How to create a garden where truth blooms supreme

I have recently become a fan of truth.

Prior to this I wasn’t against it per-say, I just hadn’t really heard anything very interesting about it. Also, I was listening from a mentality that was primarily trying to avoid suffering because that current mental framework didn’t understand either truth or suffering or genuine growth or karmic destiny or anything really, and it certainly didn’t have adequate skills for working with, loving with, and dancing open the gifts inside a challenge, honestly met.

My history with honesty and truth reads like a whole season of Jerry Springer episodes. Exhibit A: I had an entire pregnancy where two possible baby daddies (I actually referred to them thusly) were on pins and needles for a paternity test. That kind of stuff. Real page turner stuff.

Because the plot line of every rom com is predicated on someone hiding their truth. That’s what turns the page. My kids and I like to undo films while we’re watching by identifying exactly how short and boring a film would be if the people involved were just frank and up front with each other and with themselves.

I started to whiff my own dishonesty, slowly and kind of sneakily (when a part of you is trying to realign to your Essence, the conditioned part is gonna pitch a fit because change is hard and inefficient and we avoid it).

I heard Martha Beck talk about a year of honesty so I did one too. Except I didn’t. But I really really tried to. The shallowness of my trying and the resulting bummer of a year matched the shallowness of my own relationship to truth itself. I focused a lot on not telling other people lies out of my mouth. I didn’t even consider the lies I told myself or even deeper, the fact that running a pattern that runs counter to my

Essence is a lie. I didn’t even succeed in not lying to people with my mouth hole. It was a bit of a wash of a year.

I tried various measures of this over ten years and I think it’s like asking many people to open a lid until finally, pop! It goes and everyone “loosened it” but really, maybe, you just worked up the gumption to do it right?

So when I met the mental and spiritual framework of the Gene Keys did it surprise anyone that my core shadow, to work through in this life, is dishonesty? (gk 59 in my purpose & Attractor sphere for you nerds out there). It surprised no one. And, if I was a betting man, I’d wager that if you (the reader you, you!) get real about the thing you are most dicey and hard to grow on in yourself and you ran your gk chart you’d find it reflected there. (For questions about how this works please refer to the Great Mystery at the center of all things.)

So then I had this new centrifuge for truth, this new wind tunnel of pressure, and a new expansive perspective - all pushing and elevating and awakening a more genuine and innate relationship to truth itself. I remember noticing this was shifting for me when I was on a call where a woman was railing against a young person for not just “telling the truth” and why was she such a yellow bellied coward etc? When I found myself defending the person who was having a hard time sharing “their truth” by explaining that we have to create a garden of gentleness and self acceptance if we want truth seeds to have a place to come home, and grow and tell their stories. Slowly, I’d started to actually understand truth.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned as a lifetime liar, newly hot on truth.

Intimacy is the goal. Wherever you are lying, you cannot be truly intimate with that place. Intimacy is like building an invisible house of cards with yourself or someone else. Saying something is true for you when it’s not is crashing the house of cards. You’ll feel it. The integrity of the moment is gone. And you’ve missed a chance to experience real integral strength with that moment, which, is sad. Because if you weren’t truly present (requires your exact truth), what were you doing? What were you present with?

You probably don’t know you’re lying about most of the things you’re lying about. If you’re still deconditioning, unmasking, self-recovering (most of us are) you are likely operating on some codes, patterns, lifeways and expectations that aren’t real for You and you are at some point in the process of unraveling all that, but “all that” is held together by lies. And if you try to fire hose them all at once, you will burn your life, and the house you live in. You have to let life bring awareness of these things slowly and in a timing you can handle (spoiler alert, if you’re having a truth emerging for you now, you can handle it, you do have the tools for it or it wouldn’t be up for you, so yay.) I suggest “show me”prayers. Arms wide open, passionyells to the wide open skies, “Show me! Show me what I need to see/be/open to.” It’s very dramatic and effective. A showdown at the Cosmic Corral. The scene will play well in the biography of your life.

I’m a big fan of acknowledging our infinitely expansive natures, often. The truth I know or can see now is what I’m launching off of. New ones are opening up, flying in as I leap. In our house we have two rules, don’t ever willingly deceive, tell the truth you know now when you know it, and 2, accept others truths as they unfold and expect both to change and evolve a whole bunch. The person you were when you began reading this article is not the person who will finish it. (If you can, pause and take that in.)

If you feel squirrely about an area of your life, you’re likely lying about it but truth is a soft little baby and needs treats and wooing and so many cuddly blankies. So I like to use the art of contemplation here, and just kind of get curious and open a soft willingness to see beyond my current limitations or dishonest boundaries. I try to bring a different quality of attention to it. If I’m usually avoidant I try something new, like, listening or curiosity. Paying attention to the squirrely bits can help you know what parts of you are still conditioned and needing space, air, a general loosening of the reigns.

I like going on a treasure hunt in my personal stories for when I was With and Really Showed Up for my Truth. I like to relive those stories. How did it feel in my body? Who did it positively impact? What was able to change? (This is using appreciative inquiry btw). I do this because of the squirrely nature of changing from masked to Essential. And for how tender and bruised our nervous systems are. So, I bolster and remind myself how good I have been at being frank and living my truth (graduate school in poetry, traveling the world with my kids and living at intentional communities, unschooling, starting many weird and funky social initiatives etc) and it does my soul and nervous system good to re enter those spaces and kind of stand there for strength as I excavate and invite more truth to the party.

David Whyte (the poet I reference ad nauseam) has this image of a house in stormy meadow, all windows and narrow with a long table down the center. Inside the house, cozy and warm and bellied up to the feast are all the parts of ourselves we accept: our kindness, our humor, our ability to handle crisis. And outside banging on the windows, hungry, forgotten and rejected, are all the parts of ourselves we cannot and do not accept. I think it’s dangerous to our abiding sense of self to just fling open the doors at once, but I do often sneak bowls of soup to them in the night and sometimes, on a brave Sunday morning, I’ll sneak one into the table. One at a time. Bowl of soup by bowl of soup.

Dishonesty has been at my feasting table for a while now. I am more honest than I’ve ever been and it’s become almost joyful to have a gritty conversation with someone where we co-correct a prior dishonesty. It’s like getting a good crack at a chiropractor. It sounds and feels like you’re breaking something but then the alignment is so liberating because it correlates to some true inner reality.

If none of these help, then get mad. Remember that after Trump’s debate people were interviewed about their views on his more than 35 bald face lies during the debate. The consensus on the response was that truth was not something they were very interested in, but safety and financial security were. As if you could ever have either without honesty.

If that doesn’t work, get practical. That invisible house of cards is the foundation of our future. If we’re lying about ourselves we’re breaking the integrity of the entire future we are trying to co-create. And we’re likely making ourselves sick. You can’t stay off path, ignoring your cosmic GPS that’s trying to pull you back to your innate truth, for very long, without your physical body wearing down in the fight. Speaking of fight, our truth is the precise fuel the authenticity revolution needs to burn true. And the authenticity revolution is the garden soil the new humanity will and is blooming out of.

If that all feels too big and overwhelming, remember Frankie, my 24 year old child, who is trying to dream a life for themselves that has meaning and goodness in an increasingly dystopian reality.

So they keep it general, they keep it honest, and they say their simple little mantra often

I live with my truth

in love.