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Finding Your Authentic Voice
Interesting idea, isn't it? How could anyone not have an authentic voice? After all, it's our own. No one speaks for us.
Wrong. So very wrong.
Every word you/we/I have ever heard or read, has come from the voices of y/our parents, siblings, family, school, education,
intelligence, sex, sexuality, religion (or lack of), ethnicity, race, social standing, geographic location, chosen field of
endeavor, and has layered with complexity y/our authentic voice.
That includes the inner critic who is surprisingly much like every outer voice that I mentioned earlier. Those who haven't
helped us grow... Even if everyone, in truth, has served to create who we think we are. Yet the universe knows better, if
we but ask and are open to asking.
So, how does one go about peeling the layers away until one finds one's authentic voice? Is there such a thing?
This is what poets do every moment we write a poem... every moment we allow ourselves to be used by our muse.
It's that glorious event when we are writing from a place deep within us, where creativity is born, and we as human
beings are reborn in it. This is the only time we can really choose to be who we are, and by inference who we are not.
Else we're mimicking the voices of our history. No matter how grand it is.... it's not ours, in reality until we own up
to the understanding that we are not autonomous humans but automatons who have never examined a single thought.
Until we do, we're mouthing words that most of the time have no meaning in the present sense of who we are. We've
long outgrown those voices... and more often than not, just have no clue how to drop them.
So the question becomes: who am I, really? How do I drop these old voices that no longer *work*?
What better question to answer with our lives? What better answer than the voice we share in our poetry...
in our shared humanity? In the spirit of compassion, understanding and last but not least, of friendship
and love? In the Light (and darkness) that we share equally as citizens of the earth.
~Anna Ruiz/Kailashana
Wrong. So very wrong.
Every word you/we/I have ever heard or read, has come from the voices of y/our parents, siblings, family, school, education,
intelligence, sex, sexuality, religion (or lack of), ethnicity, race, social standing, geographic location, chosen field of
endeavor, and has layered with complexity y/our authentic voice.
That includes the inner critic who is surprisingly much like every outer voice that I mentioned earlier. Those who haven't
helped us grow... Even if everyone, in truth, has served to create who we think we are. Yet the universe knows better, if
we but ask and are open to asking.
So, how does one go about peeling the layers away until one finds one's authentic voice? Is there such a thing?
This is what poets do every moment we write a poem... every moment we allow ourselves to be used by our muse.
It's that glorious event when we are writing from a place deep within us, where creativity is born, and we as human
beings are reborn in it. This is the only time we can really choose to be who we are, and by inference who we are not.
Else we're mimicking the voices of our history. No matter how grand it is.... it's not ours, in reality until we own up
to the understanding that we are not autonomous humans but automatons who have never examined a single thought.
Until we do, we're mouthing words that most of the time have no meaning in the present sense of who we are. We've
long outgrown those voices... and more often than not, just have no clue how to drop them.
So the question becomes: who am I, really? How do I drop these old voices that no longer *work*?
What better question to answer with our lives? What better answer than the voice we share in our poetry...
in our shared humanity? In the spirit of compassion, understanding and last but not least, of friendship
and love? In the Light (and darkness) that we share equally as citizens of the earth.
~Anna Ruiz/Kailashana