“The greatest thing you can do is to tell the truth.”~Benjamin Smythe
“No legacy is so rich as honesty”~William Shakespeare
If you can not find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many great authors and teachers speak about telling the truth. And we all think about the concept of “truth” from a pretty young age, maybe the first time we get surprised by an idea, a person, or an experience that isn’t how we thought it was. We find out the “real” truth.
In the dictionary the word “truth” in English comes from the words “fidelity” and “faithful”. Looking at the word further, it is described as honest, just, steadfast, loyal, legitimate, accurate, typical.
All these words are descriptions of something existing, and then staying the same, holding that pattern. Accuracy even means fitting or forming a standard pattern.
If something moves off a pattern, if it changes from being loyal or faithful to one way, then we think either the new experience is NOT true (doesn’t fit what we’ve known so far) OR the new experience is the REAL truth and we were just not seeing the whole pattern before, we were missing something.
So something difficult happens in our lives. Let’s say we feel physical pain.
Today I was working with a client who had the thought that someone had hurt her physically. We wound up looking at the concept “it hurt”.
When we do the Work the first question is “is it true?”
YES YES YES! With physical pain, boy, that really feels true. I remember how it hurt. I howled, I cried, I had to stop doing what I was doing, I was rushed to the hospital, there was this energy called Pain. And I wanted to make sure to never, ever, ever be in that situation ever again.
I look again at this question to see what it means to ask “is it true?”….. It means I know, absolutely, that when that thing happened, then the sensation that followed, the one I am calling “hurt”, it was accurate, typical, steadfast, honest, legitimate, following a pattern.
Can I really know that it hurt? I’m not sure. I’m calling it “hurt”. What is this thing, this sensation of being hurt?
We use “I got hurt” when describing emotional pain and physical pain. Something came into our world, a person or a freight train or a table corner, and there was a sensation “ouch” and THEN the response was stress: sadness, despair, terror, anger, irritation.
Byron Katie says “pain is always on its way out”.
The thing presents itself and BOOM, BAM, POW, KNOCK, KICK, OUCH and then people are really upset.
What would it be like if I wasn’t so upset about the hurt moment? What if that sensation that I’m calling Pain isn’t quite what I thought? What if I’ve always seen how others react, and it looks terrible, but I haven’t asked myself yet?
Often with Pain and Hurt, which feel so very true, comes the immediate thoughts to avoid it, arrest it, attack it, make it so it never happens again.
Telling the truth about the sensation of pain and hurt is an amazing investigation. It could indeed be the greatest thing you could ever do, speaking from exactly where you are.
Find out what you think will happen next, if you opened to the sensation you are calling “hurt”. Find out if you really can’t stand it. Find out if you really do want to avoid it forever, stop it, shut it down.
What would it be like, to not be Against Pain?
“Both pleasure and pain are projections…after inquiry, the experience of pain changes. The joy that was always beneath the surface of pain is primary now, and the pain is underneath it. People who do the Work stop fearing pain. They relax into it. They watch it come and go, and they see that it always comes and goes at the perfect moment”.
Much Love, Grace