What does it mean to live an 'authentic' life? That word has so many different definitions. Mostly, it has come to mean hyper-individualism - the expression of something totally unique.

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My experience has been that authenticity is something that we step into when - ironically - we go beyond the Self and deeply connect with the Other. It's about moving to the edges of who we are, and sometimes beyond them, to taste something wild and sacred at the core of life.

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My first experience with this was through performance. Some of my first memories are of trapping my parents in our basement to perform little plays for them. By the time I hit high school I was on fire, blazing through a variety of characters and transforming into them onstage. It was exhilarating and utterly liberating! When the curtains parted I could go beyond the boundaries of who I thought I was and discover that I was more than one thing; that identity was malleable, and that there was a sense of 'truth' in all the different roles that I played. How strange, I thought, that I should feel more myself as someone else, than I do in day-to-day life.

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At university my love of acting gradually hardened into dread, and disappearing into other characters became progressively more difficult. The audience hijacked my brain: what are they thinking? Are they bored? Am I any good? My love for acting went cold. The thing which had first set me free became a cage, and the pain was unbearable.

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Then, in my early twenties - plot twist. After a few uncanny experiences and coincidences, I pole vaulted over a very high cultural fence and ran off to Botswana to be initiated as a type of African traditional doctor.

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To my great amazement, this work offered me the opportunity to become a different type of 'actor'. During traditional events we don costumes inside a hut. An audience is gathered outside, drumming with gusto. And when the doctor emerges they transform from their usual self into something 'other': an ancestral spirit who momentarily comes back to life through the dance. They greet people, sing songs and dance to their heart's content.

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Once again I could move beyond the small 'me' of my day-to-day life - but on a grander scale. It felt expansive, and sometimes, when the drums were hot and the time was right, I dropped into ecstasy, feeling myself melt away into the totality of the universe. It is an indescribably beautiful experience, a great letting go, a re-union with Everything.

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As a sangoma I was no longer an individual, but part of a much larger web of life, a participant rather than a lead character in something sacred that deserved reverent tending. Through ritual, prayer and working with plant medicine, I learnt once again to dance joyfully on the edges of this world.

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Ten years later I got sick. A dreadful, non-descript type of sick that refused to budge. Diagnosis was vague at best. Life ground to a halt and I moved out of the city to a small town in the Klein Karoo of South Africa. I lay down on a bed, in a small room, and stared at the ceiling. This was as caged as I had ever been and claustrophobia almost smothered me. I was alive, but some part of me was dying.

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There was nothing to do but write, and I wrote rather a lot. Then I began singing songs. Reams of poetry fell out of me. And over time these acts became a kind of nourishment for my soul that I desperately needed. I found expansion through creativity. I wrote poems, sang, wrote a few awful books. It was wonderful. I expressed something true to me - and yet it wasn't from me. Creativity is totally me, and totally something other than me. Through the creative act I could once again expand into the Infinite Oneness of Things.

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When I finally showed signs of improvement four years later and I moved back to the city, I was hell bent on holding onto that creative expansion and the soulfulness it gave me. But the noise and speed of the city pecked away at it and the abiding question in my mind became:

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How can I live a soulful life in a world that no longer values it?

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I think of soul as a kind of reaching - an impulse that moves through us toward others and the environment around us. A soulful life supports a deeper sense of union with the world - it's connected to the sacred dimension of life.

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Living this way feels like a revolutionary act of self-preservation. It cannot exist on the same terms as a machine life. And so the question that drives me now is not just how to find soulfulness, but how to protect and nurture it in a world that seems determined to speed us past it.