Personal Reflections On the Courage to Choose Unpleasant Truths Over Comforting Lies

Please know that I share this with humility and compassion. There is no way that I would me versus them with this one, or even try to point to myself as someone who has always chosen truth over comforting lies - because that would be a lie. Instead, I own that throughout my life there are times when I resist truth, I resist seeing with new eyes and opening my mind and heart more deeply. Instead I go with "comforting lies." 

What I have also been learning over the past many years is that it takes courage, humility, support, a fierce commitment to truth, and the capacity to let go and to stay open in order to loosen ourselves from our stuck places, our places of ignorance, our blind spots and places where we are indoctrinated into certain belief systems that may end up causing more harm than healing for ourselves and others and this beautiful world we share. 

Now, at nearly 66, I can say - and following much initial resistance and fear - that I have pinched my nose and jumped off the cliff into a new great unknown many times. This happened when I first began to learn about addiction and discovered that it was not true that I didn't know any alcoholics. Turns out that most of the people I was close with were indeed alcoholic - and last but not least, ME!... Then 9-11 happened and I began to pursue why in the hell we were attacked because I just knew it was not because "they hate us for our freedoms." But I had no idea why. Now, over 15 years later, I have discovered huge places of ignorance and false belief systems and untrue stories that I had previously held as being real for much of my life. 

And there are the lessons about attachment and putting personalities before principles. I did this when my thinking was black/white, good/bad, and I had bought into Democrats = good and Republicans = bad. So I had resisted seeing how Obama was actually betraying his campaign promises and betraying all of us in some significant ways, and all this after I had worked so hard to get him elected. I believed in the changes he promised. And on and on. 

There are so many other examples of great "growth opportunities" that I have ultimately seized after first being swept up in my own blind spots and biases and distortions of reality. First I have often had to endure being stuck - and not knowing it - in the prison of my limiting belief systems. Gratefully, a power greater than my smaller self has graced my life again and again and I have been ultimately able to recognize when it is time to open a new door. 

What I have also discovered is that life is an extraordinary journey when we surrender over and over and over again what we believe to be true and instead stay open to those moments when we are offered the opportunity we need to learn something more, something new, something our blind spots and our wounds and our fears and our biases didn't let us see before. Yet, there is always this new moment ripe with the potential of new discovery and what it is that we've been missing. 

The connecting thread that I have discovered with each new doorway, each invitation to go deeper, each new experience of embracing "uncomfortable truths" is that all offer some way in which we can grow in love. That's the bottom line. The "comforting lies" stunt our capacity for love. Embracing uncomfortable truths is often the doorway into deepening our capacity for wholeness, wisdom, connection, compassion and love.

Living with courage, humility, openness, vulnerability and the willingness to again and again pinch our noses and jump into a great new unknown is not only worth it, it is the only way to truly live. Uncomfortable truths often hold life's greatest gifts. At least, this has been my experience. 

Bless us all on our journeys.  Molly