“Honesty, it’s such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue.” So goes the popular late ’70’s lyric by singer songwriter Billy Joel.
Consider for a moment how much of the ‘untrue’ we all live with in our society? How much of what we hear are lies, how many layers of deception envelop our everyday experience? I’d say, we’re swimming in it. It surrounds us wherever we go.
Then there are the deceptions we live with privately, inside ourselves. You know the ones I mean. The stories we tell ourselves to protect ourselves from our own truth. The little white lies and half truths we tell ourselves for good reason, or simply out of habit.
Then there are the traumatizing experiences many of us have endured growing up, that have led to being distracted, or even misled, away from our pain and our authentic experience.
The pain doesn’t just go away because it’s outside our awareness of it. It just goes to the basement of our mind. We humans are very cleaver at finding creative ways of protecting ourselves from our pain, even when it looks irrational and destructive to the people around us. We find ways of coping to keep it there, like with one or more of the many addictions we can develop.
Another way we can instinctively protect ourselves from our pain is by creating a false front to the world. We create a false front to the world by denying our experience and the pain we may be feeling. When we grow up in a threatening environment, we do this unconsciously in order to survive.
We do this by learning to please the important adults in our life. And it works in the short-term, but, we pay a price in the long-term. Because we’ve unconsciously agreed to deny our experience in the name of survival growing up, overtime we pay the price with our identity. We come to forget who we really are.
How can we remember?
It’s simple, really. We can remember with honesty. A Yogi and a therapist would say the same thing. It’s with honesty we can come to reconnect with our experience and come back into genuine relationship with our self.
We do this ‘work’ when the time is right. When our safety is no longer in jeopardy, when we feel a pull from within to heal old wounds, or when we’re so overwhelmed with emotion and frightening memories, that it feels like we have no choice but to attend to the pain that can no longer be held inside.
As a result of this ‘work’, we no longer feel the need to hold onto wearing a false front to the world. We can survive emotionally without it, and simply be our self in the world.
One straight forward way of beginning this process is by simply starting to listen. Starting to listen to ourselves again, to our thoughts, our feelings, our dreams, our fantasies, our fears, our pains, our grief. To simply beginning to listen to what we hear inside.
Sometimes this doesn’t come easy and we need extra support to hear what’s going on inside. We can do this by separating ourselves from the business of life, and being in nature. Allowing the Stillness that envelops us there to quiet our noisey minds, so we can listen inwardly and hear more clearly what’s happening in there.
Or perhaps it means lying down on our mat in Savasana, the Corpse Position, and sliding into the Stillness from this experience, to listen inwardly to what’s going on inside.
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If you’d like more information about how to do Savasana, hop over to the blog post titled ‘Get the Vibe‘.
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Listening inwardly is one important key to building a bridge to our self. Getting honest with ourselves is another.
We get honest with our selves to go beyond the mask and engage in REAL relationship with our self. We get honest so we can begin to heal any pain we find there, and at the end of the day, know peace.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure I agree with Billy Joel. Honesty is such an un-lonely word, when we take the time to listen inwardly and engage authentically in the most fundamental relationship in our life. When “Everyone is so untrue.”, as the song says, all the more reason to be true to our self.
If you’d like to learn more about being true to yourself, click here, and put ‘Honesty’ in the subject line. Tell me a little bit about yourself and what you’re facing right now. I’ll get back to you right away.
