The Truthtellers Path
Finding and Speaking your Truth in a World that Wants you to Shut Up.
All of us walking an awakening path are truthtellers. It comes with the territory of waking up from the ‘patriarchal trance’, and beginning to live with your heart and all 3 eyes wide open. Once this process begins to unfold, it becomes virtually impossible not to speak your truth. But truth telling, like many of life’s Phase 2 endeavours, is by no means always easy, nor is it often that welcome, in a world invested in us staying quiet. It is in fact most inconvenient if you and your 3 big eyes start seeing clearly beyond the illusion, and then opening your equally big mouth and speaking up about it. The nerve!
It reminds me of Hans Christian Anderson’s famous folktale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, which most of us know. In essence it’s the story of a vain and spoilt Emperor being fooled into believing that his new royal garments were invisible to stupid people, when in fact there were no fancy clothes, he was buck naked. Most of his loyal subjects pretended otherwise however, for fear of being seen as foolish themselves, or facing the wrath of the Emperor. Until of course, along comes the truth telling child, who points out the bleeding obvious – all together now - ‘the Emperor is NAKED!’
Innocent Truth
Well, that’s us my fellow Soul Pilgrims. Like the child in the story, we are truthtellers the lot of us, whether we like it or not! If you think about it, we all start our human journey by telling the truth. Babies are probably the most honest creatures you will ever meet, pooing, weeing and wailing their truth, without hesitation. Small children are the same. They haven’t had that stolen from them yet. The other day my youngest grandson, who is 4, came into the loo with me, and looking at me sitting on the loo, he said, in complete innocence and without any malice, ‘Your bum is too big for that loo seat nanny’. And it was. Truth.
Slowly but surely this kind of innocent truth telling starts to fade for most of us, as we learn how to lie, deny or hide our truth, in order to be accepted and to belong. This is especially true for us women. We tend to swallow our truth, and sadly over time this can make us really sick, both physically and mentally. The number of women I have worked with over the years who have throat issues, from swallowing their truth. Sore throats, tonsillitis, laryngitis, you name it. Even their voices can become constricted, high pitched and ‘tight’, from all the effort it takes to desperately clamp hold of decades of swallowed truths that are trying to break free. And of course who can blame us women for doing this?! Because we all know what happened historically to women who dared to speak up and live their truth.