Honesty is Essential for Our Growth
Someone I work with recently asked me, since one of the precepts that we work with is for him to own and feel his feelings, if there were any feelings that he shouldn’t feel. This opened up an interesting discussion about feelings and feeling states.
Feelings, when owned and appropriately expressed, pass through us freely and our energy moves on. However, some feelings become stuck, endlessly recycling and we’re unable to shift them. Anger, for instance, can pass through us like a storm when appropriately expressed, but sometimes it can become a rage that we can’t seem to clear or lay to rest. Often, this feeling of anger-rage can be accompanied by other feelings of impotence, resentment and a wish to punish the person we’re angry at. We can’t process and clear this feeling state, because there is something beneath it that is keeping it in place. We have to consciously step out of it.
We can often make the mistake of thinking that once we step out of a feeling state that we’ve dealt with it, but actually this is only the first, albeit important, step to working with it. We then need to take a look at why this feeling state was triggered, what dynamic, belief or set of beliefs about our self or the world gave rise to it. If we don’t look at that, it is likely to get triggered time and time again. Indeed, it probably will get triggered time and time again, even when we’re investigating it! However, each time it happens, we have the opportunity to work with the dynamic or set of beliefs and become more skilled at stepping out of it and eventually avoid it being triggered in the first place.
This discussion led me to reflect upon how essential honesty is to our growth. Put another way, without honesty we can’t really grow. To grow and to change we first have to acknowledge and accept where we are. This might involve owning feelings that we think we shouldn’t feel or fear are evidence that we are essentially a ‘bad’ person. As human beings, we have a full range of emotions, from dark to light. The only way that we can really have creative mastery over our emotions is by becoming acquainted with them all. If we block certain emotions we are likely to act out of them in a negative way. This can further convince us that we are essentially ‘bad’. We don’t always need to express what we’re feeling to other people, but it is important to find a way to express it to our self.
Honesty is key for building trust, whether that is trusting our self, being trustworthy or trusting another. Trust involves a reliance upon an ever-changing stream of information that we receive from our self and the world. If we are not emotionally honest with our self, the information that we receive will be faulty and so will our trust. Dishonesty erodes trust.
When involved in metaphysics and spirituality, dishonesty will either block us from connecting with other levels of reality or will distort our experience of them. Unfortunately, sometimes we can have the attitude that now that we’ve opened up to these other realms we’ve somehow moved beyond the need to deal with the ‘psychological stuff’. We then neglect our emotional processes and dishonesty creeps in – not to mention our Ego! Our Ego can become highly destructive when it takes on things it’s not designed to handle. For our metaphysics and spirituality to become integrated, we need to pay attention to all levels of our consciousness.
Honesty can help release us from where we are blocked in our life. It can help us to grow. It is essential for building trust. Honesty can help us to create a solid foundation from which to explore other realms of our consciousness safely and productively.
Leigh Osborne, Copyright November 2017
To discover ways of developing your emotional honesty, take a look at my one-to-one and workshop pages.