The Basis for Telling the Truth

“You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of! That is the basis for telling the truth.”  I have thought about this quote from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche a lot since I first read it a couple years ago.  Shame is such a really terrible feeling—that feeling of wanting or needing to hide or disappear or not exist.  It feels terrible and also makes it very difficult to do anything, especially anything that won’t end up resulting in more shame. 

Our topic of the month at Samarya is satya, the practice of truthfulness (which got me back thinking about this quote again).  How do we practice telling the truth (inside and outside)?  It seems like what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche is pointing at is that not telling the truth is a symptom of a bigger root problem, which is shame.  The reason I don’t tell the truth to someone else or to myself is that I think the truth is not okay, so I have to hide it, hide me.  Can you imagine what it would be like to feel like there is nothing to hide?  No beating around the bush, no side-stepping, no spin?  It sounds pretty good to me.

Now, I’m not advocating that we should just walk around saying everything that comes into our minds.  But I think being able to acknowledge reality in my own self feels pretty good and when I am able to do that, I tend to have more clarity about what is useful or not useful to say out loud to other people.

It sure seems like a lot of yoga comes back around to this same idea (at least for me) that most (if not all) of our suffering comes from thinking things should be different than they are.

The big one for me lately is my relationship.  I have been married for almost three and a half years and it is really hard.  It seems like in our culture, it’s okay to talk about the tribulations of marriage if you are doing it in a stand-up comic sort of way, but otherwise, it’s supposed to be nice.  I know intellectually that everything in life has easy parts and hard parts, upsides and downsides, but I have had to do a lot of work to get okay with admitting that things aren’t great.  There has been shame that I am a yoga teacher and therapist and I haven’t done a better job.  And I see without a doubt that when I am denying the truth because it feels too embarrassing or scary to look at, it makes things worse.  I can’t actually work on understanding or changing anything because I’m too busy pretending it is fine.

So, as we’re getting 2012 started, maybe you can think of a shame that you are ready to let go of.  Go ahead, give it a try.  Lighten your load.