Tara Brach - Being Truthful - How Honesty Nourishes Love

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Being Truthful - How Honesty Nourishes Love - The grounds of happiness, loving relationships and a just and flourishing society is honesty. And yet our current times are characterized by a plethora of deception – both societally, and often in more subtle ways, in our personal lives. This talk examines the deep conditioning we have to deceive others, and to avoid facing and acknowledging our own vulnerability. We then explore how we can commit ourselves to deepening our truth telling, and in so doing, creating a climate of integrity and trust that can lead to a more compassionate world (from the 2017 archives).

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I'm a stay and welcome. I'd like to start our shared reflection tonight with a tale that I heard through Michael Mead. He's a storyteller and it's considered a fable for today and it begins with a child who's playing with a ball and he's bitten by a poisonous snake. and by the time the parents have arrived, the venom has spread so the little child's unconscious and with no doctor near, they carry him to a local monk and implore the holy man to save

the youngster. The monk declares that he's not the kind of religious person who knows how to heal. In desperation, the parents plead that someone on a spiritual path must have the power to perform an act of truth that can reverse the course of the poison. The monk replies it, he says that the only truth he knows of his own life is this and he places his hand on the child's head. He then reveals that he's long before lost any sense of true holiness and only kept up a saintly appearance while secretly longing for the pleasures of the world. No sooner had this act of truth been made than the eyes of the child opened again.

The holy man insisted that the father used his power to tell a truth that could remove more poison. With his hand on his child's chest, the father confessed that though widely respected and envied for his wealth and position, he never felt generous to others are fulfilled inside himself. He owned that he felt empty inside despite all his outer wealth and power. And after this act of truth, the child stood up but he couldn't stand or move. The father begged the mother to use her power of truth-telling to save their only child. She spoke the truth that she carried in her heart, that her child was the only one she had ever loved

and that her marriage brought her no love, that she remained in it only out of fear of reprisals. No sooner had this act of truth been performed than the remaining poison left the child who rose up and began to play again with the ball. He was healed. So, what is the sense that we can make from this story? And one understanding that seems really clear is that this child is really all the children

of our future and that they're threatened by the toxins in our society today. The greed and the aggression and the violations that really proliferate when we're not facing truth and speaking truth. And so that the medicine of these times is really calling for us, us, to deepen our commitment to truth-telling to being honest and real with ourselves and with each other because this is really the grounds of love.

And love is the medicine, but to really love, we need to be in touch with what's here within ourselves and each other and have the courage to be that realness. And the challenge that we see and we can particularly see it in current times is the more grasping and greed and the more there's that being caught in that trance of not enough, something's wrong, danger, we need more, the less motivation there is and capacity to pause and say, hey, what's really true? true. And so, part of what's so crazy making for so many right now is it's like almost

in this kind of carnival of like a fun house carnival where all the ground rules have been changed and lies are the norm to a greater degree. I mean it's always been there. In fact, I'm talking a bit about how deception is, you know, through the ages but you can particularly feel today the sense of that some conceptual reality we thought we're all agreeing to is that the grounds have shifted on that. So it's crazy making. So what is the genesis of deception? I mean, what's behind it? My understanding is that every one of us until we're free in some way lies to ourself or deludes ourselves and deludes others and sometimes we're somewhat conscious of it and sometimes we're not. And part of becoming more free is this capacity to live

above that line to live with more consciousness and speak more truth. But the genesis is that it's a basic survival strategy for creatures through the ages. And there's three basic ways that it helps us survive. And one is through safety, through ensuring more safety. And another is that it in some way promotes our self-interest and the third is it's harmful to others. So if you just take them at one at a time, you can see how many creatures use camouflage to protect themselves, whether it's the viruses and we know how viruses and that's just the way they do it. They blend into the environment and not be seen and I think of the butterfly fish, you know, that has its eye on the back end of its body so if it gets attacked,

It's the end of its body that gets attacked. It's not going to be lethal. And so you can see how creatures do it. And children, you know, a child breaks something and is afraid of punishment. They are going to be inclined to lie about it. So in this story a woman stays in a marriage because telling the truth would bring too much of a risk, too much of a threat to her well-being.

One of the stories I like about deception has it runs so rampant A rabbi, a minister and a priest are playing poker Police raids the game Turning to the priest lead police officers As Father Murphy, were you gambling? Turning his eyes to heaven, the priest whispers Lord, forgive me for what I'm about to do

And then to the police officer he says, No officer, I was not gambling The officer asks the minister the same thing Pastor Johnson, were you gambling And again, after an appeal to heaven, the minister says, oh, no, I wasn't gambling. Turning to the rabbi, the officer says, Rabbi Goldstein, were you gambling? And shrugging his shoulders, the rabbi replied, with whom could I be gambling? So one of the big reasons when we're talking about lying to promote our, for safety,

is that we lie to cover over what will make us look bad. And that's a pretty universal way that we try to self-justify. to ourselves and we certainly hide our vulnerability, our insecurity, our loneliness. We don't let others know what we think will reflect badly upon us. That's the more subtle but ongoing way we do it. So number two, we lie to promote our self-interest and deception helps us get what we want. And my favorite example, garter snakes. Okay, so the garter snake males can emit these pheromones that suggest that they're female,

but they only do it for a couple of days after they emerge from their winter dens. And the goal is to get warm because it turns out that these garter snakes form mating balls of a hundred males around the female. So this male, pretends he's a female, gets a hundred other snakes to wrap around and warms up and then once he's gotten a snake hug he switches gears and slithers off. That's a great example. So we've got promoting self-interest in that way and we do it in our own ways. We exaggerate our achievements.

We inflate our resumes and like in the story the monk had his pretense of spirituality. day. And in some way we manipulate to get response and a child might act sick in order to get to stay home. So we do things to promote our self-interest. And then the third, harming others. And again, a South American crab spider kills an aunt, consumes the contents of the body, keeping intact the outer skeleton, carries the empty carcass of its own body that looks like a prey to attract new victims. So it's this pretense that then allows us to harm others and we know if you just think of slander and how slander works. I mean that slander changes everything. You know if you have you set up a pretense that somebody in some way

is bad even if it's not true it makes people think oh badness is associated there. You get to have people do what you want them to do. This little essay says, How to wash a cat? And forgive me, cat lovers. I'm one of you. Here goes. Put both lids of the toilet up

and add an eighth cup of pet shampoo to the water in the bowl. Pick up the cat and soothe them while you carry them towards the bathroom. In one smooth movement, put the cat in the toilet and close the lid. You may need to stand on the lid.

At this point, the cat will self-agitate and make ample suds. Never mind the noises that come from the toilet. The cat's actually enjoying this. Flush the toilet three or four times. This provides a power wash and rinse. Have someone open the front door of your home. Be sure that there are no people between the bathroom and the front door.

Stand well back behind the toilet as far as you can and quickly lift the lid. The cat will rocket out of the toilet, streak through the bathroom and run outside where he'll dry himself off. Both the toilet and the cat will be sparkling clean. Yours sincerely, the dog. You know, we often hear the notes. that honesty is the best policy and you hear it in business a lot that to be honest means you know you'll track trust and confidence and people will keep coming back and so on and I read a article in the Harvard Business Review that actually challenges that it says why be

honest if honesty doesn't pay we bet on rational case for trust economists ethicists and business ages have persuaded us that honesty is the best policy, but their evidence seems weak. Through extensive interviews we hope to find data that would support their theories and thus encourage higher standards of business behavior. To our surprise, our pet theories failed to stand up. Treachery we found can pay. And then the whole article describes all the different ways through history really that different, for instance, many of today's blue chip companies were put together at the turn of the century under the circumstances approaching securities fraud.

The robber barons who promoted them enjoyed great material rewards at the time and their fortunes survived several generations. The Industrial Revolution did not make entirely obsolete Machiavili's observation. Men seldom rise from low condition to high rank without employing either force or fraud. And then my favorite example is one of the best liars in history was Eric the Red of Iceland. Some of you might know this story. It's a great one. Banished from his country for three years for killing some neighbors in an altercation. He sailed westward to an unpopulated land that was 86% ice, some of it two miles thick and rock.

The only thing that could grow was a little moss on the beach during the summer. Eric claimed the barren expanse as his realm. As he explored and mapped this land, he named many geographic features after himself. Returning home, he enthusiastically urged, others to join him in what he called Greenland. They pictured trees, flowers, and rolling hills of grass which promised a welcome change from Iceland. 25 shiploads of people followed Eric to his frozen domain. That's the beginning of Greenland. So I'm taking a little time with this just to cast a bigger perspective which is that through the history of the evolution

of all creatures and through human history, honesty was perhaps a default but it really worked to deceive. And like all primitive survival strategies, fight, flight and freeze, when deception becomes habitual, when it's not really directly about survival, it prevents us from continued evolution. So for each of us to the degree that we're not really real with ourselves or to the degree that we withhold important truths from others, we just can't keep evolving. There's three ways, three major consequences for living in a way that's not honest and clean. And one is emotional physical stress because it actually takes energy, it creates a lot of tension in the body mind to lie and to maintain a lie. Even when we're not aware of it

because we're so familiar, our personas used to kind of exaggerating or leaning things in certain directions, the body gets tense with it. It perpetuates a sense of an unsafe self too because if we're lying that's coming from a sense of unthreatened so it perpetuates that feeling. The second one which I would think pretty much everyone gets is that in relationships, if we're not, to the degree we can't be real to that degree there's not going to be trust. We won't trust because we'll sense that the real me would not be accepted, it wouldn't be okay, that's why we're driven to not being honest. So a relationship can really be assessed by the degree of truth telling.

Okay. And then, of course, you can see it in the larger society that the more it becomes the norm, the more a cynicism and mistrust that's very, very toxic, creeps into every institution. The third area is, as I was indicating, to do with evolution, our spiritual unfolding. You know, you can't go through a day of robbing and lying and murdering and so on and they come home and have a really good sit at night time. It just doesn't work that way. So the habit of lying, it obscures truth. When we're in the habit of molding things a certain way, we actually can't contact what's there and we can't contact the very vulnerability in us that really awakens our

capacity for compassion. That's the thread I'm going to be following, which is that if we want to have the capacity to speak truth to power, to be in a conflict and have some way of speaking truth that's actually going to move us towards healing, we have to be able to be honest with ourselves and be in touch with our own vulnerability. Otherwise we will not be empowered in a way that actually helps to change consciousness. So in terms of our evolution spiritually, there's a wonderful way to have the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for dishonesty and what happens. And from the Desert Fathers it's described that they're absolutely committed, this is the Christian

Desert Fathers, to breaking the cycle of deceptions which began with Adam and Eve. So mythologically there's a sense that in human consciousness we went for this survival mechanism of deception, but we need to grow out of it. And so using the myth of Adam and Eve, one might say that the great tragedy of the fall lay not so much in that they disobeyed. God could handle that. The tragedy of Adam and Eve was that they hid. Far from thinking of themselves like God, they thought of God like themselves and thinking God could not bear their failure, they hid. So the Desert Fathers knew that one of the fundamental characteristics of fallen humanity

is that we think we can keep things going by hiding and pretending. That quote came from Columbus Stewart. So we sense right from the get-go that if we perceive ourselves as insecure and threatened, we're going to latch on to lying and covering over what's true very early on. I remember a cute little story of a child goes up in the attic and he finds the family Bible really old, hadn't been open for a while, he's looking through it and he sees a dried leaf in it and he runs downstairs, thrilled, can't wait to tell his mom, he says, Mommy, mommy, mommy, I found Adam's suit. So, covering ourselves over. So the frame here is that in our evolution,

deception, it seems to be a key stage of our growing and it's not the end of the story. In the same way that you think of the brain as, you know, there's the primitive or survival brain that operates from fight-flight freeze and deceptions built in there, the most recently evolved part of our brain has the capacity to be mindful of the patterns of deception, has the capacity to be compassionate towards what drives them, has the capacity to, from that compassion and mindfulness, live from a real, and speak from a real place of integrity which fosters connection, understanding. So we're going to look at that and name that there's a real strong pull from both our past

to get into the cycles of lying and many people are feeling I've spoken to are saying that part of what they're concerned about, some of the disappointment with the growing kind of a movement that's going on right now to really try to bring some more healing to our society is that in a way the way they describe is both sides, and this is regardless, and this is not partisan, it's like everybody is participating in spins. It's not one side or the other and to respond in kind, to feel something that's violating and responding kind with making others the enemy and creating their own spin puts us all playing on the same field of consciousness, to raise the consciousness we need to be coming

from a place of compassion and honesty. So we'll be looking at that on the individual level because it takes commitment, because there's a pull when we get insecure, to in some way rosy up what we're saying, to some way cover up things. I find that for myself it takes a real conscious intention to stay right cleaving really close to what's exactly real and to practice it. We're going to look at how to be more real about our own vulnerability. And by the way, this doesn't mean that we have to announce on Facebook to everybody our most vulnerable, you know, it's not that. It's where we feel that there's a sense with others that there's a mutual commitment to

getting real, how do we play that edge more? Because I don't know anyone that can't benefit from examining that edge. Now, some people use, over-express their vulnerability, but the intention isn't to be real, it's to then get attention and be the designated patient. So it requires a real honest attention on how we can be real. and have our intention be to really deepen understanding and care, really clean. Again, I want to draw from the Desert Fathers. I think there's just a lot of power in this model because the Christian Desert Fathers talked about radical self-honesty.

And it's a very exciting path, like when you start saying, wow, more than feeling comfortable, I really want to know what's true. I really want to be honest with myself. There's something incredibly juicy and enlivening about that. So they call this honest recognition of the thoughts of the heart that we're beginning to examine the thoughts of the heart, the stories and the beliefs and the emotions that we might not want to be feeling

that we don't like the way they make us feel about ourselves. and they're described as demons in the sense of the shadow side, they're the patterns of the false self. They circle around a kind of misguided sense of a limiting self. So the way they practice this radical self-honesty, which again I think is really quite beautiful, is that the monks would start identifying these shadow patterns and they'd bring them to an elder that they trusted, called the Abba, ABBA. And this personage really represented a kind of accepting presence for the process of self-knowledge, but it was a way of naming it out loud.

And quite different from confession, which was this sense of, I have sinned for, you know, if something's bad, forgive me, this is, hey, this is what's going on and I want to deepen my understanding and will you hold it with me. And it said, this is the way they describe it, when the heart is open to the light of truth, when there are no secrets, the demons have nowhere to hide. They cannot begin their crafting of obsessions and illusions, which keeps the false self going.

We become more transparent and divine light shines through. So this is the same process that we're doing in meditation. And you might sense that you're cultivating that awareness that like an elder can bear witness without judgment. You're cultivating an awareness that's kind and present so that as you shine a light on the patterns that have evolved around of that kind of false self, the insecure self, you can begin to shine the light with a real steadiness and just bring it into the light of awareness so it no longer has a stickiness that makes you think I am that. I am that insecure self, I'm that jealous self, on that competitive

aggressive self, on that judgmental controlling self. Instead, you're resting in this awareness that can see it and then there's nowhere to hide. There's no way that it grabs your energy and reconfines you. It takes practice. You know, we teach a lot about meditation, you know, just sitting with our own being, it takes practice to begin to really stay with and name it and to bring it into the relational context which I think is absolutely essential. You'll be able to shine a light here and say what we're touching to others is what really frees us. Because if you can do that, the last bits of shame that cling to what's there begin to dissolve. Does that make sense if you can say it out loud that it releases the shame?

Yeah. We got one yes. Thank you. So that's part of the process, really, the healing, awakening process that we see in 12-step groups. I think it's part of the power of 12-step groups that when we start collectively naming the shadow, we have our eyes on it and it no longer grabs our identity. It's the power in the Buddhist tradition of our spiritual friends groups. They're called Kalliana Meta, spiritual friends, where there's a meditation and then we share

the fears of a relationship that's breaking up or addiction or raising a child. We share what's going on. So again, it takes courage because what we encounter in there, it doesn't feel good and it makes us not feel good about ourselves. I remember the first time I went to a retreat, I was at the Insight Meditation Society in Barry Massachusetts and there was a little sign and it had a quote from Lily Tomlin and it said, self-knowledge is not necessarily good news. So it's hard to embrace these very hard-wired survival reactions we have to

grasp after things. Anybody that's dealt with an addiction knows it feels ugly. It makes us ashamed. And it's hard to deal with the fact that we get aggressive. The anger is very real. Every one of us has a nervous system that's designed to feel anger and we're designed to feel embarrassed about things. It takes a lot of courage to hang in and what really can make a difference is if we can see those patterns and and in some way send the message, okay, you belong. You know, you're part of the design. Everybody else is designed the same way.

This is not defining me. It's just part of how these body minds are wired. And if we can say that, we can keep shining the light of awareness on what's there. So a story about this kind of truthfulness with ourselves and the power of it Some years back I was working with a man who had come to some different meditation classes and told me what this incredibly painful conflict he had gone through with his sister. They had been very close growing up, especially because their parents divorced so they kind of teamed up and really hung in for each other, had each other's back and as a teens they did a lot together.

They kind of both called each other kiddo. That was their nickname. He told me about how they went to Audubon camps together and they're really into bird watching and they're just a real team. In her early 30 she started dating a good friend of his and a colleague and then those two, the two men had some real bad blood come between them. But his sister married his kind of ex-friend and he cut her off. It was like in some way he couldn't overcome the feeling of being betrayed.

And this estrangement between them went on for 12 years. And she regularly sent him cards and email messages and kept trying to keep the channels open but he completely cut her off. Then he got very sick. He had some stomach disorder and it was a real scare. I think he had, might have been some form of cancer, I can't remember, but it was, he was told he'd recover, but it was a scary one. And some months after he got better, she received an email from him and it said, hey kiddo,

it's migration time, how about going bird watching? So I asked him what turned it around, like what was his process? Because I am very drawn to stories of reconciliation. I can barely read them without or hear about them without crying because it always seems so tragic that humans get separated and so much like some part of consciousness and some real grace when we reconnect. So I wanted to know about him and he said, well, after being sick I just wanted to take a fresh look at my life because I knew that and I knew that part if I could do anything differently

it would be to drop my grudges. It's because they seem kind of petty in the face of mortality. And he told me it wasn't only a sister Beth-Anne, but it was also a lot of other people. Because he said he was touching the deepest truth, which is what mattered was love. But he said to be available to actually go along with that and drop a grudge, that was a different matter.

And that's where being truthful with himself how to happen. And so his entry was he just had a view with himself and he felt this like this resentment that had been festering and bitter for so long in him. And he began to practice, as many of you know, the practice of rain, which is really mindfulness and compassion. He began recognizing and allowing, okay, so it's here.

I'm feeling bitter, I'm feeling betrayed, it feels irrational, but it's just here. And then as he investigated, he found it coming from this really young place that felt very wounded that basically believed I'm not special to anyone. The one person he had felt special to it, betrayed him by being with his ex-friend, so I'm not special to anyone. And a real feeling of shame and unworthiness wrapped around it. So like he felt like all these years he'd been holding on

to resentment so he would not have to sit down into the shame and deep grief of I'm not special to anyone. So when he could see that it wasn't difficult for him to offer care to that young boy who felt that. And as many of you know when I put my hand on my heart it's a gesture that some people find is really helpful when you get to with recognize and a lot of allow you're noticing what's going on of the rain acronym. With investigate he was discovering the young child who didn't feel he's special to anyone and the grip of that. And then the end of rain is to nurture.

It said that we're not survival of the fittest, we're survival of the nurtured. So the lying let him be fit enough he could get through and not feel his vulnerability. it wasn't until he felt his vulnerability, that he could nurture, self-nurture in a way, that then he could be with her. And he said it was a shift in my whole sense of myself. It was like I went from being the angry person to being the very young abandoned person to being this kind of compassionate presence that could be with that young place. So he said, he told me as it turned out when I first met her when we first hug the

All the tears and the pent-up caring just washed away. And the only thing between us was the binoculars banging on our chest and we were hugging, which I thought was really cute. But the truth from this for me is that if we want to love well, we all have ways of creating distance. We have to be willing to be with the vulnerability underneath the ways that we create distance, with that vulnerability that we're avoiding. So I thought maybe I'd pause here

and I have one more piece I want to cover with you after this, but do a brief reflection that's a little bit of that practice of self-honesty. You just take a moment to come into a posture that lets you be alert and relaxed and take a few full breaths. And you might scan your life for a relationship that matters to you, where you send some separation or some distance and you know that

there's not a full, honest exchange there. Or either you are defending and holding back something and not saying something because you're afraid or where you feel like you're misleading or exaggerating or... So like either covering up or not really being as real as you could be. The beginning of rain is to simply recognize and allow what is there. It may be a sense of uneasiness or mistrust or fear, confusion, hurt, defendedness, whatever you're noticing, whatever you're aware of, we begin by recognizing and allowing that to be there. So you're just beginning to witness right now, a kind witness, just noticing what's happening.

It's the beginning of this radical self-honesty is just to shine a lens on the light on this relationship and then let yourself bring to mind a particular situation perhaps when you're together and you're with that person and you're aware of that distance or that lack of realness. investigate a little, just like this man did he went under in a sense, you know, so what's really underneath the resentment or to investigate and sense, you know, what's underneath this distance or separation? Is there a place in you that's afraid or insecure that if you are more honest you'll be rejected or you'll create anger and it'll be frightening? Is there a sense that the other person won't want to go there.

There's kind of a fear of going to an edge and you won't be well received. A fear of looking bad. Fear that you might be taken advantage of if you expose yourself in some way. So just to, with some honesty and clarity sense underneath the separation, underneath whatever you're withholding or not saying or whatever is creating that distance, And just to sense the human vulnerability, the her, the fear, your own unmet needs, as if you're offering that to an elder, offer that to this awareness that's here, just letting it be held in something that's awake, it's kind of an awake and compassionate space of awareness.

And it's helpful to put your hand on your own heart. So you're really offering compassion to the part of you that feels vulnerable or insecure, that when you imagine going to that edge of being more real it feels scary. Just not pushing yourself to anything, you're just offering kindness, you're acknowledging, okay, vulnerable. You just sense who you are when you're offering care to a vulnerable place inside you. You might sense what possible. possibilities open up, what choices open up, if you can be with the vulnerability honestly

within yourself, what then becomes possible with others? And perhaps there's fresh choices available. Adrian Rich writes, an honorable human relationship that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love, is a process of deepening the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation, deepening the truths that we can tell each other. So that's a direction and you can open your eyes. That's a direction and as we know it's not necessarily wise to deepen the truths in situations

that are unsafe and it takes a certain wise discernment to sense what the time and what's the relationship and so on. So it's not a kind of a sweeping, you know, we should all be playing the edge all the time. And to deep and loving we need to be committed to examining this, each one of us. As I mentioned, the most challenging edge of truth-telling is when we think we're going to show something about ourselves that's going to make us look at us. bad. We're really afraid of looking bad. So remember our three friends, the minister, priest and the rabbi? They're back again with another story. So they go for a hike on a hot

day and since in addition to the gambling now and then they like to go and do a little skinny dipping in a small lake and secluded. They take off their clothes, jump in the water, then they go and pick some berries while they're enjoying their natural freedom. But as they're crossing an open area, who should come along but a group of ladies from town. Oh my gosh. Unable to get their clothes in time, the minister and the priest cover their privates, and the rabbi covers his face, and they run for cover. So the ladies have left, and the men get their clothes back on,

and the minister and the priest both asked Rabbi Goldstein, why did he cover his face rather than his privates? So he responds, I don't know about you, but in my congregation, it's my face they'll recognize. So, there are different times it's appropriate to be revealing. And so I shared Adrian Rich's quote on purpose because that's the one that has affected me a lot in my own life, the sense that the correlation between loving, unfolding, and deepening truth-telling.

So I very much practice that with my husband Jonathan and we have twice a week, we have times where we meditate together and we have a process of asking some questions and being with each other and one of our questions is there anything right now between us that's in some way creating distance or separation and that's the opportunity to, you know, we could be talking about something that's going on between us or something going on ourselves that we haven't really shared that would be helpful to name. So last year one of the things that came to up for me was the background is that I'm a super ludite in terms of anything cyber and anything mechanical. I mean even down to the point if a package is hard to open I'll have a hard time.

And back in the day of CDs that were wrapped, I don't know how many other, how many of you had trouble opening up CDs? Okay, thank you. I'm not completely alone. But organizing files, um, follow following instructions, putting in the new water filter, anything, and it seems like this massive roadblock and I often back off. And so Jonathan and I joke about it a lot and, you know, he has fun with it, but I realized last year that it was growing, my sense of incompetence was growing and it's getting older thing, that I was, my terrain was getting smaller and I was not trying to do certain things

it seemed hard really quickly and just leaving them for him. And feeling self-conscious and embarrassed about it. You know, in addition to losing words, I was just becoming less confident on the earth. And so the joking, there was some edge in me that felt bad about myself. And I remember how hard it was when I knew I need to say that because I didn't want to draw his attention to the 10,000 times a day that I was actually bumbling around.

and because to say I was self-conscious about it would then add our focus to it and how important it was to say it because the truth is I am getting less competent. I mean it's just it's part of the way this body mind's aging. I am forcing myself to do things that I feel like, oh, I can't do this. Oh, okay, try, you know, just do a few more rounds. But to name it out loud, help to reduce the shame. identity with it. And to be able to share it now, I wouldn't have said it out loud a year ago. I'm in the fortune position I get to share with you, my spiritual community and it actually helps

again, it's not like me, it's just part of the kind of conditioning going on. It made such a difference to say it out loud and then of course it increased every time Jonathan and I are take the chance to be vulnerable, there's deep in connection and trust. I've seen it in personal relationships over and over again and I see it even when it's not so people that know each other so well, the power of being real. Last week, a friend that attended here, a woman from Middle East Muslim, I asked her how she was doing and there were tears and she was just to see. described the panic she's living with right now about all the policies and deportation

and so on and how she'll go to work and feel it and feel agitated and people at work will say, oh come on, you're overreacting and how much that increases the isolation. It's so important to be able to speak our truths and have it be held because if I could just say to her, I get it, I can really get why you're scared and share, I'm not very many degrees of separation from many, many people who are really immediately threatened. And so it's very much in my nervous system, the fear. To be able to speak the truth and have others get it is part of the healing. The belonging that's there makes such a difference. So that's part of our job right now is to create a climate for realness, both receiving and sharing.

One of my dearest friends, Sherry Maples, is a Buddhist meditation teacher. And last fall she got into a horrendous biking accident. And for a while I didn't think she was going to live. She lived, she's in a wheelchair and we don't know whether she'll be able to walk or not. she is a long ways to go. This last weekend she, and she's had two outings, she's been in a hospital facility for five months now. She went and gave a talk to 100 people last weekend for the first time.

And the talk was an expression of vulnerability in a loving space and it was both a heart expression of what it was like to have to have friends there 24-7 because if she pressed the call button people might not come and she was having such trouble breathing, she was afraid she'd die. The vulnerability of that to the vulnerability of being with a medical professional who wasn't really listening to her and feeling powerless and what that was like.

The kind of humility that she had a face, to be able to be in a wheelchair, in public, with that much feeling like her entire life has changed and in that grief of it and having to know that she's going to be grieving more in different ways. I share this because part of the power of that talk was she was transmitting the courage to be vulnerable. She made it more permissible.

permissible for the field that was there. And it's when we have that courage to contact what's within us, it wakes up compassion. And then, and of course where the soul leads is we get to be in our larger community and speak truth, have the courage to speak truth, but it's not coming from unexamined anger, it's not coming from unexamined hatred, it's coming from authentic caring. which is the medicine that will truly change our bigger society. So we started with the boy being bitten by the snake and there is huge suffering when truths are buried.

Huge suffering and it's going on for many of us in our personal lives we can feel where the distance is and it's going on in our larger society and if we want to change as Ghani said we have to be the change So my prayer is that each of us will commit to whatever degree works for us to deepen that radical self-honesty, to shine a light on what's true and to see where we can bring it into our world to increase the loving. So let's, we'll close again together tonight with just a very brief reflection. Susie Kassam says being truthful is the new beautiful, taking a moment.

a moment in the spirit of this radical self-honesty, this truthfulness, just to sense what's true for you right now. What's true in your body? What does your body feel like right now? It's true in your heart. What's the mood, the emotion, the weather of the moment? And what in this moment is the prayer, the longing that's most true for you? a moment to feel the heart's longing. How is it you want to live, this one wild and precious

life, as Mary Oliver says. The sign of truthfulness is a kind of sincerity where you feel innocent, clear, tender, and real. Namaste and blessings, thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit Tara Brahma dot com.