Do you know how sometimes when you’re stuck but trying to figure out something in your life, suddenly a messenger shows up with exactly what you were looking for?
Last year, one of my neighbors shared a quote that stopped me in my tracks.
"Healing takes place when we are truthful with God, with ourselves and with others. We find healing in saying: 'This is where I am right now.' Maybe you're trying to pretend that you're fine. You can lie to yourself. But God knows you. He knows where you truly are and he knows how to get you to where you need to be in life."
This isn't about religion, by the way. It's about relationships... relationships with the Divine, with self and with others.
Being honest and truthful with others feels vulnerable. It's scary even when your expression of truth is well-received and respected. It’s much scarier when people hate you for speaking the truth.
When we experience betrayal from the people who were closest to us, from those painful experiences, we learn to not be honest with ourselves.
We’ve all experienced some kind of betrayal. And we’ve all lied to ourselves about something.
Apparently the most common lie people tell is, "I'm fine", when they're not.
A 2002 University of Massachusetts study found that 60% of people lie at least once during a 10 minute conversation and told and average of 2-3 lies. The study showed that women were more likely to lie to make the other person feel good while men lied to make themselves look better.
That was almost 20 years ago and before social media destroyed the fabric of society, so I would bet the actual number of lies is much higher nowadays. Just take a scroll through the newsfeed on any of your socials and you'll see how hard people work to make themselves look good, happy, competent and interesting. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Of course it's not safe to be truthful and open with abusers and manipulators. They'll use that against you. Usually you'll have to hide your plans, thoughts and feelings, then sneak away without them knowing that you're leaving, in order to be safe from sabotage and harm.
Abusive and manipulative relationships do serious damage to trust and truthfulness. It’s not hard to imagine the wounding of trust that is taking place around the world. As more truth comes out and reality continues to shatter for people who clung to the lies, there is going to be an epidemic of mental illness.
It is said that the truth will set you free. Why is that?
If you tried to tell the truth in an abusive family, workplace or other social circle, you probably realized that people don't believe you.
In fact, they will usually turn on you. Enablers will often defend the abusers because they're hopelessly dependent upon the abuser or the system (the family, office, social group, etc.).
This is devastating. It can make you feel crazy and alone in the world because you're the only one in the group who sees reality. A lot of people around the world have been feeling this since 2020.
We can look deeper into the spiritual dimension of self and life.
The absence of truth is an open invitation to the dark forces that thrive in environments of lies, illusions, deception, distortion, fantasy and confusion.
If we are living in world where these dark forces are ruling, what does that say about us as a society?
Society is a representation of the collective, and each of us individuals contributes to form the collective.
How far have we drifted from the truth, individually and collectively, in order for this to be possible?
Unfortunately nowadays, as a result of decades of programming, and even more so since the advent of social media, most people are not present or truthful with themselves.
It’s not entirely our fault. We’ve been enticed, groomed and programmed through social engineering, advertising and culture to love the lie.
This is why we are living in a world nowadays where massive lies are able to survive for so long and people are easily coerced into participating.
During the last couple years, many people have been questioning where they belong in terms of their geographical location, their friendships, colleagues, intimate relationships and even family.
Speaking the truth shows you where you belong and not. This act of courage reveals the truth, and lies, surrounding you.
When you're truthful with yourself and others you will find the right relationships and turn away from the toxic ones, or even those that simply aren’t a match of core values.
Sometimes you'll choose to end those relationships and other times they will pull away from you or push you away because the truth you're speaking feels threatening to their perception of reality.
When we're pretending to be someone we're not, others who are living truthfully will feel that incoherence.
Living in truth helps you find your community.
How does being truthful help us heal ourselves and this wounded world?
It's not that when you admit the truth then suddenly you're all healed. If only it were that easy! It won’t be that easy for the world either.
When you take on the responsibility to admit and own the truth in your life, that vulnerable honesty initiates a breakthrough and metaphysical healing process. There is still work to be done to align your actions and life with the truth, but what to do isn’t clear until the truth pierces the denial.
On the other hand, you’ll notice that when you aren't being truthful with yourself, you’ll get stuck in mental blocks and conflicts, which obstruct the healing path and forward movement. But the hard part is that when you’re stuck, you usually don’t see where the lie is. That’s why you’re stuck.
The truth helps us to face and resolve inner conflicts so the healing can take place.
Inner conflicts create dissonance, which causes an energetic distortion pattern that disturbs one’s coherent life functioning. As soon as the truth is observed and accepted at a visceral level, the wave function collapses and the dissonance dissolves. The truth becomes an instantaneous relief from the gnawing internal struggle that had been maintaining the conflict.
If we are honest with ourselves, we can see when we are holding onto a fantasy of "what could be", the potential of a friendship or a relationship, when it isn't a good match. The same fantasy can happen with a a job, a social organization or even a community.
The letting go of a fantasy involves processing grief. Yet even in that painful process, there’s a sense that a burden has been alleviated by the truth. This bittersweetness feels liberating.
If we are consistently honest with ourselves and others, it becomes clear when we are dealing with people who are lying.
Sometimes people are lying to deceive. Sometimes they lie to avoid a confrontation with the truth. Other times people are lying to themselves and don't even know it.
By default, a person who is lying to themselves cannot be honest with you. They could be good people but if they're lying to themselves about something that they’re unable or unwilling to look at, this is inevitably going to put you at risk as well since they’re not living in reality.
When the truth is absent from a relationship, instead we find distance and disconnection.
Whether a person is unaware that they're lying to themselves or consciously pretending and hiding, the result is still the same.
Naturally, there’s going to be a big distance separating you two so you’re not going to feel connected even when you’re connecting. That’s not real love, and intimacy cannot grow there. Distance and disconnection is not the foundation of a healthy relationship.
When a person isn't present with you, you won't feel safe with them. Instead of presence, there is an absence that creates an opening for the dark forces to enter and before you know it, you'll be living in Hell.
Look around you and notice how many people aren’t present at all. They’re functioning in automaton behavior. That’s why they’re easily led into lies.
This is also true regarding our ability to be honest and present with ourselves.
Telling the truth is love. Being truthful and loving is how healthy relationships are formed with the Divine, with oneself and with others.
The truth is the source from where love emerges.
If it's not based on the truth, it's not love. Without the truth, it's just fantasy, illusion, delusion, distortion, deception, lies and confusion.
It's a challenge to stay honest with oneself in a climate of lies and illusions, even more so if you were trained by your family or culture to say that you're fine, and to pretend you want to do whatever they're coercing you to do.
To keep myself grounded in the truth, I find it helpful to question my motives, consistently and honestly, in order to check in with myself and see if I'm living in the truth.
This is part of my daily mental ninja work, to keep myself unsubscribed from the early life programming that taught me to pretend it's okay and to go along.
This practice is also excellent for building immunity to gaslighting, manipulation, propaganda and other forms of suggestion or coercion that we are exposed to from other people, in the media, on social media as well as through advertising and entertainment.
It's like a self-care sobriety practice that you can apply to almost anything:
Why am I doing this?
Why do I want this in my life?
How am I going to feel if I get/do this?
Be careful that you're taking an objective look at the answers and not indulging in fantasy, illusions, lies or rationalizations.
When we have addictions, we will rationalize and lie to ourselves in order to hide the pain. That's where the addiction lives.
Sometimes addictions involve physical substances or things.
Other addictions are more about a fantasy, a feeling, an illusion or idea. Those are the trickiest ones to identify because their very existence is hidden in the fantasy or illusion.
A very common addiction nowadays could be the fantasy of “getting back to normal.” This frustrated fantasy could then cause a person to drink or eat in order to numb the feelings. Sometimes addictions are layered like this in a web of lies.
The invisible addictions are usually the ones that cause our inner conflicts and mental blocks, which keep us stuck and unable to heal or move forward to the next level.
If you are able to identify an addiction that you're still struggling to let go of, ask yourself:
Where is the lie?
What stories are you telling yourself to justify it?
What is the pain that you're trying to escape?
What are you accepting or participating in that you don't like?
We often lie to ourselves in order to avoid facing a painful truth. It's normal to want to deny the ugly truth in order to avoid pain. But in order to create a better life, we have to first be willing to admit the ugly truth so we can pierce through the denial.
We have to know where we are so we can get to where we want to be.
The only person who can make these choices for you is yourself. Until then, life will keep smacking you upside the head, offering you painful or uncomfortable opportunities to see the truth and make new choices that are coherent with the truth. As we align more with the truth, the body and mind will detox from the lies, illusions, distortions, fantasies, pretending and denial.
Lying and pretending makes us sick over time. This is why we are living in a sick society.
The more pure and true your body and mind are, the quicker you’ll feel sick when you start lying to yourself or pretending.
It's like when you consistently eat really healthy and then you introduce some junk food into your system. You're going to feel acutely awful for hours after eating that. Yet someone who eats junk food regularly doesn't necessarily feel much at all because their body has been desensitized to the consistent feeling of awful, that it becomes normalized.
The same is true with the energy we ingest from contact with other people. When you've detoxed your life of emotional manipulators, as soon as someone toxic shows up, you'll notice right away. But if you keep toxic people around and another one shows up, you might not notice how you feel around that person since you feel similar with the other toxic people. This is how you could end up adding another one to your life and not realize until it’s too late.
When you hang out with people who you can't be honest and authentic around, those relationships will inevitably turn toxic, even if everyone involved has good intentions.
When you sacrifice truth and authenticity for connection, that means you're abandoning yourself and not meeting your own needs.
If you have to pretend to be someone you're not or to like something that you don't like, or if you have to silence yourself and not speak about things that are important to you because the other person would think you're crazy or get angry at you, then that's not a healthy connection.
Everyone involved could have good intentions, but these are not the kind of relationships that can survive the truth.
Your authenticity is your truth about who you are.
When you're living truthfully with yourself and someone shows up pretending to be something they're not, you will notice the lie. You might not know exactly what the lie is, but you will feel the distance where the absence of truth exists.
Our world is a collective reflection of our individual choices. If we want to heal the world, we need to start within ourselves.
If you want to make a breakthrough in your healing and forward movement, make the commitment to be more honest with yourself about the choices you make on the daily. That includes the thoughts you allow to take seed in your mind, the people in your inner circle, the projects you participate in and the actions that you create in the world.
Ask yourself why, more often, and consider if the consequences of your choices are really what you want in your life or if it's what someone else wants or told you that you should want or do.
Take a break from social media, especially Instagram and Facebook. What will you do with all that free time and energy? How will you feel about yourself without exposure to those messages every day? If you take a couple weeks off and then go back, you’ll probably notice exactly what I’m talking about. You might feel disgusted and anxious just scrolling a bit through the feed of posts.
If there are relationships in your life that you’re not sure about, you can give yourself some space to feel and process your feelings. You’ll likely gain clarity about whether or not a person belongs in your life once you’ve spent some time apart.
Sometimes we have to take distance to get a new perspective of the truth and to figure out if a relationship, habit or situation is really aligned with who we are and where we are going.
Mere in John 8:32 say:
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Thanks Mere for share!
Thank You!