Speaking Your Truth: Some Deeper Considerations
In my recent post, The Truth Shall Set You Free, I explored how the use of honesty cultivates harmony between ourselves and our lives, while the use of deception creates discord. It is a simple concept worth considering, as it will help you become more aware of what you are creating in your own life. That’s my intention: to empower you.
Yet when it comes to speaking one’s truth, there are some deeper considerations.
The biggest challenge we face in speaking our truth, is the tendency in our culture to define absolutes. We tend to become very attached to our own perspectives, equating our views with who we are and with the truth of reality.
In the most obvious example, a person can develop a dogmatic or extremist mindset. This is marked by a rigid mentality - where exposure to new information doesn’t broaden one’s perspective, but instead triggers the need to defend it at all costs. People like this will tend to foist their perspectives on others. Their basic motivation is the preservation of their sense of self or their sense of reality, and in the process they are more than willing to diminish others. One could say that this kind of person “speaks their truth” and doesn’t “lie by omission”. And if you read my last article, you might have concluded that I am suggesting that this kind of person creates harmony in life. But I wouldn’t consider this an honest expression of one’s truth. For one, these ‘truths’ are often adopted from external sources. And this kind of expression is unbalanced because it lacks awareness of, or respect for, the simple fact that everyone sees the world from their own perspective.
So, I would like to set the stage with this: We each have an individual perspective and understanding of life. Our individual perspectives are the result of our personal life experiences, as well as our interpretations of those experiences. This means two things:
Everyone’s perspective is valid, and
Everyone’s perspective is different.
Our unique life experiences, combined with our personal interpretations, create intricate inner kaleidoscopes through which each of us view our shared world.
So, even though we tend to define and cling to absolutes, we can recognize that what we see through our individual perspective is NOT ABSOLUTE. This doesn’t negate the possibility of an underlying, unified truth - only that we cannot fully grasp it through the lens of our personal perspectives. When we believe our own perspective is the absolute truth, we automatically assume that other perspectives are wrong. I wrote more about the division this causes in The Woe of Being Right.