If we can't be radically honest, then what's the point?
If we can’t be radically honest with ourselves (and as a byproduct others,) then what’s the point?
We all know the breaking point. The knees on the floor. Tear-stained skin. Grasping hands finally opening in acceptance of what is, either by choice or by force of circumstance. Truth is demanding.
It can feel excruciating— the gravity of what is. And as an adaptive species we do every. single. thing. we can to avoid allowing ourselves to truly sit with this unsustainable discomfort, as if it will consume us.
Our shame. Of allowing what happened to us to happen to us and then allowing it to close us off. Of acting out of fear rather than love. Of repeating the patterns of neglect and abuse that we were given instead of adoration as children.
Our shame of our inability to do anything about the terror of a world falling apart around us.
Our shame of our inability to truly sit with the abandonment of the houseless individual laying on the street corner in the heat of the sun.
Our shame that we scroll as species die and entire communities are wiped out on this sacred planet that we were given to care for.
Our shame that we have failed.
Oftentimes we will do anything, put on any mask, play any performance to pretend that we’re okay with it all. We post our highlight reels and get fit and cut open our bodies to edit what we deem as unworthy in order to make ourselves appear more attractive to the world around us, a world we cannot bear to witness.
When in reality, there is a deep aching within our bones.
We have forgotten how to grieve.
Which isn’t necessarily our fault. We’ve inherited world where our worth is determined by what we can contribute, how much money we can make, how appealing and appeasing we can be.
Rituals were stripped from our ancestors along with customs, cultures, stories, music, communities, bodies, and souls.
And here we are self-medicating and numbing in order to stay alive. What else could we expect when our greatest rituals for grief have been lost?
And what does grief have to do with honesty?
Everything.
The truth is, it’s impossible to sit with everything we have swept under the rug over generations. There is so much unexpressed, so much that has been forced deep into the shadows, that has never been integrated, never invited into the light.
And so the cycle continues expressing the shadow- war, death, blood, addiction, fear, depression.
Not root-causes but symptoms of a culture who has fractured and separated themselves from light.
A society who believes it is broken is a society that is easy to control.
A person who believes they are broken is a person who is easy to control.
Sit with that.
I spent all of my childhood and the majority of my adult life believing I was broken. And I made a really ‘good’ daughter and a really ‘good’ wife. I made a good church-goer and missionary in my 20s but I made a terrible friend- to myself, to my parents, my husband, and those around me. Why? Because I couldn’t love myself into wholeness. I believed that so many parts of me were unloveable. And if I were unable to love my own shadow, then how could I possibly love others’ and remind them of their irrevocable wholeness?
If you can’t love your shadow, then those parts that feel ‘broken’ are never allowed to be integrated, and if those parts are never integrated, then it is impossible to shine your light. The extent that you hide the versions of you that you deem unworthy, you will also hide the versions of you that risk changing the world. Your soul-calling.
It is not your fault that you were taught that you were unloveable. But it is your most important soul-duty to remember your innate lovability.
Honesty does not start with you shouting your feelings from the rooftops, or even with speaking your truth to others.
Honesty begins when you are able to sit with the most abandoned parts of yourself with your arms wide open and say ‘“tell me more. I’ve got you”.
And it ripples out from there. Patience.
This is the slow awakening, the great shift.
Where you stop living a shell of a life and re-member Who you are. As a person blessed with the opportunity to set foot on this wild, intoxicatingly beautiful earth. As a person blessed to love and give love, accepting that forms may be lost but spirit always remains. A person blessed to have the ability to laugh and cry and scream without inhibition. A person whose life is *fully* theirs.
If we can’t be radically honest with ourselves, then what’s the point?