Tara Brach - The Honesty Challenge - Getting More Truthful with Ourselves and Our World

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Most of us value honesty yet are not aware of how regularly we avoid facing what's difficult inside us, and how we are less than truthful with others. This talk explores the practice of radical self-honesty as the grounds of being more honest with others, and bringing more love and freedom to our lives. 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Greetings. Welcome, friends. I've been in touch with a lot of people in these last weeks, as you can imagine. There's a huge range of reactions to the elections here in the United States, some angry and blaming looking for who's at fault and some shock and disbelief, some demeaning towards the perceived enemy, some despairing, some fearful. Some people saying they realized that they were in denial. One sent a cartoon with two dinosaurs talking and there's this asteroid hurtling

at them and one's kind of reassuring the other, well, maybe it won't be so bad. So, One friend wrote to me this, she said, we're going through the 48 stages of grief, and I think we're only up to 14. This takes time, and it's natural to have whatever unfolding range of reactions, whether this is to do with the elections, the world, what's going on else in the world, difficult changes in your personal life. And in the midst of reactivity, if we want to find our way to inner clarity,

to resilience, to presence, the key is to keep pausing. Keep checking in. Many of you are familiar with that wonderful phrase from Rumi, do you make regular visits to yourself? You can check in and ask very simply, what's true right now? And be the witness. You can do it right now.

What's true? What's going on inside me? And be the witness, sense the reality of the moment. But it's important to acknowledge how it is, honestly. There's a simple phrase I use that really helps. Once I've noticed and named what's going on, the phrase is, it's like this right now. Just that.

It's like this right now. You can try that. The reason I bring this up is that the grounds of this path of waking up is being honest with ourselves about the reality of the moment. Asking what's true here, acknowledging it, it's like this. and there's freedom. There's some space that opens up when we let reality be reality.

If we can recognize what's right here, the reality of what's going on inside us and around us, then we can resource ourselves and respond as wisely as possible. We can't respond wisely if we're not contacting reality. We know this. Our ultimate refuge is truth. A pastor had been advised by his doctor to lose 30 pounds or risk serious health consequences. The good pastor took his new diet seriously, even changing his driving route to the church building

to avoid his favorite bakery. One morning, however, he arrived for Bible study, carrying a gigantic devil's food cake. The class chuckled and chided him, but the good pastor's smile remained cherubic. This was a very special cake, he explained. I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning and there in the window were a host of goodies. I felt this was no accident, so I prayed, Lord, if you want me to have one of those delicious cakes, let me have a parking space directly in front of the bakery. And sure enough, he continued, the 12th time around the block, there it was. So I share this because we deceive ourselves when there are strong wants or fears.

We deceive others as well for the same reasons. It's part of our survival brain conditioning and it becomes habitual. So I'm starting with all of this as a kind of warm up for a talk I want to share with you today. And it feels very timely. It's called the honesty challenge. there is so much suffering that comes from not having the courage to be honest with ourselves, really honest, really contacting what's here or with our world. And without honesty, we can't connect.

We can't feel our togetherness. And as we know, this is rampant in our larger society. Honesty and truthfulness is in precipitous decline. And it's not just in some people, the atmosphere of fear and mistrust really impacts us all. As fear and distrust go up, so do the protective habits of deception and self-deception, not really facing reality. You can think of it in a scientific way that fear blocks the activity of the prefrontal cortex it leads to a deluded and narrowed reality.

It's limbic-driven. It brings us to black-white thinking. When it's strong, it lands up as the paranoia of conspiracy theory. And again, we're all breathing in the atmosphere of this society, so we're all prone to absorbing the limiting beliefs of our particular societal bubbles. and if we look directly at our personal life, it's the unseen, unfaced, unacknowledged parts of our own psyche that creates suffering. Or we haven't really asked what's true here.

It's the unfaced, loneliness, insecurity, hurt. So truth does set us free. The practice of mindfulness. The power of that practice is that it's so. strengthens our capacity for honesty, seem clearly, for not believing our limiting thoughts and beliefs for a kind of life-giving curiosity about what's true, for opening to a larger reality. And friends, at these times, we so need this. We need a large enough perspective so we can respond to our personal life and our world with spiritual clarity, with strength,

with a wise heart. So I hope this talk, this reflection, deepens your curiosity about what's true here. Really deepens your commitment to honesty. And it's for your own benefit and really the benefit of all of us. Okay, enjoy. For several decades, of my life, I had a poodle, two different poodles, love very much. And so I'd like to start with a favorite story that stars a poodle. This is a woman goes to a safari in Africa, and she takes her poodle along for company. And one day, the poodle runs off after some butterflies or something. Before long, he discovers he's lost. And so he's wandering around and he notices a leopard that's heading rapidly in his direction and the intention of having lunch. So the old poodle thinks, oh, no, I'm in

trouble now. And notices some bones on the ground close by. So he immediately settles down to chew on the bones with his back to the approaching cat. And just as the leopard is about to leave, the old poodle exclaims loudly, boy, that was one delicious leopard. I wonder if there are any more around here. So hearing this, the young leopard halts his attack and mid-strike look of terror over space slinks away and says, phew, the leper says, that was close. That old prudel nearly had me. Meanwhile, a monkey who had been watching the whole thing from a tree, figures he can put knowledge to good use and trade it for protection from the leopard. So off he goes, the old prudal ceased him heading after the leper with great speed and figures out that something must be up.

The monkey soon catches up with the leopard, spells the bean, strikes a deal for himself with the leopard. Okay, so the young leopard's furious. He's made a fool of himself and he says, Here, monkey, hop on my back and see what's going to happen to that conniving canine. So now the old poodle sees the leopard coming with the monkey on his back and thinks, well, what am I going to do now? But instead of running, the dog sits down with his back to his attackers, pretends he hasn't seen them. And just when they get close enough to hear it, the old poodle says,

where's that damn monkey? I sent him off an hour ago to bring me another leopard. So a long example of how deception actually really works. And it's a tried and true strategy for surviving and thriving throughout the animal kingdom, including humans, of course. viruses use camouflage to avoid detection. And of course, we hide by conforming or becoming invisible. And cats bristle, you know, they look larger than they are to intimidate. And we dress and posture in ways to make impressions to look strong or imposing, our militant, are powerful. And fish and

butterflies, you know, some of them have those set of fake eyes that are on parts of the body that are not so vulnerable to distract attention from vulnerable areas. And we do the same, hiding what we don't want others to see. And I'll share my favorite example with you is gartersnakes. The males emerge from their winter dens and they're cold and they need warmth. And so they emit these pheromones to suggest that they're female. Now, garter snakes form these mating balls of 100 males around a real female. And so the pretender gets this major warming hug from 100, garter snakes, and then it turns off the pheromone. And you can imagine the disappointment of all those affectionate males. Anyway, we, too, all of us humans, use pretense to attract others to get attention, to get care.

So we're part of the creation. You know, we use deception to avoid threats and to further us to get what we want. And it's natural. It's not our fault. And this survival strategy, it's often unconscious. And when it takes over, when it becomes habitual and predominant our lives, deceiving ourselves, deceiving others, it entraps us in suffering. I mean, dishonesty basically prevents us from evolving, from loving fully, from being who we can be.

So, friends, this is our theme, how to deepen intention around honesty. And of course, the ground of it all is self-honesty. Carl Young says it so clearly that our suffering arises from the unseen, unfilled parts of our psyche. And the conditioning that gives rise to dishonesty, trauma, strong cravings, fears, fears, shame, they lead to bearing our covering over. what's real. So dishonesty has been through all of human history, of course, and it's proliferating in our contemporary world. And we can see how disastrous the consequences. When we collectively deny what's going on, big example, of course, is climate change. The horror of that, of just not facing what's real all these decades and what that's caused.

And there are so many other examples. I think of in the United States the concerted effort to not face our legacy of slavery, the horrors of continued systemic racism, the suffering that's coming from spreading lies around elections. Of course, this is not just the United States, but how that breeds distrust and undo democracy. just how lies fuel hatred, separation. And I think what's most chilling right now is how in our contemporary society, how much cynicism there is, there's an assumption of lies. And research shows that we're lied to 10 to 200 times a day. Of course, it depends on how plugged in we are

to virtual, social media and the like. but it's the atmosphere we're living in. And the conditioning is in each one of our brains and nervous systems to deceive, the conditioning to lie as a kind of survival practice. And it comes from, and this is the most core universal conditioning, that we identify as a separate self, that we have this core sense of, oh, something's missing or something's wrong. And then the more craving our fear, our shame, the stronger the impetus to lie, to deceive

ourselves or others. And of course, deception then creates more of a sense of separation. So there's more craving fear and shame. Let me ground this a little in a story. Some years back, I was when I was teaching meditation and I was a clinical psychologist. And I was meeting with one woman who was about a year into Alcoholics Anonymous, AA. And she had almost lost her marriage to young children because of her drinking. She grew up in a very traumatizing household, sexual abuse. Her parents had a very bitter divorce. she started drinking when she was 14. And she told me about her first meeting with her very wise

AA sponsor. And one of the first things this woman had said to her was, no matter what, tell the truth. No matter what, tell the truth. Let this be your North Star. No, no matter how embarrassing, no matter how ugly, shameful, tell the truth to yourself and to us, all of us. And it saved her life, but not right away. I mean, she had two bad relapses where, you know, that very familiar thing if you're in a 12-step program with the rationalizations, the self-deceptions that think we can get away with things. And during her second relapse at one point, she was screaming at her husband and he wasn't yelling back and all she could see was his utter hurt that he was in some way devastated. And then that's when she heard those words from her sponsor in her mind,

tell the truth, tell the truth. And right then and there, she said to him, I'm hitting bottom again. I hate myself. I need help. Now it was the beginning of her slow climb. out telling the truth. And AA was invaluable in it. It's a culture of truth telling and it reduces shame. But her challenge, and this is with her family and others close in, was she would get reactive and triggered. She had caught in feeling victimized and blaming and she wasn't present enough to be aware of what was true. She couldn't tell the truth because she wasn't in touch with truth. So she say things like, you know, I'm just speaking my truth. We all, many of us are familiar that line, but they're actually just what she was expressing were the top layers of

anger and resentment and blame. She wasn't recognizing underneath that, the unprocessed fears and the hurts and the traumas. So her proclamations of, I'm speaking my truth, actually fueled more conflict. Her sponsor suggested that she come to my meditation class. I was teaching live classes in D.C. at the time. And her sponsor actually attended those classes along with huge numbers of people from 12-step programs. The 11th step you might know is to do with prayer and meditation as a pathway to presence. So she started coming. And many of you know our mindfulness meditation is rooted in the Buddhist practice of Vapassana. That's the Pali word.

And the meaning of Vapasana is seeing what's true, seeing the nature of reality. And the Buddha taught that really our suffering arises from delusion, from not seeing reality, not seeing truth. And right at the center of that delusion, is not realizing who we are. We suffer because we do not realize who we are. We live in a shrunken identity, identifying with the feelings and beliefs of a separate self, often a bad separate self,

who's apart from this living world. And so that self-centeredness, and I don't say it as a pejorative word, it's not our fault. It's part of our primal conditioning. That self-centeredness keeps us from really seeing the truth of our belonging. You know, if we're honest and we scan the day, we can see that self-centeredness so clearly

and how most moments of the day were in this narrative about ourselves, like what I want or what I'm anxious about or how I don't have energy to do such and such, or how I need more time to get such and such done, most have to some degree a self-centeredness that it obscures our larger belonging. It obscures the awareness that's here, the love, the mystery. So self-centeredness is suffering, and with it,

there comes a sense something's missing, something's wrong, and all of our craving and addiction and fear and aggression comes out of that basic sense of I'm a separate self and something's missing or wrong. So meditation is a practice of radical self-honesty. Its impact is it actually releases that self-centeredness. It dissolves the illusion of a separate self. And it was a huge, powerful practice and support for this woman where over and over again she'd be stuck and she'd say, okay, right here, just stay, be present, what's happening, what's happening?

And she'd look and she'd see these changing ways of wanting something in particular, wanting a drink, wanting people to pay attention to her. she'd see the ways of a version of being angry about the way things were going or angry at a person. She'd see her beliefs in how unlovable or unworthy she thought she was. And in the scene, there was some freeing. The Shalman put it really wonderfully. They say that when you name a fear, when you see it, when you see it clearly, see the truth. okay, fears here. It loses its power. And she found this. She would be meditating. Sometimes we

do it together and sometimes she'd do it alone and she'd just start naming what was there. And the more stuck she was, the more she'd slow down and just say, afraid, okay, ashamed, believing I've really screwed up again, whatever it is. And as she could name things, see the truth in the moment. Those passing ways weren't ruling her as much. They didn't block that she also loved her partner and her children, that her life was bigger. So this is the gift of meditation, this radical self-honesty,

because in presence, in that clear seeing, this life isn't so personal. There's no one it's happening to. There's no one who's causing what's going on. Just life unfolding. So in moments of full presence, we're free from the story of the self. We're living in a larger truth. And she was able to actually name that.

She was able to talk about the prison of self-centeredness and what was shifting. And I remember when she said, when I'm being really unlawful, honest, I become more like an undefended open space, an undefended open space. So this is a story of self-honesty, somebody's experience recovering from substance addiction. And many of you listening who know about recovery, know honesty is key. And self-honesty is key for all of us. we all have the same core suffering, this conditioning to live in a shrunken reality of a separate self. You know, we all have emotional reactivity and a tendency to cover over what's painful. We all have that conditioning to not be truthful with ourselves and others.

So it takes practice, it takes commitment. One man at the end of a month-long repossan retreat, we met and he was describing all of his ups and downs and practicing presence, that radical self-honesty, seeing his tendency to compare to others and his jealousy and his self-consciousness and insecurity, seeing his loneliness, and also seeing the peace that could come and the compassion and the lucidity. in his mind and the clarity. So as he was leaving, he said, the joy isn't getting real. Never forget that. The joy isn't getting real. It's in seeing the truth of the moment,

being honest with ourselves, with others. So here's the thing in getting real. It's not about, particularly about what the content is. It could be pleasant or unpleasant. it's the capacity to be the awareness that we are and see and allow and include this ever-changing life. And when that happens, the more we're resting as that awareness, the more the habitual self-centeredness gets replaced by a real sense of freedom, undefended heart. Most of us consciously value honesty. In some way, I'm preaching to the

converted, you know. We think it's good and healthy to be honest with ourselves. We think it's important to face truths about our own experience and our behavior and our impact on others. And we think it's good and healthy to be honest with others. I think of Adrian Rich, who 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 truth they can tell each other. It's important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. Telling the truth breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. So you might reflect and even sense the relationships where you feel the most closeness. Just notice how much in those relationships.

relationships, the closeness comes from being real, from being honest. They're inseparable, really. The undefended heart. Of course, I like the way Mark Twain put it. He says, always tell the truth. That way you don't have to remember what you said. But it is freeing to just tell the truth. And, you know, if we Google, statistics vary some,

But they say we lie on an average of one to four times a day and 60% of adults can't have a conversation without one lie every 10 minutes. And psychological research shows that we regularly deceive ourselves to maintain our narrative about ourselves and our view of the world. We lie to ourselves and we can't face reality. And often it's quite toxic and pervasive. So I'm titling this talk, the honesty challenge, telling the truth to ourselves and our world. And I'm calling it a challenge, but I'm hoping you'll join me just to let it be an opportunity to see what happens when we consciously dedicate to being more honest. See what happens.

it's also a challenge because it's an incredibly humbling domain to explore. And as I mentioned, we value honesty. In fact, it's part of our self-marriage of that we're honest. And yet, when we start looking closely, we see how much of the day can be littered with, it's not the big lies, it's the small ones. And, you know, as I, over these last few weeks have been reflecting on this more directly and writing this, writing notes to myself to share with you now, of course, I was monitoring myself and made it very purposeful. And it was so revealing. I mean, it's a little

bit of a confessional, but so revealing to see all the small ways that I started noticing I was not being real, you know, in emails, catch myself all the phrases and expressions. So it just didn't feel genuine, sometimes flattery, or saying I was looking forward to meetings that are going to be actually difficult or obligatory and I'm not looking forward to them. Or I noticed in several casual social interactions, embellishing stories to be more interesting or in conversation with Jonathan just to impress. I remember one morning he asked me how long I swam, I swim most morning. and and I rounded, I started rounding up the minutes and then I had to say no, actually it was 27,

you know, because I'm trying now to be honest. But just to watch myself with that impulse to round it up are noticing, talking to people and saying I'm feeling, you know, asking how I'm doing and feeling from me but not naming it. Our family member texted last week, you know, just it was a last-minute text saying, hey, can you talk this morning? You know, I have some stuff I really want to go over with you. And I had put aside that time to be writing. But I watched my mind come up with all these other responses. It sounded much more compelling.

Of course, you know, because I caught myself, I didn't do it. I'm sharing it with you because it's just so pervasive, the tendency to in some way hide something or present something different than what's real. And you might just check yourself, just reflect today, yesterday, how honest have I been? Just scan, scan the conversations, emails, texts. And just you might consider, was there any hiding what you felt when it would have been more appropriate to name it, how you're doing with your health, or if you felt hurt by something or misunderstood, or how much exaggerating? Maybe sometimes we exaggerate what we know about things,

about the news or a book being discussed, or just general knowledge areas. We kind of have a thinner, thinner layer than what's real in terms of what we project. Or maybe making excuses to get out of things we don't want to do, hiding our difficulties or inflating them, dropping names or connections to impress. It's valuable to scan and it's valuable to intend to be alert to this. The point is to bring it into awareness not to judge it because it's universal or social creatures and it's very much a part of the survival brand. function to gain status, to try to get what we want, to protect from being judged, being rejected. You know, the Christian Desert Fathers had a view of Eden, the Garden of Eden, the metaphor,

as being that we were originally innocent and at home in our being. and the fall was not disobedience to God. It was that they hid, that they pretended, that they believed that they were bad and covered up and forgot their divine essence. And I think that's a really valuable kind of interpretation of that metaphor that we are originally and essentially pure and good. and that our suffering comes from the misperception of badness and that we need to cover ourselves. And then moving on from the Christian Desert Fathers, there's a story of a rabbi and a priest

having a picnic on the really hot summer day, and they wanted to dip in the water and cool off. They hadn't brought bathing suits so they decided to skinny dip. And the river was flowing rapidly, and the clergy were washed to shift. short distance downstream before getting out. And after climbing out of the river, they just started to make a run for it to get their clothes when some of the members of their congregation came into view who had been some women having a picnic. So the priest covered his privates with his hands and put on a burst of speed. But the rabbi covered his face instead. And the priest said, what are you doing? And the rabbi said, I don't know about you, but my carvenines recognize me

by my face. So the tendency to deceive, it starts preverbally soon after birth. It's often reflexive and unconscious. I mean, children lie from a really young age. They'll start fake crying and fake laughter, act innocent when they're caught doing something forbidden. And then by 2.5 years, are indulging in face-saving lives, you know, blaming siblings, etc. So starts preverbally and as we grow, it can get baked into our personality. And you might know the word persona. It comes from ancient Greece and it really had to do with the masks that actors would wear. That was their persona.

And then when they were done acting, they'd take it off and re-inhabit their real self. Well, the challenge with our personas, our personalities, and the challenge with deception is when it's unconscious and regular, we forget we're wearing a mask. We get identified with that threatened separate self that needs a deceive. And we forget the deeper dimensions of who we are, of the creativity and full intelligence and awareness. that's our beingness. So I'd like to reflect again with you and invite you to be a little more focused and take a moment to pause here, might take a few full breaths, and then bring to mind a person who you respect, who you want to think well of you, and who you have some anxiety around. Maybe you fear their judgment. There's some discomfort, self-consciousness.

So take a moment to bring to mind somebody that fits that profile. You respect, you want them to think well of you, and maybe you're concerned they'll judge you in some way. Just think, what is it you want them to see about you? And how do you present yourself so they'll see that? And what is it you don't want them to see? What are you afraid they'll see? and the sense into the ways you might cover over what you don't want them to see,

perhaps in what you say or don't say. And as you reflect on this sense yourself in that persona who's wanting to be seen a certain way and not wanting to be seen in certain ways and just sense into the stress of that, how it confines. You might even ask, do I like myself when presenting a math? How am I experiencing myself? What's the sense of myself? Is there more of a self-centeredness? And how does the mask, which is a type of deception, impact the sense of closeness with this person

who I'm trying to impress or get respect from or avoid judgment with? And you might shift your attention now. Take a few full breaths. Bring to mind someone who's easy to be with, who you feel very accepted by and comfortable with, intimate with, perhaps. Somebody who you feel more fully at home and yourself with. Just remind yourself of who you are when you're at home in an authentic sense of your being. Just the more space, more freedom. So that as you move forward in the days and weeks to come, you can sense just the signals of how the mask can keep you from your authenticity and also what's possible. So this is an intentional

inquiry and we start inward with, you know, really being honest with ourselves. That's the beginning and the grounds of the honesty challenge. And the inquiry is, what's true? What is true in this moment? And, you know, just to name the challenge the challenge, it's not so easy. I remember one of my first retreats at the Insight Meditation Society. Somebody had posted a quote by Lily Tomlin. It was self-knowledge is not good news. And we know it because as we begin to ask what's true, what's going on, there are layers often of unfaced fear and shame and hurt and vulnerability. Yet the path, the freedom, the freedom is to include the waves. They become less personal as we do, as we say, okay, it's true, there's fear here.

We actually open into a place where it has less power, more into the sea of beingness. So the pathway to self-honesty is that inquiry about what is really happening in this moment. And one of my friends, and many of you know of her, the poet Dana Falls, has a book called What's True Here. It's a book of her poetry. And I'd like to read you a part of the preface, which I think is a powerful invitation into the inquiry, what's true here. And she writes, What's True Here is an inquiry I often use in meditation. When introduced gently, the question stops the hypnotizing train of thoughts and brings me present. Paying attention to my direct experience of now, I don't so much try to answer the question as be the answer.

Experience reality firsthand and know it from inside. Let me describe what it's like when the inquiry arrives in my busy mind. First, there is a pause in the thought stream, an interval of weightless silence. Next, it's as if the skylight in my awareness suddenly opens. Farrell Williams captures his perfectly in his song, Happy, when he sings, clap along if you feel like a room without a roof. I can't say how asking myself what's true here takes the lid off my usually limited frame of reference, but it does. And when the skylight opens, I join with the vastness

of which we are all part. So this is her introduction to the inquiry. What's true here? And you might try just for a few moments. We'll practice together. You might close your eyes or lower your gaze. Again, take a moment to collect perhaps by relaxing with the inflow and the outflow of the breath, and then gently offer the question, what's true here? From the awareness that you are, the question, what's true here? Listening, feeling, opening, contacting the life that's here. You might sense, as Dana puts it, that skylight opens, taking again some breaths. So I want to name the most common block or cloud to clear seeing, what blocks the light of awareness. And that's judgment. And let's say in that brief reflection we just did, what's true here, you were

judging yourself for not being here, for not being present, for not seeing anything. And just to notice how that judgment may have blocked the truth of seeing judging, okay, a judging thought, of seeing, okay, mind distracted, there's fuzziness, there's tiredness, confusion, other thoughts. Judgment blocks honesty. It blocks, honesty. It blocks seeing. what's true. And in any moment that we're judging what's happening in ourselves or another, we cannot see clearly what's here. And we can't communicate honestly. So that's why radical acceptance actually goes hand in hand with radical honesty. And share a story where this just for me was so clear. One man I was working with some years ago was increasingly alienated

from his wife and his 14-year-old stepson. It was a newish marriage. They've been together for three years. And he felt all the problems that they were facing were really his fault. And what was going on was the teen was rude to them both. He would ignore requests to clean up after himself and he'd leave a room while they were talking to him. He's very dismissive of his mother

and at times contemptuous with this man I'm telling you about. And so the man reacted with anger. He was offended. He was disturbed. And a few months in there were a number of blow-ups where he'd lose his temper, let's say, one time after the boy was defiant with his mom and just started blaring music when she was talking. So he and his wife had difficulty talking about it. They were both at a loss. And he was increasingly shut down and distanced kind of pulled away from both of them. and just became very dark and withdrawn.

So when we met and talked, his real anger was at himself. Like, why can I be a mature adult and find creative ways to work with this boy and be in communication with my wife? So we practiced rain, which is the mindfulness and compassion practice that we use with the steps of recognize, allow, investigate and nurture. And he recognized, okay, anger, self-judgment, and the A is allow, he let that be there, just naming it, allowing it to be there. And then as he started investigating, he got shooken because he realized he had a tremendous aversion towards the boy, and he didn't like him. He didn't like his stepson. And on top of that, there was like, I just got sunk.

He's swamped in shame. Like, here I am married and I don't like my stepson, you know. And then he got into powerlessness. How can I can't make it different? And then fear, I'm going to lose my marriage. And so he opened into the vulnerability of those feelings, that powerlessness and the fear and the shame. And gradually, he was able to, as,

I often guide and invite to put his hand on his heart and start sensing, this hurts, I'm hurting. This is hard. That's truth too. So there was some compassion. And gradually, you know, we did a number of rounds from that space of where he was holding himself more kindly. He could see how his stepson was hurting in a way he reminded of himself as a teen. that he was frustrated, agitated, anxious young person. So there was more compassion.

But still, when, you know, the boy would act out, he'd react. And he realized that he had pulled away from his wife because it was so hard to admit the truth that he didn't like his steps on. So he talked to her and he told her the truth. the dislike was there, also the care and the concern and the fear of loss of the marriage. He just named it in this very undefended way. And it allowed her to name what was going on for her, which was she was utterly feeling powerless and distraught.

And like she was going to lose the marriage. And her heart was broken because she was feeling so separated from an understanding. able to reach her son. There's a lot of anguish. So they named their truths. And in doing that, they could team up together. The honesty brought them closer and they could create a better field, a better container, more clarity, more boundaries, and more care with her son. And then they also had a therapist come in and gradually the communication built between the three. It took several years. But the point is what brought them out of the swamp of suffering was beginning to face and name truth. That's what set them on the path.

We all have what's sometimes called the shadow, the painful beliefs and emotions that come from feeling like a separate self, that something's missing or wrong. for this man, aversion, anger, powerlessness, shame. So we need to name it. We need to face it. And the power of radical self-honesty is that in the moment that we shine a light on the shadow, we are inhabiting a larger space. We're living in a larger space and there's more choice.

The path of freedom, deepening truthful, with ourselves, with each other. And the path of freedom is growing truthfulness in our world. I started the conniving prudal outsmarting the leopard because deception is part of survival. And especially when we live with much fear and addictive tendencies, the deception becomes habitual. and it blocks us from being at home.

It blocks us from living and loving fully. Again, Carl Jung, that the suffering comes from the unseen, unfaced parts of the psyche. And that includes our collective, you know, as the fear levels in our world increase, so do the tendencies towards deception and mistrust. And I'm bringing this again, as we close because it makes it ever more crucial that we take on the challenge.

You know, if we can in our own lives and with ourselves and each other dedicate ourselves to growing our honesty, it ripples out. And it's a courageous thing to do, this willingness to meet life with an undefended heart. It's courageous and it brings more. connection and loving to ourselves, to our world. So as we've explored, the grounds are that simple inquiry, you know, what's true here? So we'll close in that spirit and just take a moment because we need to pause. We need to get quiet to reconnect with truth. So let yourself

pause right now as we close. Take a few breaths and you might sense in yourself whatever your heart's intention is towards honesty, however you want to language that. May I be more truthful, may I be more honest, may I be more real with myself, with others. And then in this very moment, in silence, listening, just asking that question. What's true here? Letting the skylight open, including the sensations, emotions, the consciousness, the vastness we belong to. What's true here? It's an inquiry of love for the life that's right here. Sensing the changing waves, the ocean of awareness of truth, just inhabiting that truth of who we are. Thank you, friends. Thank you for your presence, your heart, all blessings on the path.