice of our conscience: “the place within us where we face ourselves most profoundly and honestly.” This is what it means to be authentic. We meet ourselves in that solitary, sometimes frightening, and often lonely valley of the self.