Understanding the importance of self-honesty and ramping up how honest you are with yourself – making it an iron-clad habit – will turbocharge your capacity for self-acceptance and real wellness. If the prospect of that scares you, don’t worry because this skill is a struggle for pretty much everybody. People lie to each other all the time, from the most dramatic fabrications down to the smallest fibs. But it’s the white lies we tell ourselves that trip us up on our health journey and hold us back from our personal development. If we can’t be honest with ourselves, it’s impossible for us see the truth we need to accept.
Reality is already complex enough without the compounding, confusing, distorting effect of dishonesty. To accept and connect with your reality, you need to be honest with yourself and about yourself. It requires you to let go of what you may want, dream of, wish to be true, feel is only fair and just or rightfully yours to claim or reclaim. Rather, you need to see exactly what’s there, how you are, who you are, and what you need.
Maybe this means confronting your vulnerability and flaws. Maybe it means coming to terms with your age and acknowledging that you’re coming to your likely last decade. Maybe it means facing the truth that you’re never going to be that famous cricket player you’d so wanted to be. Or maybe it means acknowledging that your chronic health symptoms don’t have a clear diagnosis and you may never get the diagnostic answers and cure-all you’ve been holding out for. Whatever your honest truth, you must face it in order to accept it.
If you want to be well and enjoy a healthy relationship with yourself, then you must learn to accept every aspect of how you are. Self-acceptance sows the seeds for inner peace, calm, and self-compassion. With self-acceptance you can focus effectively on your true needs, and cultivate a non-striving mindset, which is conducive to living with real wellness.
Being honest with yourself not only allows you to work on your self-acceptance but it also enables you to make the most of yourself and grow in strength and character, where and when needed. For as long as you deceive yourself about what you’re doing, how you are, and what you could be doing differently, you’ll never get ground on change. To improve any aspect of yourself and grow, it’s essential to be honest with yourself about the status quo, the starting point. You have to be able to see precisely how things stand and what to amend. You have to be able to turn the spotlight on yourself and your actions and face the consequences.
To effectively resolve problems, you need to deal with the problem honestly. You need to be able to let your guard and defenses down, soften and relax your body, and enquire within: what’s really going on here?
So how is a person to be honest with themself when the truth hurts like a thousand paper cuts? The answer it to face it, accept it and pair it with loving kindness. Use your self-compassion skills to forgive yourself for your humanness. As previously mentioned, you pair the yogic wisdom of ahimsa (loving kindness) with satya (ultimate truth).
The truth is, every one of us can be selfish at times and driven to please ourselves. All of us have moments of weakness and temptation; all of us are susceptible to ageing, disease and disability, and all of us wane occasionally in our discipline and self-control. Don’t be fooled by virtuous appearances or professional masks. Behind the scenes, yogis can be argumentative and obnoxious, and professionals can lack ethics and discipline: I’ve witnessed abominable behaviour from people who are revered by those who come to them for help. In a different vein, plenty of high-functioning adults are silently managing significant mental and physical impairments day in and day out with never a misstep: you’d never guess.
My point is, try not to beat yourself up too much when you notice your standards slip. Don’t expect yourself to be a saint when most of us are far from, and don’t expect yourself to be immune to making mistakes. Do accept the truth that whatever has happened in the past has happened, and whatever or whoever you are is what it is. Whether you want to admit it or not, deep down you know your truth, and being honest with yourself can bring unexpected and immense relief once you begin to accept it all. If you have acted horribly to someone, self-compassionately own it, bravely look at it, courageously face and feel the shame and pain, and breathe into it. It’s okay to make mistakes; that’s only human. But what redeems you is your ability to honestly take stock, repair any damage as best you can, and learn from your mistakes and failures. In fact, these moments need not be a point of shame and personal condemnation; rather they can catapult your personal growth and be your best teachers and worst role models. You won’t know what damage there is without facing the truth of it first, and you won’t be able to come to terms with that truth without self-compassion.
What are you lying about? The truth is painful, and that’s why we lie. Use your self-compassion and radical acceptance skills to stop being avoidant. The sooner you can lovingly accept the truth, the sooner you will reduce your suffering.
