What does aligning to your truth actually mean?
What does it feel like?
How do we know with absolute surety that something is essentially True?
I’ve been playing with this amazing new energy tool called the Body Regeneration™ Card Deck and one of the cards in it is called Aligning to Your Truth. This is what it looks like.
I absolutely love this card and it’s imagery.
Since this card deck is a tool to ascertain the energy around or behind (what may be hidden) a certain thing or situation, there is more of a playful check-in, than a tool of divination like a Tarot deck would be.
Until I sat with the energy of this card, I didn’t realize how static my understanding of aligning to my truth actually was.
When my world was created on the basis of good & bad, black & white, right & wrong, I had a rigid and linear understanding of what defined truth and what defined lies.
There is a necessary reorientation process when we realize that neither our inner nor the outer world are linear. This is a bizarre and often upsetting experience, especially when we are new to it.
And it starts with what our source of illumination is.
What Illuminates Your Truth
Imagine that you have lived in a dark basement for your entire life.
And one day, someone walks into this room, and turns on a tube light.
The dark room you called home is now illuminated.
Once your eyes adjust, forms, shapes and colours show up. You have much more information to inform you of your surroundings than you did before. You have choices and preference now. Perhaps you feel more free and empowered than you did before. You previously lived in the darkness of fear and doubt, and now you can see and understand yourself and your environment much better. Your decisions made from this place are also more informed.
If another person walks in and turns off the tube light, you would recognize this state of darkness. You may try to feel your way and turn the light on again.
This analogy is experienced by many in the process being illuminated by the light of realization.
If we apply this analogy to to truth (illumination) and lies (darkness), the we are easily able to tell the difference.
When the room was all dark and someone came in and told you that their skin was green, the table has eleven legs and life always sucks, you may have believed them, because you wouldn’t have known otherwise.
When the room became illuminated by the tube-light and the same person came in making the same claims, you could see, know and discuss this with them, for yourself.
Here, you can look at the person’s skin and say ‘that is not what I believe the colour green to be’ and ‘this table has 4 legs’ because you can see and so you can count. Based on that, you may question the third statement about how life always sucking.
Because you can now see what you previously could not, you are now able to engage at a broader level of consciousness.
Maybe we engage in healthy debate, maybe we get angry because we feel we have been lied to, or maybe we have an existential crisis given this new information that we are now perceiving.
Either way, we now engage we the idea of truth and lies differently. We have to because now we can see and we have to re-orient ourselves to what we are seeing.
The problem is that the tube light is not the ultimate source of Illumination. It is a source, but not The Source.
So, when we find ourselves in the tube-lit room, making life philosophies and building our boundaries and belief systems based on everything we can see, we sometimes ignore all that is beyond our immediate sight. We start building attachments and a new identity and personality structure around this, because we now we know what we previously did not; we like that we know and we don’t like feeling ignorant.
Now imagine that another person walks into your tube-lit room, and pulls back the heavy velvet curtains and opens the doors and windows that you didn’t realize were there.
For the first time, you behold the awesome sunlight in the day, along with radiant moon and star light at night. You feel with your other senses the warmth of day and the coolness of night. Suddenly, your realize everything that the tube-light’s illumination never gave you all this time.
When we are here, we can sometimes feel angry at this sense of falseness of the tube-light. Under the false light, we may have made certain decisions, certain philosophies and belief systems that somehow do not hold true under the light of the Sun and Moon.
Now, we have to go through this re-orientation process yet again.
This is so important and relevant in the times we find ourselves in.
Because if our sense of truth and lies comes solely from one place in outer world, and that one place in the outer world changes it’s tune, then we constantly have to shift our centre of right and wrong to be able to exist in the world. Some of us may fall short and feel left behind, holding archaic things close to our heart, simply because of it’s all the control we can exert. Others of us, may move to keep up with the world on the surface, but live incongruously, hypocritically and out of alignment with our true beliefs and who we truly are.
Interacting with the world from either of these places, gives us relationships that are built on superficiality, fear and inauthenticity. And it is hard when we are here to see that we are anchored and functioning from a place of tube-lights or false-illumination.
I believe that the Source of illumination that allows us to see, perceive and know our Truth that comes from the eternal light of our Spirit and Soul, is the one that keeps us keeps us both stable and able to flow.
Rivers & Reflections
Aside from getting to the Source of Light as described above, I also love the concept of reflection on the river, as illustrated so beautifully on this card.
Truth is like a River.
It is not static, yet it hold constancy.
Rivers have water - that is constant.
The nature, the feel and flow, participation in the evaporation and condensation cycles, the mechanism of rock erosion, the twists and turns of the landscape, the speed and incline of the waters and eventual draining into the sea, those change.
By nature, water reflects back to us - that is also constant.
Yet the changing mood of the water may make it hard to see a crystal clear reflection, so we have to adjust to these changes.
When we float on the River of our Truth, it is a journey that takes us through all sorts of terrain in our lives and, as we are able to reflect at times with great clarity.
For example, have you ever been so bothered by the action (or inaction) of another person? Have you complained about them so much to everyone, only to realize that you actually do the same thing, just in a slightly different way?
It’s very hard on our egos, but there is a powerful learning here. When this happens, we are at a point in our journey, where the water has become still, and under the illumination of our Soul’s light, we can see that this person’s behaviour is reflecting something about ourselves back at us.
Maybe we have to forgive and let something go.
Maybe we have to make a very conscious choice and take inspired action in our own life.
Maybe we have to speak up about something, or show up to the change.
Maybe we have to lay down our fight and nourish ourselves.
And so, aligning to our truth is like a journey down a river with many twists and turns, tides and calms.
It is less about avoiding the lies; rather it is about keeping our little boat upright and strong so that it doesn’t upturn, drown and crash upon rocks.
So, if aligning to our truth is a process, then the obstacles on this journey are not just lies. It is getting caught up in the weeds and not having the skill or strength to navigate out; it could be distraction, navigating with a broken compass, lack of awareness; it could also be arrogance, not paying attention and being upturned because we thought we were fine.
Sometimes we think we know things.
We believe we know what is best for us and for others.
We feel that the world should move according to our desires.
These are all obstacles. Part of flowing along the River of our Truths is that with our skill and courage, an essential surrender is also required in flowing with what we do not and cannot know. This flowing with in surrender to the waves can be very helpful when we need to temper our arrogances and attachments along our journey.
Living Our Lies & Falsehoods
Being lied to absolutely sucks.
But we lie to ourselves all the time and accept it.
Have you ever told yourself that you’re an unworthy and unlovable person?
I have.
That’s a lie, yet many of us hold it as an absolute truth and walk through decades of life believing it. Mapping this to our dark room analogy, we are in total darkness and can see neither the river, nor the boat, nor do we know where we are and why we are here.
Have you ever told yourself and others repeatedly that you deserve more money, a better job and a perfect partner, and have done absolutely nothing to move yourself towards a life where those things are possible? Have you wallowed in inaction and complaining, blaming the world or the past for everything you do not have?
I have.
This is falsehood that we get trapped it, because we are disconnected from where we are in the present moment and the objects of our desire.
Mapping this back to our analogy, we have the desire to take our boat down the river and catch a big fish for our dinner to feed our family. But have not noticed that a storm is brewing. Nor have we taken the time to fix the holes in our boat from past journeys. We can’t actually find the paddles and we also haven’t asked our family if they even want fish. And so, in a sense we doom ourselves into feeling dejected, worthless and inadequate before we even start our task.
Falsehoods to me are more dangerous than lies, because they have a tendency to keep creating that same terrible experiences over and over again. This happens because we do not see our part of the equation. We see what is around us, but not ourselves.
And so, when we finally start aligning to our Truths, we get to reflect on the lies and falsehoods we tell ourselves and upon which we keep experiencing life and creating the same situations unconsciously.
This can feel like trying to crawl your way out of a whirlpool.
It’s rough, but what you learn is to build tremendous discernment. This discernment is needed to right our wrongs and balance ourselves out, as we are learning to refine and clarify the voices and images in our mind.
We are learning to follow our Truest Source of Illumination and stay balanced, discerning and fluid in the movements of life.
I believe it is here that we get to notice in sweet and subtle ways that our Truths are fragments of Universal Truths and there is an unquestionable sense of All-ness and Whole-ness now available to us.
Living Our Truths
I’ve learned that Living Our Truths is rarely a statement.
Like the image of the card, it is a process of staying balanced, reflecting on who we are and how we show up in the world.
In a sense we get to see what we are made of.
Are we the boat that is made of paper that will drown at the slightest wave?
Or are made of finely crafted birch bark?
Is our integrity like paper? Crushable at the sight of a fist?
Or is our vessel lightweight, adaptable and sturdy with the ability to move through torrential waves, twist around tall rocks and angled bends, and able to float gracefully in calmer waters?
How we live our Truth then, isn’t dependent on what we say to people at a gathering. It is simply felt and known by how we exist and it is understood in between our words.
Honesty & strength of character is essential for realizing your own truth. A very tough call for most. I’m sure half d planet has no clue, it’s far more easier to blindly follow d pack, to just exist, not “live” n be “alive”. It needs guts to open your own window, allow d light to shine on you n see what you can make of d life that has been gifted to you. People who break away from crowds, carve their own paths, do their own things, on a singular belief in themselves, their strength and their truth!
Commendable Aarti, loved the depth & concept of real truth 👌👌 🌺 🌹
Requires one to be bold & courageous enough to introspect & try to discover the real truth