TRUTH
Tell—and Live—the Truth
True intimacy comes from being genuine and expressing yourself with flow, aliveness, and truth (FAT). When flowing and alive, you are more revealed, more real, and more yourself.
You are more spontaneous and genuine as you express yourself without editing—and you are more present and in the moment.
Your expression is more genuine, because it isn’t rehearsed, stilted, edited, or heady. You reflect more of your mind, heart, and spirit. When you add truth to flow and aliveness, you have the formula for intimate, real-time communication.
When you commit to being genuine and telling the truth, you remove barriers to intimacy. There is nothing to hide. You can be truly intimate because you are real, honest, genuine, and revealed. You are able to make deep and essential contact—where you are seen, heard, and known. When two people meet with truth and genuineness, true essential contact occurs. There is no real intimacy when you are fake, lying, withholding, trying to falsely impress someone, or putting a spin on information. You can’t be intimate if you can’t be you.
Truth is the final skill in becoming more “FAT.” Truth is the way to lead a life of integrity, genuineness, freedom, and true intimacy. Before, you were more likely to conform and follow family rules, myths, and beliefs without conscious awareness. For most families, total truth has not been valued or has been harshly judged as mean, messy, unnecessary, rude, or even worse. Most families don’t have the capacity to deal with full, truthful, emotional expression.
Increasing your flow and aliveness is a much better investment in your life, with a greater chance of a return on your investment. As you have been flowing and more alive, you have created more exchanges of energy around you. By adding Truth, you invest in a mutual trust fund!
You are now living and challenging the rules and beliefs that once governed your life. Truth will continue to guide you as you follow your path to being authentic—it is truth that can become your new way of being.
By now, this has provided you with steps to achieve greater truth. You have realized the truth of how your beliefs have been formed through your early attachment experiences. You have seen the truth of how your Matrix was formed and how it influences your thoughts, actions, and behaviors. You have seen the truth of how the degree to which you have individuated and differentiated from your family determines your degree of intimacy in your life now. You have become more honest with yourself about the impact of your family rules, myths, and beliefs on your life. You have begun to speak the truth of your heart as you develop visions for new relationships. You have begun to become aware of withholds and resentments that keep you from becoming more clear and current with others. In the coming weeks, you challenge your beliefs about the opposite sex and see that while they are your beliefs, they are not necessarily the truth.
All these steps are facets of being truthful. You are now living and challenging the rules and beliefs that once governed your life. Truth will continue to guide you as you follow your path to being authentic—it is truth that can become your new way of being.
Think back and review any family rules, myths, and beliefs you had or have about telling the truth. What obstacles or blocks do you have to telling the truth? What are the challenges you face around the truth?
What words and thoughts would actually come out of your mouth if you allowed the truth to flow from you? Think about the things that come out of the mouths of babies! Many times you may shudder or wince at what a child says, yet what they are saying is typically a truth. Parents often discourage children from expressing truth, rather than taking the time to train them in saying it effectively or appropriately. It is time to change the family programming and become more truthful, genuine, and expressive—more real and more intimate with yourself and others.
The journey of truth is likely to create more compassion for yourself, your family, and your past. As you begin to accept more of what is true, you allow more healing, understanding, and acceptance to occur. You begin to see yourself more fully and understand yourself and others better. You begin to see your family more clearly and understand them. You develop more compassion as the truth reveals what was said and done as well as the emotional reasons that spurred the words or actions. It doesn’t mean that you or others should get a “pass” for what has happened, but it can create an opening to allow change and develop a new direction and vision. Without the truth, you will be stuck in your family patterns, destined to unconsciously repeat them, rather than creating new, spontaneous expressions of your true self, abundant in flow and aliveness.
Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But
the Truth
Main Assignment
This assignment is focused on being more authentic, telling more truth, and allowing yourself to be more “FAT” with Flow, Aliveness, and Truth. This is a time to discover how telling truth can result in increasing aliveness and flow and vice versa—how living with more flow and aliveness leads to more truth telling. As you continue to work the assignments this week, remember that you are creating more of the authentic you, challenging your family “past,” and becoming your family “present.” This is the work of a person who intends to have close, genuine, resilient, honest, and intimate relationships. This is the work of someone who is genuine and willing to share themselves with the world—to risk being seen, heard, known, and loved.
A surfer doesn’t catch every wave, but chooses both doable waves and those that present a challenge. The more skill the surfer develops through practice, the bigger the waves that can be tackled. The same can be said for telling the truth. This week, your assignment is to catch and ride more waves of truth to the best of your ability in the moment. Learning to catch those waves consistently and to express more fully and spontaneously is a complex set of skills and takes intention and practice. Truth is a personal journey that will continue throughout your life. Now, start by increasing your willingness and ability to catch and ride more waves of truth.
Many of you may have contact with family and friends celebrating the holidays. Live with flow, aliveness, and truth. Share your feelings, thoughts, opinions, withholds—with a full range of expression! Fully express your gratitude, love, and appreciation. Follow your urges, express yourself fully, live unedited. Give the gift of your presence, not just presents, this year.
Your main assignment this week is to tell the truth of your highest vision to the best of your ability. Give yourself permission to tell the truth, to express yourself genuinely, and to be real. Use this week as an opportunity to come clean with someone, take a risk, share genuinely how you feel, and let your emotional expression match what you feel inside yourself. Use the assignment to become closer to yourself and closer to others.
Very-Able Assignments
Remember, Truth is a main ingredient for intimacy—we all yearn to be closer to others, to be loved. We can’t be loved as ourselves if we never fully share ourselves!
Watch for the times when you want to withhold the truth, or act out of integrity, be fake, put a spin on things, fudge things, or outright lie—there is information for you in those moments. Think about whom you are with, what you are afraid of, what you think would happen if you told the truth, and what consequences there are for you for not telling the truth.
Practice as many of the Very-Able Assignments as you can this week to help you with this assignment. Document what you are learning about yourself in your journal to capture your insights and growth moves.
As you discover the non-truths and half-truths that hold you back from full intimacy, let this week be about how you practice becoming closer by telling the truth. Enjoy the journey of deepening your relationships!
Express Your Withholds and Resentments
Use this week’s assignment of telling the truth to actually express those withholds and resentments. Be aware of your withheld expressions of gratitude or appreciation, stifled feelings, judgments, criticisms, and reactions—this is your week to come clean.
Tell the truth. Get more “current” and up-to-date with your family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances. Flow with aliveness and truth. Express fully and love with an open heart.
What I’m Afraid to Tell You Is… and the Next Thing I’m Afraid to Tell You Is…
With a loved one or close friend, use the sentence stem and take turns completing it. Try to go deeper in your truth telling each round. When you are complete, journal on your feelings, reactions, and thoughts about what it was like to do this exercise.
Truth or Consequences
Take a moment and do a truth survey at the end of each day. Use the Truth Tracker to record your results (or you can use the journal sheet as a place to note your overall expression and withholding of truths in your life). Notice where you were and weren’t truthful. What were the consequences for not being truthful? Look hard and watch how you will want to justify why it was good to not tell the truth. Take some time this week to clean it up, tell the truth where you had not, and accept whatever consequences may be there.
Fact and Feelings—Express Factual Truth with Emotional Honesty
Many times people will tell you a truth, but their emotions are distant. They will tell you, “I am really excited,” or, “I am angry,” in a lifeless voice. It may be factually accurate, but their emotions are not being reflected with it, so it is not emotionally honest. Notice if your feelings are aligned with what you are saying when speaking the truth. Spend a day expressing information with feelings that match! Journal at the end of the day how you felt to be expressing facts and feelings.
Meeting Underbelly to Underbelly
True intimacy comes from being revealed and open, sharing underbelly to underbelly. Allow yourself to be exposed to someone close to you and open up to them being open with you. Experience truth telling and truth receiving.
Express your truth to someone who matters to you and invite them to share their truth back. Allow your vulnerable underbelly to be seen, and see theirs.
Be as vulnerable as you can in that moment. Let your guard down. Let yourself be seen. Feel the space that you create inside of you and between the two of you.
Beware of Stinking Thinking
Remember, stinking thinking is not the truth. Stinking thinking is faulty thinking that masquerades as truth. This week, be aware of when you sink into Stinking Thinking, as it is not in line with your commitment to truth this week. Use Stinkers to call yourself on your stinking thinking. Have some compassion—laugh at yourself. When you put on your deodorant in the morning, imagine putting it on your head to keep you from stinking thinking for the day. :)
Play on the Right Side of the Engagement Continuum
When you are flowing, alive, and truthful, you naturally on the Right Side of the Engagement Continuum. You move from transactional engagement to transformational engagement. This week, be alive and awake, in touch with your feelings, and aware of your yearnings. Express your feelings. Share your yearnings. Be curious about the yearnings of others with whom you are interacting. Take risks. Go “into the woods.” Let yourself express spontaneously. Be willing to get messy. Be real. This is where true intimacy occurs and relationships become transformative!
Celebrate the Holidays with FAT
If you’re with family and friends this week or over the holiday, be conscious of engaging with flow, aliveness, and truth. Make a plan—set up an “if/then”—to share your feelings, thoughts, withholds, opinions, urges, gratitude and love with full expression and presence. Think about the upcoming days and who you intend to see. Be aware of the feelings that may come up around. And make some great plans: If
I’m with _______, then I will… If I am at a Zoom gathering, then I will____... If I am feeling _______, then I will share my feelings... If I am with _________, I will share at least one withheld communication… If I am talking to my father, I will express my gratitude… If someone gives me a gift, then I will receive it graciously and express my thankfulness…
Tell the Truth When You Attend and Invite to Growthful Events
Tell the truth about your visions, goals, intentions, and heartfelt feelings when you invite people to take a step and join your life team. It's a call to embrace the vibrant rhythm of the present, to dance with life's currents and immerse ourselves in the exhilarating now. Remember to paint your visions with honesty, share your goals with unwavering passion, and reveal your intentions with a genuine heart and inspire others to do so with you.
Use the Funnel of Truth
Use the Blue Funnel of Truth to assess your levels of truth in your communications and life. Are you at the level of Blame, Shame, Stinking Thinking, Excuses, Rationalizations, and presenting your false self? Are you sharing factual truths and realities? Are you sharing responsible truths? Or even responsible and heartfelt, communications? At what level of the funnel are you operating? What would it take to travel further down the funnel to deep, heartfelt truth?
Truthful, Meaningful Conversations
Truth is the cornerstone of meaningful, intimate conversations. The more your communications are real and truthful, the more intimacy you can experience. Use the Engagement continuum to assess your communications and experiment more with going to the right of the continuum by sharing truth beyond factuality. Share your feelings, your yearnings, and what really matters to you—the truth from your heart. Keep track of your meaningful conversations this week—building your intimacy skills! Share your journey of truth and ask others to share the journey with you—let them know you’d love them on your life team and that you want to be on theirs.
Relationship Engagement Continuum
Truth Tracker
Truth Tracker (cont.)
Journal Sheet
Use this sheet to journal any and all of your experiences telling deeper truths. What are your feelings, reactions, and thoughts about sharing the truth with others?