Speaking Your Truth

We've all heard the term 'speaking your truth'. It means to say what we feel in our heart, no matter how many roadblocks our fears and habits set before us.

Speaking our truth is hard for some and easy for others. It all depends on what parameters we set for ourselves as we enter the Game of Free Choice on Planet Earth, and how much work we've done on our path of personal growth.

Here's what Story Waters had to say on this subject:

Story Waters Thought for the Day Oct 3, 2009:

It is time to meet and play with your unexpressed self - the unspoken self, contained within. Learn to notice when you feel inhibited or self-conscious as a signpost to your fear. Transform unspoken fear into freedom through speaking what you fear to speak. Cease to contain yourself and simply be yourself in free expression. Be uncontainable.

He clarified further with this comment:

Sometimes speaking your truth is going to hurt other people deeply. Learning the ability to express these personal truths with love, clarity, and without manipulation is the best we can do in these situations, but even within that what is said must still match what is felt to be authentic.

To be whole we must embrace what we feel, light and dark. To choose to not upset people rather then speak what you feel is a totally valid choice for life - it is not however what I choose for myself. Please take what resonates and leave the rest.

For the Indigos among us, speaking our truth is like 'duh!' .. it comes easily and naturally for them, and they don't much care who gets hurt when they speak. They're wired to know that it's not their responsibility to manage how their comments land, it only matters that they speak them. Their job is to teach us to manage our own responses to their bluntness, to take responsibility for how we feel when someone speaks to us, to help us take our own power back. They may appear brazen at times, but that's on purpose, they incarnated with those skills to help us learn about ourselves and grow to be more like them.

The lesson for Indigos is different than for the rest of us - their task is to learn how to 'soften the blow' so to speak, of their communications, to recognize when it's time to pull out the stops and just express, and when to stand back a little bit, see the bigger picture, to speak their full truth but to do so compassionately.

For most us, speaking our truth is sometimes easy and sometimes difficult. If we care how others feel about what we say, we will we clam up or only say part of what we want to say when we see or expect that the response to what we want to say will be negative (hurt, anger, upset, guilt, belittling, recrimination, retaliation or even revenge). In doing that we allow our fear to dictate what we say (and do). If we don't care about how others feel, then it becomes easy to say what's in our heart. Not caring doesn't necessarily mean cold-hearted, it can mean that we've learned that it is each listener's responsibility to determine how they feel about what is said, that's not the messenger's responsibility.

For those of us with a Life Lesson of Truth*, speaking our truth is the hardest of all 'lessons' to learn. Those with such a life lesson set their current life up to give them numerous opportunities to move through the fear of speaking their truth. The opportunities are set in early childhood either to mimic fears carried over from other lifetimes, or to experience such fears and conquer (acknowledge, accept, appreciate, love, and then release) them. If you have a life lesson of truth, it's more important than ever that you walk through your fears and allow yourself to speak and act in accordance with what is in your heart. If someone gets hurt by your words or actions then they do, but know that it's their responsibility to discover why what is said to them affects them in a negative way, not yours. Your responsibility is to say and do what's there in your heart to be said and done.

For all of us, no matter how we are 'wired', we can learn to speak our truth and present those words in such a way that empowers others instead of disempowering them. That is perhaps the hardest skill to develop, but well worth working at.

* For more on Life Lessons see "Spiritual Psychology: The Twelve Primary Life Lessons" by Steve Rother.