We have heard the bad news, haven’t we? We continue hearing more bad news, don’t we? Our world is bombarded by disasters, defeat, difficulty, disease, division, and depression. Some people respond by becoming obsessed with the bad news—letting it control their lives. Other people live with avoidance and denial—pretending all is well when it isn’t.
Mark Anthony, in his book Living an Authentic Life, offers a much better response to reality. We can change our way of thinking. We can enter a season of personal transformation. We can practice healthy disciplines of breathing, meditating, and loving. We can move toward healing, freedom, and peace.
Mark writes with honesty and compassion. Open the pages. Open your heart and your mind to a season where you can wave goodbye to harmful emotions like worry and fear. Open your life to venturing beyond the obstacles of life to find healing. Let Mark’s words bring you just when you need to live an authentic life in these times of uncertainty.
-Chris Maxwell
Author, Pastor, Poet
Here’s an introduction!
Our life is constantly changing moment to moment, day to day and year to year.
Living authentically is an interesting and popular topic and one that I think needs special consider- ation. In life, we are being asked more than ever to check in with our true self (spirit), values and personality (ego) daily.
Put simply, authenticity means you’re true to your own personality, values, and spirit, regardless of the pressure that you’re under to act otherwise. You’re honest with yourself and with others, and you take responsibility for your mistakes. In life we are being challenged, prodded and pushed, creating opportunity that might promote transformational growth and change and even redefine how we live our authentic life.
Authentic is defined as:
“not false or copied; genuine; real.” And, my favorite defInition, “representing one’s true nature or beliefs; true to oneself or to the person identified.”
As an author and coach, I know in order to become more authentic and to seek this out in others, we first need to be open-minded. We attract the people and things we want in life when we’re open-minded and receptive. This often leads to opportunities and new ways of thinking that expand our minds and bring us ideas that add value and create change to our lives.
Live in the Moment and Be a Great Listener
“What day is it?” asked Pooh.
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh. —A.A. Milne
There’s nothing more real than a person who lives in the moment without worry or concern for needless matters. Who do you know that truly embraces the moment? Someone who doesn’t bother checking their smartphone every five seconds to worry about an email from Instagram or some trivial matter? A teacher who left a huge impression on you because of their devotion to their students?
Living in the moment means concentrating on exactly what is happening in your life at that precise time. It demands that we remove the baggage and clutter from our lives to live our best in the moment. Presence and concern for right now are achieved when we eliminate distractions. Like junk email!
Being a great listener is not just suited for conversa- tions with our loved ones or business partners. It’s also about listening to the very important voice inside our heads. Listen to your intuition. Do what your heart is telling you to do. That’s what an authentic person does.
Each second of every day we are being led by our minds and our hearts experiencing change. Otherwise, we are just standing still (paralyzed), going through the exact same moment over and over.
My family owns a funeral home and I made the
decision out of college that I would join the business. I didn’t know how much I would learn as a funeral director and mortician, but wanted to be part of the family business. Working in funeral service, I have spent years walking with people through a time of change when someone loses a loved one. I have had the privilege of helping others journey through loss, fear, pain, disfunction, and sadness, assisting them as they transition through their loss. I have witnessed healing, where grief left deep holes, I have witnessed pain and suffering, gratitude, remembering and celebration, and I have witnessed seemingly hopeless and sad situations transform into love. I have been blessed by this.
Through this experience and window into change and how transformational change can affect an indi- vidual, I’ve realized the value of change and its affect in our world. I’ve realized what a gift we all can be in our world.
Through this experience I discovered that until we learn to navigate change, we are stuck. We remain in one place with no movement whatsoever. Without movement, we become paralyzed and there is death. Death, because we are no longer challenging ourselves and are no longer moving forward in our living.
I’ve experienced a time of transformation in my life. After years of helping others on their transitional journeys, I wanted to know if I could do a better job of it for myself. I took part in a retreat where all of the participants committed to meditating for an hour every
day for one hundred days. After the hour of meditation,
we were encouraged to document what we learned, thought about, or discovered during our ritual. Many in the group chose to create vlogs (video blogs); I decided to write, so I started a blog chronicling the journey.
This personal transformation manifested clarity and creativity within me. It fed my desires. It has shown me how thoughts can be limiting. It has also shown me how growth is stymied by those limiting thoughts and fears. It has opened the door connecting me with my true authenticity, my source of being, my true nature, values, and personality.
Transformation can be a messy job. It triggers old ideas and patterns that we have buried in our subcon- scious. All of our triggers and fear are typically con- nected to another time in our lives; something in our past manifested them. To live in the present moment, we have to work on moving past those fears and trig- gers, recognize the old patterns and stories, so that we are not hiding behind those stories anymore. Through my practice of blogging and meditation, I have been able to uncover my own limiting thoughts to spur on my own growth. And while it’s a continuing journey, its one well worth the effort.
In addition to documenting my thoughts and discov- eries through my transformation, my blog allowed me to discover my voice and my genuine delight of writing. I have continued to write on my blog past the initial one hundred days, and I now have over four hundred posts. I have also written another book, “Living and Dying” finding hope and love on your journey through loss.
This love of writing combined with my desire to help others through times of transition led to the creation of this book. You will hopefully see, we all share the same or similar life experiences. It is only our individual stories that make them unique and different. We all experience birth, adolescence, puberty, adulthood, aging, changing jobs, and new relationships: all of these are shared experi- ences. We live them all differently, though.
My hope with this book is that as I share with you my experience and stories, you will recognize opportunities for transformation in your own life. That living authentically is a journey of self discovery through change, transformation and lifes tranisition’s.
To accomplish this purpose, I have included some of my writings from my own journey through transformation throughout this book. I want you to be able to see what I was thinking and experiencing while I was going through my periods of transition. I hope that by doing so you will see how embracing challenges and change in our lives will keep us moving forward.
I am not a doctor or health professional, or profess to have any magic solutions to life. My thoughts are simply mine as they applied to my lifes journey. My writings are a compilation of my energetic connection to source (God), my divine guides, Jesus, my Native American guide and archangels Raphael and Michael, and many close friends and family. Without them this writing would not be possible and I give up all personal responsibility for these words and thoughts, acknowledging with sincere gratitude and praise for being so blessed by them.
To be published soon!!!
“Blessings on your journey”
Hope and Love on life's journey 