The Frequency of Authenticity
Discovering the moments when our inner truth speaks louder than anything else
for McGee.
image created in Canva by B. Littleton
On May 19th, Dr. Zach Bush sat down with D. Alec Zeck for a conversation that still lingers in my mind. In it, he described a study that explored what happens to our energy when we experience different emotions. Using the SPANE scale, the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience, researchers invited participants into a Faraday cage, a chamber that blocks outside electromagnetic interference, so their energy and frequency could be measured without distraction.
One by one, people were prompted to feel specific emotions: love, joy, sadness. Each one created a distinct energetic signature. Love gave off a strong, steady field. Joy rose higher. Sadness had a clear, measurable presence of its own.
Then something unexpected happened. While these main emotions were being recorded, a completely different frequency appeared on the instruments. The researchers had not prompted it, yet the readings spiked, sometimes as much as forty times higher than the strongest frequency of love. Curious, they repeated the test. The same unsolicited surges showed up again. Reviewing the data, they realized the emotion they had measured was not one they had set out to study at all. It was a pure state of authenticity.
At first, I thought, How can anything outshine love like that? But the more I sat with it, the more it made sense. Authenticity is not just a “good” feeling or a high vibration. It is the full alignment of who you are on the inside with how you show up on the outside. It can happen in moments of joy, but also in moments of grief, anger, clarity, or quiet presence. Any emotion can live inside authenticity. The key is congruence, your heart, mind, body, and soul telling the same truth at the same time.
The tricky thing is, these moments happen more often than we realize. They can be small and quiet. A laugh that slips out before you can think about it. An honest sentence you speak without editing. A deep breath when your shoulders drop and you feel at home in yourself, even if just for a second.
Authenticity can also surface in the ways we lose track of time. When you get lost in music, or while painting or creating art, when an entire day vanishes because you have been writing, or when you are out in nature, hiking, surfing, walking in the woods, and you are fully engaged with your surroundings, not leaning on the intellect but living in the moment. It makes me wonder if falling in love feels so addictive because the frequency of love may be closer to the frequency of authenticity, even though what we often call “falling in love” is more about infatuation and an oxytocin rush. Nevertheless, these activities position authenticity close in. The same is true in those rare therapy moments, when the truth you have been seeking finally arrives. Or in that instant when you know you need to leave the amazing job or the “perfect” marriage. When you suddenly know you want a child. When your last parent dies and you realize you are an orphan. These are all moments of authentic Self. I have offered just a few examples. What about you? How has authenticity shown up for you, and how did it feel in your body when it happened?
Your body often gives you the clues. Your breath deepens. Your muscles soften. Your voice feels unforced. Words flow more easily. There is a sense of rightness, even relief. Sometimes the other person relaxes too. The air feels clearer, like something real just happened.
Windows open toward what is both soul-centered and liberating when ego takes a step back and is met with the numinous, the “wholly Other.” As Carl Jung said, “The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis but rather with the approach to the numinous. Inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology.” The numinous is that powerful inner shift, making the unconscious conscious, aligning ego with soul, and bridging the worlds of surface awareness and the deeper Self.
As John O’Donohue reminds us, “There is a place in you . . . that is the eternal place within you. The more we visit there, the more we are touched and fused with the limitless kindness and affection of the divine . . . If we can inhabit that reflex of divine presence, then compassion will flow naturally from us.” In other words, our authentic Self lives in the timeless part of us that is already whole, and from that place, our love and truth flow without effort.
At the end of the interview, Bush reflects that what the instruments captured in those extraordinary spikes was not an emotional high at all, but the moment a person was resting in their authentic Self. In other words, they were inhabiting soul, a place beyond the rise and fall of feelings, beyond the familiar palette of daily emotions that Jung described as belonging to ego-consciousness. While I have often thought of authenticity as arising in our most present, freely felt moments, Bush draws a deeper distinction. These states, he explains, are free from the fluctuating tides of neurotransmitters. They are steady, cosmic, and linked directly to Source. Earlier in the interview, he describes it as holding a space that is completely cosmic, a frequency we breathe with when we are in our most authentic Self. It is not that emotion is absent, but that we are no longer tethered to its pull. We are in coherence with something larger, something that does not waver.
And as Rumi says, “The sky is a whole, the earth is a whole, and between the two, we are whole. We are the bridge between heaven and earth, a vessel for the divine essence.” In other words, when we live authentically, we become that bridge, carrying the presence of soul into the human world and letting it move through everything we do.
Dr. David Hawkins, in his book Power vs. Force, offers a way to build trust in this inner knowing through muscle testing. Traditionally done with a partner, he teaches a self-test you can use anytime. You link your thumbs and fingers into two small loops and gently pull them apart while holding a statement or question in mind. If the loops stay linked, it suggests congruence or truth for you. If they separate easily, it points to incongruence or something that may not be right for you. You can use this to test moments from your day: Was I in my authentic Self during that conversation? Is this decision aligned with who I truly am? Over time, the physical testing becomes less necessary because your awareness of authenticity grows sharper. You build a library of trust. You begin to know in your bones when you are living from a place of soul.
I am grateful to know that between my daily menu of emotions and stories, compensations, fears, and foibles, my authentic Self still shows up. And when it does, it blasts through my energy field with coherence, truth, alignment, authenticity. It reminds me I am more than survival, posturing, or performance. That truth pulses through loss, love, longing, and the in-between. We do not have to chase these moments. They are already happening in the hidden threads of our lives. Our task is simply to wake up to them, celebrate our awareness and presence, over and over, again and again.
written by Brenda Littleton
image created in Canva by B. Littleton
Tin Flea Press c. 2025