Four Ways to Exercise Your Truth Muscle (and why it's important)

My wife and I recently watched the Oscar-nominated movie Flight.  It's an incredibly powerful and even disturbing story about an airline pilot (played in an Oscar-worthy performance by Denzel Washington) who is forced to come face to face with his own truth--something he's been avoiding his whole life.  Spoiler Alert:  The powerful irony of the movie is illustrated in the final scene where he sits in his prison AA group and remarks that he's never felt this free in his whole life. There is something very liberating that comes from standing in your truth, embracing who you are, owning your strengths and weaknesses, your successes and failures, and being willing to look past your performance to the more foundational issue of core identity.  Where does your true value and worth come from:  the roles you play every day?  The quality of your behavior every day?  Or is there something more grounded and centered and fundamental?

Captain Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) gets those two realities confused.  He's clear on his performance as an airline pilot--he's one of the best in the industry and the story's crisis reveals that truth.  But he has placed his identity exclusively in that role to the exclusion of admitting another truth:  his alcoholism.  And as long as he refuses to stand in that truth, his denial continues placing people, including himself, in painful harm's way.

Captain Whitaker doesn't experience true freedom until he finally embraces the whole truth.

So here are FOUR WAYS TO EXERCISE YOUR TRUTH MUSCLE:

Embrace the whole truth about yourself.

We all have a shadow side--that place that is trying to get heard in order to make sense of life--which often manifests itself in unhealthy, unhelpful ways.

For example, we lash out at and fight with our partners, not because we want to be jerks, but because we want to be heard, we want greater intimacy.  Unfortunately, we've chosen an approach that goes counter to the very thing we're longing for and instead creates greater distance.  We maintain some addictions, not because we want to imprison ourselves in unbreakable chains and create terrible chaos and pain and suffering in our lives and everyone else's, but because we're hungry for belonging, a sense of worth and value, and we desire deeper, more lasting pleasure and intimacy.  Unfortunately, we've chosen an approach that goes counter to the very thing we're longing for and instead creates greater distance and suffering.  We get hooked on unhealthy ways to compensate for our lack--it's quicker, sometimes easier, but far more deeply painful.

But the whole truth is also that we have a light side in us.  We love others with good motives.  We serve others for their own good not just ours.  We develop healthy intimacy with ourselves and others.  We give with unselfish compassion and caring.  We choose delayed gratification at times for the right reasons, in the right places, in the right ways.  We show honor and respect to people, including ourselves.  We affirm and appreciate others, including ourselves.

As the great wisdom traditions describes, we are this mix of yin and yang, shadow and light, healthy and unhealthy motives, ego and soul.  Both sides are a part of us which make up the whole truth.  To deny one for the sake of the other is to cripple the whole.

Honor your Shadow side.

Our shadow side must be acknowledged and honored for what it contributes to us--the understanding of what is trying to be heard from deep within ourselves.  My cry for intimacy, or for wanting to be seen and heard and honored, or for wanting to feel the depths of life and joy and happiness, or for wanting to feel significant is a deeply human hunger and need.  We have to address these desires.  To deny them is to deny our humanness and short-circuit the goal of being fully alive as God intended.  Our goal is to learn how to dig deeper for the most basic ache inside ourselves and then to choose the most effective, healthy ways to satisfy it.

Genuine satisfaction can not be experienced until the deepest, most true hunger is identified.

How would you describe your shadow side?  How does it manifest itself?  What is your shadow saying about what's most important to you?

By being willing to embrace your shadow and listen to it, your honoring it will facilitate your experience of your whole truth.

Learn from your Hungers.

Hungers are not bad.  Even Jesus affirmed and blessed hunger when he said in the Beatitudes, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied."  (Matthew 5:6)

Having hungers is not bad.  Acknowledging them is a part of wisdom.  Understanding them leads to wholeness.

The hunger that has the most satisfaction and fulfillment, says Jesus, is the hunger for what is right, true, noble, pure, just, helpful, loving, compassionate, hopeful.  Hunger, which is the deepest, truest form of desire and want, is what must be honored and embraced.

So what do you learn about yourself from your hungers and desires?  What values do your hungers reveal are most important to you?  How do your hungers correspond to the above list of what Jesus calls the most satisfying?  What is it that you really, really, really want and how does that specific truth inform you about your whole truth?

Practice.

One of the powerful paradigms in the 12 Step Recovery program is the insistence on standing in your truth, the whole truth, and practicing it relentlessly.  That means refusing to deny the addiction and what it means to you; refusing to live in dishonesty; agreeing to name your shadow daily.  And it also means working hard to embrace the other side of your truth--learning how to feed the light side, live in it more completely and honestly, stepping into regular practices and behaviors that reinforce that part of the truth.

What are the practices you've developed that reinforce and solidify your experience of your truth?  Do you have daily mantras and inspirational readings that reinforce your truth?  Do you pray and meditate on it?  Do you finds creative ways to serve and give to others from a place of unselfish compassion?  Do you engage in self affirmations about who you really are, your true identity as a deeply loved and fully accepted human being by God?

In the end, as Jesus once observed, it is only the truth that sets us free.  Captain Whip Whitaker experienced that in a very dramatic way.  You and I can experience it in our own ways.  The nature of truth is that when it is honestly embraced, it is the most truly liberating and empowering experience on earth.

Is There More To Life Than What You See?

There's a profound dynamic to sailing that goes beyond the scale of the boat, the engineering, the rigging, all the equipment that helps the boat go fast and stable, that goes beyond even the condition of the water and even the crew.  It is in fact, ironically enough, that which cannot be seen.  And without it, there would be no sailing.  Figured out what it is? Exactly.  Wind.  It's the whole force behind sailing.  You can't see it.  You can only feel it and notice its impact.  And believe me, it's quite a force to be reckoned with.  I've at times cursed it and hailed it (depending of course how well I'm doing leveraging it).  And I've been deathly afraid of it (when my boat appeared to be "going down" in the storm).  All of these responses to something you can't even see - but obviously acknowledge is there.

There's an intriguing spiritual dimension to this reality.  And of all people to acknowledge it is Christopher Hitchens, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, most known for his self-proclaimed role as one of the New Atheists called to debunk the world of religion and religious thought, as most recently revealed in his manifesto book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  His primary sparring partners tend to be religious conservatives and apologists for fundamentalism.

In a recent interview with a liberal Christian minister he made some surprising philosophical and spiritual observations of sharing a mutual appreciation for "the transcendent" and "the numinous" (which literally means, "surpassing comprehension or understanding; mysterious; filled with or characterized by a sense of a supernatural presence: a numinous place; Spiritually elevated; sublime"):  terms that Hitchens himself introduced into the conversation, not vice versa.

When asked about this, he commented:

"It's innate in us to be overawed by certain moments, say, at evening on a mountaintop or sunset on the boundaries of the ocean. Or, in my case, looking through the Hubble telescope at those extraordinary pictures. We have a sense of awe and wonder at something beyond ourselves, and so we should, because our own lives are very transient and insignificant. That's the numinous, and there's enough wonder in the natural world without any resort to the supernatural being required."

And then he surprisingly took it one step further.  "Everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there's more to life than just matter." More to life than just what you can see?

This is quite a profound observation from a person who has refused to embrace acceptance of anything supernatural.  More to life than just matter? Is Hitchens really saying what he seems to be saying here, that "the numinous" refers to the sense that there's something more to our existence than just the material world?

The ancient Hebrews (in Jewish scripture) had no problem acknowledging this reality.  In fact, to them, the scriptures never talked about "spiritual life."  Spirituality was NOT simply one of several aspects of life.  All of life was Sacred, God-breathed, infused with divine wonder and awe.  So they talked about only life.  As my friend Samir Selmanovic points out (in his book It's Really All About God), "the Hebrews loved both God and life.  Obeying God meant being fully human, with every fiber of one's being alive.  One could not experience one without the other...To tune in to human life is to tune in to God.  Existence itself is a sacred place."

There's more to life than just matter.  There's a Spirit to all life.  So embracing life deeply and passionately is a highly spiritual practice.  And historically (among spiritual traditions), this practice has been called "worship."  Living life with a sense that life is sacred, intentionally giving value to life and the Giver of life, embracing the awe and wonder that there is More than simply our existence, that there is a Life Force that flows all around us and in us and through us.  Worship is the spiritual practice of embracing God and showing value to the Divine life.

There's more to life than just matter - worship - embracing "the transcendent" and the "numinous" - giving honor to Life.  Renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens acknowledges this reality (in his own way).  I definitely concur.

In the spiritual community in San Francisco I'm a part of, Second Wind's "W" core value (in our core values acronymn S.E.C.O.N.D. W.I.N.D.) stands for "W.orship."  It's a desire to value living life with a sense of the divine, learning the art of living all of life as sacred, embracing the worldview (as Einstein pointed out) that the Universe is in fact "friendly," that God is the ultimate Force of love and compassion and goodness.  So we're trying to find meaningful and intentional ways to live out this value and important paradigm.  We think this value will empower us to love extravagantly and serve unselfishly to make this world a better place.

And in the end, isn't there something centering and grounding to sense that there is more to life than just matter?  That, as my friends in AA are so wise to regularly affirm, there's a Higher Power beyond myself, greater than myself, that nourishes and sustains and empowers my life toward greater self responsibility leading to wholeness and transformation?

When it comes to sailing, I can tell you that the most effective sailors are those that not only acknowledge the wind but learn how to live with it well, who embrace it and honor it and respect it - who learn the art of leaning into it.

What would it look like in tangible terms for you to embrace this core value, to affirm that there is more to life than matter and what you can see?  How would it impact your daily existence, your relationships, your concerns, your hopes and dreams?  What are specific ways you tend to show deeper value for Life, to carve out space to acknowledge and pay attention and affirm the Sacred in life?  When is the last time you actually thought about there being a Power greater than yourself and expressed respect and honor for It?