Living an authentic life | Dr. Maria Sirois | TEDxBerkshires

Dr. Maria Sirois is an inspirational speaker, consultant, and licensed clinical psychologist who has worked in the fields of wellness and positive psychology for twenty years. As a lecturer and motivational speaker, Maria has been invited to keynote at conferences for wellness organizations, businesses, hospitals, hospices, religious and philanthropic institutions around the country. A master storyteller, her lectures and workshops combine powerful and moving anecdotes with research to bring an audience to the place we all most want to be: moved to tears, joy and positive action within the lives we are already living. Addressing topics as diverse as "Sustaining Resilience in the Presence of Suffering," "Every Day Counts: Flourishing No Matter What," and "The Heart in Philanthropy," she has been called both a "true teacher," and "an orator of great power and beauty."

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Think of one thing that you do
when you are procrastinating,

when you're not doing
the thing you ought be doing.

One thing.

Everybody got one?

Okay, can I hear a few?

(Audience) E-mail.

E-mail.

(Audience) Clean the house.

Clean the house.
Why don't you live with me?

(Laughter)

(Audience) Facebook.

Television, Facebook, one more?

(Audience) Play with the dogs.

Pardon?

You play with the dogs, right.
Play with the dogs.

You have a duty to perform,
this is Jalal ad-Din Rumi.

You have a duty to perform.

Do anything else, do any number of things:
clean the house, go on e-mail, eat.

(Audience) Eat.

(Laughter)

Eat, walk the dogs.

Do anything else, do any number of things,
occupy your time fully.

And yet, if you do not do this task,
your time here will have been wasted.

A very fierce teaching.

You have a duty to perform, and yet,
if you do not do this one task,

your time here will have been wasted.

What is he talking about?
What was Rumi trying to tell us?

He was trying to tell us
that it is up to us to come awake,

to come alive, fully alive,
in the one life that we can live;

to move away from the limitations
that keep us small and boxed in;

to come into the unique
particular being that we are, each of us.

He understood, Rumi, that this
was a particularly kind of difficult task.

It isn't easy to know what it means
to live an authentic life,

to be fully in yourself, all of the time.

And so, he also then wrote a beautiful
invitation to sort of self-compassion.

Come, he said, come, whoever you are;

wanderers, worshippers, lovers of leaving,

eaters, house cleaners, e-mail doers,

whoever you are.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vow,

even if we've fallen off
our own wagon a thousand times:

come, come yet again, come.

I'm Maria Sirois, a clinical psychologist
and inspirational speaker.

I work, as Jamie said,
in the world of death and dying,

but also the world of flourishing,

and one minute into my first experience

of working with a child
who had a terminal illness,

at Dana-Farber in Boston,

I figured out that I
was going to have to figure out

what we knew about how to survive well,

you know, how do we rise
in the presence of difficult moments,

how do we thrive
when Haiti crashes and crumbles,

how do we keep ourselves intact?

And it turns out,
we do know how to do this,

"we" meaning the positive psychologists
and the mind-body medicine people

and the poets and the artists

throughout the centuries
do know something,

and it has to do with this notion
of actually living an authentic life.

That when we live an authentic life,

when we live our life,
we actually can thrive.

When we try and live someone else's life,
have you ever tried that?

Have you ever married
somebody else's spouse?

Worked somebody else's job, right?

Wore somebody else's clothes,
day after day after day after day?

And what starts to happen
is you start to...

feel un-alive.

The opposite of thriving.

Sup at your own table -

this is Marcus Tullius Tiro,

slave and then eventually
assistant to Cicero and freedman -

sup at your own table,

drink from your own well,
speak from your own heart,

follow where your own path leads,

for anyone who hopes to lead you
cannot help but lead you astray.

Drink from your own wells.

So, what does this look like,
like in real life terms today?

What does this really look like?

It looks like a woman
I was teaching a couple of weeks ago,

who was at the start
of a five-day retreat program.

This was opening night,

and I was invited to talk
a little bit about how we thrive,

and I had introduced
this notion of authenticity,

and it was the end of the program,
and I said, "Okay,

if you would to do this week,

if you were going to do this one week,

just one week, five percent
more authentically than before,

what would you do?"

And this woman in her mid-50s,
late 60s stood up and said,

from Toronto, stood up and said:

"I would wear the bunny suit."

(Laughter)

Well, it was Easter time,
and she had come to the Berkshires

with a full-on, furry, tail, ears,
the whole thing bunny suit,

and had this this urge
to be the Easter Bunny.

It was a dream
she had had her entire life,

and she was determined
that at this moment in her life,

she was going to do it.

I didn't see her the rest of the week
until she was getting ready to leave.

I said: "Did you do it?
Did you wear the bunny suit?"

She says: "I did. It was amazing.

I put it on, and I thought,
'I don't care, I don't care anymore,

I don't care anymore
what anybody else thinks,

I am going to be what I wanted to be.

I don't care.'

And I took my basket of chocolates,
and every single person I saw that day,

I said to them the thing
I most wanted to hear when I was a girl,

I said to them: 'Here,
take as much as you want.

Take as much as you want.'"

You see, when we're authentic,
we are self-authoring.

We author our own way,
we author our own day,

we create our own look,
our own music, our own sound,

we come up with ideas that are ours,
that are uniquely ours,

we are self-measured and self-authoring,

we quiet other people's voices,

and we become who we can best be.

And to be authentic
also means that we are congruent.

What that means is
that how you think and feel and act

and what you value in the world,

they all sort of cohere together

so that, if you were to say
to the world: I'm a kind person,

you would actually be kind,
and move in kind ways,

and elevate kindness when you'd see it,

and you would reflect it back,
and you would honor it,

and you would be kind
and bring kindness alive.

And third, it also means

that we give ourselves
permission to be fully human.

This is from Tal Ben-Shahar,

Israeli psychologist,
former Harvard professor:

the notion that we get to have
all parts of us exist

and all parts of us be honored,

because there isn't a person yet,
I think, in the world

who has figured out
how to be perfect, am I right?

At least in Berkshire County?

There's one guy, it was a rumor,
it was a rumor, right?

2,000 years ago.

Permission to be fully human.

When I was a ehm...

younger mother,

I had one of those moments
with my daughter

- frequent moments back then -

when I had to give her
a consequence for something

- I would say punished,

but thought it was too hard a word
for a modern mom so I said consequence,

so notice how already, just standing here,

we edit ourselves
for the benefit of others -

the truth of the matter is
I punished the heck out of her,

and I sent her slamming upstairs,

and she got halfway up,
three and a half years old,

she stopped dramatically on the landing,

and she screamed down at me:
"I hate you and I hate all of your parts."

(Laughter)

When we are authentic,
all the parts get to exist,

all of them get to play together,

all the voices at the table
get to be heard.

We don't necessarily move
from all of those voices,

we choose the ones, most wisely of course,
that we live from and bring forward,

but they all get to exist:
the depressed voice,

the sad voice, the weary, the embittered,

the passionate, the impassionate,

the kind, the bold, the dull, the soft,

the still,

the shy, the introverted voices,
they all get to exist.

And when that happens,

when the bunny gets to play,
whatever that might mean for us,

the buffalo also gets to play.

Brené Brown talks about,
from the University of Houston,

how those of us
who live wholehearted lives

are those of us who allow
all of our parts to come together

and be...

well, you know,

just be.

Just be.

That none of us is anything

except who we are most fully
when we are wholehearted.

And the beauty of being wholehearted
is that we can then bring that to others.

Living authentically actually
generates authenticity in others.

It's one of the great benefits.

It passes itself on,

like generosity begets generosity
and kindness begets kindness,

authenticity does the same.

If you're standing with someone,

in the presence of someone
who is living truthfully,

you feel that urgency
to live that way too,

to figure out what your own
bunny suit might be, right?

And the other benefits that accrue

from taking the time to figure out
what our one task is

and then going there
courageously step-by-step,

the other benefits
are increased self-esteem

and overall psychological well-being,

less depression, less anxiety,

less ridiculous eating
in the middle of the night,

you know, three o'clock in the morning,
going for the the third bag of Doritos.

We actually have more pleasure,
a sense of meaning in life,

and because of those we are happier.

And, beautifully, wonderfully,
what we now understand

is that those of us who live more and more
into the truth of our own particular being

actually innovate more,
we are more creative,

we generate, we make things happen,

when we are who we are,

we can take a problem
like Duchenne muscular dystrophy

and say, thank you very much,

I understand how this
was done for the last 200 years,

we are not going there.

We are going here, we are going
to talk directly to the scientist,

and we're going to talk to other parents
about what has to happen,

we're going to bring two worlds together
and make something happen.

Or you can be a doctor
like Mark Hyman and say:

"I know about obesity,
I'm a medical doctor,

but I also know something
about the human condition

and I can understand

that connection has to live fully
in order for health to arise,

and so why can't I bring
those two together?

Why can't I create it together?"

Or you can be like,
I don't even know his name,

who makes organs with a printing machine,

you know?

When we are authentic,
we are freed up to create,

because we aren't damped down.

When you damp down a part of yourself,

when I damp down parts of myself,
the other parts don't get to exist.

I think it was Golda Meir who said:

"If you do not experience
the depth of your sadness,

you cannot experience
the fullness of your joy."

And so...

I invite you, tonight, as you go home,

like not right now,
but soon, when you go home,

to think about what it would be like to -

for the next few hours,
maybe just the rest of this day -

to step into five percent
more authenticity.

What might that be like?

Would you go to bed early? Would you not?

Would you wear, you know,
flannel pajamas

or not wear nothing at all?

Would you stay awake late into the night

because you've seen or heard
one thing tonight

that is so, like, fascinating to you

that the thought of staying
with that one thing

for just a little bit longer

helps you feel like
you're six years old again,

and the world was bright and magical,
and anything could happen,

the Easter Bunny actually
could show up the next morning,

and chocolate could be given,

and you could take as much
as you wanted from the world.

Remember when you were six?

Remember when we were six,
and the world had a kind of magic to it?

When I was six,
I spent a lot of time in church.

And I loved my church,
and I loved my faith,

and I loved it so much, the whole thing:
the story, the Catholic church,

the son of God, the mystery,
the ritual, the rite, the incense,

the whole thing, loved it all.

And so by the time I was eight,
I'd screwed up my courage enough

to go to the nuns and say the thing
that had been in my heart

for a very long time already -

six to eight is a very long time
when you're a young girl -

and I went up to the nuns on a Wednesday -

I don't know why catechism
was always on Wednesday in the 1960s -

and I went up to them and said:
"I want to go to the priest classes,

I don't want to go
to regular class anymore,

I want to know how to be a priest,"

and she said-
well, you know what she said.

(Laughter)

She said, "That is not going to happen."

And yet, I have to tell you
how very grateful I am to be here tonight.

The generosity of our hosts
and of this community,

to have the opportunity
to talk about something

that's powerful and meaningful
and potent for me,

because it was at that moment
at the age of eight,

when some part of me kicked in
and said: "I'm sorry,

I'm going to figure out a way, anyway,

to teach, and to offer,

and to figure out how this part of me
that's alive spiritually

gets to live anyway;

to say something that is sacred,

just because it's sacred to me
and share that and see what happens -

and see what happens.

So I urge you to go home tonight,

step out of this room, step into yourself.

You- we...

We have a duty to perform.

Come, come, whoever you are.

Do anything else,
do any number of things,

occupy your time fully,

wanderers, worshippers, lovers of leaving.

And if you do not do this one thing,

even, if we have broken our vows
a thousand times, it's okay.

Your time here.

This is our time.

This is our time.

Thank you.

(Applause)