On Truth, Darkness, Joy, & Critique

 "LIVE YOUR TRUTH." I think most of us have heard this phrase, and, if you are anything like me, the first time you heard it, it went in one ear and out the other… “what exactly does this mean?”

LIVING YOUR TRUTH AS FOLLOWING YOUR JOY

For me there is an intimate relationship between the catchphrase, “live your truth,” and the catchphrase, “follow your joy.” The two are inextricably linked. 

What does it mean to follow your joy? It means to, in every moment, ask yourself, “what thing will bring me the greatest joy right now?” And not just to ask, to do that exact thing (providing it doesn't cause any harm, but true joy is NEVER derived from the pain of another). 

To follow your joy means that you liberate yourself of all notions of your egoic self. You let go of any societal habits or traditions that you have previous done out of obligation and fear and replace them with the things that bring you energy and aliveness. It means saying, “no” to everything you genuinely do not want to do; it means being bold enough to do the work that brings you joy and not necessarily the work that brings you prestige or money; it means risking judgement and critique from others, for the sake of a richer life (more on this later). 

It is the most illogical thing, but most people I know (myself included for a very long time) are genuinely fearful of following their joy. They think, “if I do what makes me happy, everything will fall apart.” This fear, like all fears, is nonsense. “Fear is a liar,” I can’t repeat this enough times!

When you follow your joy it is almost impossible that everything will fall apart, this is true because of the law of attraction. When you are in a state of joy and happiness what do you attract? That’s right, joy and happiness! Therefore, when you “follow your joy,” you don’t create destruction you create MORE JOY AND MORE HAPPINESS (and probably some abundance too). It is honestly like magic. 

How do you know you’re following your joy? You feel alive, you feel like a child again, your heart is filled with love, your interactions with others improve, your interactions with self are radically transformed, and you may notice mental/physical/spiritual healing. 

Following your joy is, in some sense, a fast track to connecting with your higher self because the things that fill you with joy are soul-level callings. In listening in for signals of what brings you this sense of aliveness, you are innately learning to trust your intuition and feel your higher self!

This is amazing!! And it’s all in the sake of happiness.

LIVING YOUR TRUTH AS OWNING YOUR DARKNESS

I think on some level, most of us see the link between living our truth and following our joy. However, there are other elements to living one’s truth besides “following joy.” I have found these other elements to be EVEN MORE TRANSFORMATIVE than living one’s joy, if you can imagine that possibility. 

I will admit to a current obsession with integrating and mediating dichotomies of self… with that said, there is darkness and light within each and every one of us. Most people have an easier time owning their light than their darkness. Holistic transformation, however, asks us to love our darkness… “say what?!”

Yes, love your darkness, your ugliness, your anger, your guilt, your hatred, your mistakes, your faults, your...everything…. love your everything… “but how?”

Around age 18 I discovered a very helpful psychology-inspired conflict-management tool called, “disarming the critic.” The basic premise of this is that when someone tries to activate your ego-based anger by criticizing you, saying, for example, “you are ugly,” you completely disarm them by saying, “you are correct, I am ugly.” 

Most people will stop at this point, but someone truly determined to hurt you (aka someone who is hurting inside because… they are not living their own truth) may continue, saying something like, “you see, you are so dumb, you agreed to what I said, “ to which you would reply, “you are correct, I am dumb.”

...I think you get the idea. 

Now, I am not claiming any deep spiritual truth in this tool of disarming the critic, what I am claiming is that there is a relationship between the transformational power of “disarming the critic” and the transformational power of “living your truth” ESPECIALLY when the critic you are disarming is your self, by which I mean “your ego,” (because your higher self does not criticize)! 

There are truths about every single one of us which we genuinely believe are heinous...too heinous to be accepted by other people. In response to our self-judgment of these truths, we expend ENORMOUS energy trying to hide them from the world. These truths may be about our sexuality, our bodies, our family, our eating habits, our financial reality, our health, our professional life, or any other number of topics. The actual topic is not important because there is absolutely nothing that cannot be accepted from a place of love and standpoint of truth. 

For myself and many of my friends, our spiritual calling was one of these truths that we hid from the world out of fear others could not accept it, that we would be judged as “witches” or dark-energy workers, or that we would simply be considered “crazy” and become outcast from society. It begs mentioning once again that… FEAR IS A LIAR!!!!!!!!

There are a shocking number of light-workers who practice daily...light-workers who radically transform the experience of others... and who hide their work from their friends and family. “My parents will never understand,” they say. It’s true, people may not understand your truth, but they will understand your authenticity. And, your authenticity will set them free. It isn't the content of your truth that is important, it is the spirit of it.

Say what you think you cannot say. Do what you think you cannot do. In doing so you will free up all that energy you have been using to hide your truth from the world. This energy will feed you in ways you probably cannot yet comprehend.

I live part-time in the academic world now, which is a very 3D world indeed. I was a bit uncomfortable returning to this world, having changed my trajectory so dramatically since I was last here. I was afraid (yes, fear strikes again) of the questions, “What are your professional goals? What do you hope to do after graduation?”

I was afraid of these questions because I was actively working to hide the truth of them. Then I reminded myself that “fear is a liar,” and I looked into the face of the first faculty member who asked me this question and said, “I want to be a light-worker.” Yes, for a moment, he was uncomfortable. I saw it. I felt it.

Then the moment passed, and he adjusted and integrated the new reality into his experience and we went on to have one of the most profound conversations about the human experience that I’ve ever had in an academic setting. And, it is very likely this conversation will become my thesis, and possibly book. What is more important, though, is that by facing my fear, I took all power away from it. Where there once was anxiety, fear, and self-judgment, there now resides power, love, and an out-of-this world energy around being on my path and yes, “owning my truth.”

It is, in one word, freedom.

LIVING YOUR TRUTH AS RECOGNIZING THE TRUTH OF OTHERS

Something amazing happens when you live your truth consistently… you begin to be able to recognize the truth of other people.  This isn't a subtle gift; this is a gift that will transform your experience.

When you stop deceiving yourself you can no longer be deceived by others. You will begin to see the darkness and light of other people for exactly what they are, darkness and light. As you hone your personal truth-know-er you begin to be able to apply this to others. Suddenly, you can see when they are out of alignment with themselves. I find this of particularly transformative nature when applied to “the critic.” 

I have some deeply held beliefs about critique. 

One comes from my academic artistic and creative background in which I was taught to ignore the pain of critique and face my critics head-on, knowing that they held a sort of “secret power” to improve my creative work... if only I could overcome ego enough to embrace their critiques. Overtime I became overly good at this “important academic skill” to the point of denying my own creative truth (more on this below). 

Another deeply held belief I internalized about critique was a belief popularized by the late Randy Pausch, “your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care.” 

There is a felt truth in both of these beliefs about critique. That felt-truth could be summed up by saying something like, “your critics love you enough to want to make you better.” We feel this. My deep place of knowing says, “yes...this is true,” with a special-qualifier, “sometimes.” 

Critique has provided a magical place of self-exploration and truth-making for me in the past several weeks. At my current state-of-awareness, almost no critique feels good... let me be clear about that. However, the fact that all critique feels bad is actually a gift. The fact that all critique feels bad means that I must look inside each time I am presented with a critique of my “self” and ask, “is this truth?” 

When someone presents you with a critique that hurts, but is nevertheless truth, and you go inside and ask yourself, “is this true” and the answer that comes back, through the pain, is “yes,” you are presented with an amazing opportunity to own your truth! Take this opportunity to set yourself free. 

If someone says, for example, that you hurt them, or misguided them, and you did...don’t run from your darkness, embrace it! 

IT IS OKAY TO MAKE MISTAKES. IT IS OKAY TO HAVE DARKNESS 

We are human. This is part of the human experience. The best thing you can do for yourself, and everyone you know, is to love yourself enough not to run away from your darkness… to love yourself enough to show vulnerability, and to own your darkness as a beautiful part of what makes you who you are.

This is all well and good, but I've spent the past several weeks grappling with a different question, the question of what to do when we consult our truth meter and discover our critics are not coming from a place of love. 

As humans, I feel we are often taught to respect the opinions of others at the expense of our own knowing and truth. This is what I was getting at when I discussed the example of creative and artistic critique above. 

For me, my greatest source of present critics can be found on YouTube; it is amazing how much freer people are with critique when they are not accountable to their words.

Since the beginning, the approval rating for my channel with Christopher has been about 99/1, 99 loving supporters for every one outspoken critic. You would think I would be overjoyed about this. I wish I could say I was. The truth is, this 1% has been the source of my deepest pain as of late. Their abrasive words have caused tears, self-doubt, and brief periods of hopelessness. This is one of the truths I hid from the world for months, until I finally shared this deep pain with Chris last week.

When I looked into this 1%, I found a small minority of critics acting from a place of love. These light-workers, whose words were nevertheless painful to the ego, did have best-intentions in mind. They were trying to help, most of them focusing on the distinction between, “relationship" and "union,” a distinction we did not first recognize in the early days of our production, but one that has since radically transformed our connection and experience in the world… that’s how you know truth, it transforms you!

This, ultimately,  led me to ask these big questions about the nature of “living one’s truth.” What I realized, in this quest, is that not all critics are telling you, “they still love you and care,” some critics are simply telling you they still, “hate themselves and don’t want you to be happy.” Only by exercising your own inner knowing and self-truth can you distinguish those coming from a place of love and those coming from a place of fear; this distinction is critical.

The others, whose hatred I initially tried to respond as a mechanism for “improving my work” (as I was taught in my creative studies) are those who I allowed to cause my enormous pain. Had I initially asked myself, “is this truth,” and allowed my place of knowing to respond, as opposed to my head (my place of fear) I would have realized these critiques came from a place of hatred before trying to respect them by matching my vibration to them, which hurt because hatred is not aligned with my truth… hatred is not aligned with anyone’s truth!

When you go inside, consult your truth, and it tells you something is not right. Trust it.

After much contemplation about the nature of truth, I’ve learned to remove these people who “fake truth” from my experience. 

To "release all that no longer serves you,” is an IMMENSELY POWERFUL practice. 

There is no one who operates from a place of hatred and also deserves a place in your experience, regardless of their relationship to you. It is not wrong to delete/block/report someone who expresses hatred by attacking your truth. Failing to do just that is a subjugation of yourself and your truth.

Live Your Truth 

Follow Your Joy 

Own Your Darkness  

Embrace Your Loving Critics

& Release All Those Who Hatefully Attack Your Experience 

This is the way to love, to aliveness, to enlightenment.  

This is the way to you.

ON STORIES. Honor, Release, Repeat

Get Inspired, Aura and Soul Psychology Facebook Page 

If you've spent a little time in spiritual communities or even light-filled secular communities, like those of Oprah Winfrey and, more notably, Brené Brown, you've probably noticed a lot of talk about stories. What you might have also noticed is a paradoxical positioning of "the story of oneself" as either "helpful" or "destructive" depending which  community you consult. 

If you are like me, and you consult both communities, things can get a little confusing! :)

THE HEALING PROPERTIES OF TELLING YOUR STORY 

Academic and journalistic figures, like Oprah and  Brené Brown, have been very progressive in their quest to advocate for the healing power of telling our true and authentic life stories. Both women have built super-empowering enterprises and, quite honestly, movements on the concept of telling your story, which I might add fits nicely into the spiritual adage of "facing your darkness" as a mechanism for "standing in your truth." 

In all honesty, the philosophies of Oprah and Brené  Brown resonate with me on a very deep level.

Certainly, it is the power of telling ones true story that initially motivated me to found this blog, and indeed my YouTube channel, which I created long before I ever wrote on spiritual topics or met my twin flame. In all reality, I am living proof of the fundamental truth that telling our real story, in it's full authenticity, is not only liberating, it is healing. 

My collection of Peace Corps "Vlogs Uncensored," however small, set me free from the shackles of my Peace Corps experience. Talking through some of the abuse I witnessed and experienced... being heard for my truth... stopped almost all my symptoms of the PTSD I was diagnosed with when my service end. It was truly amazing. After sharing my truth, suddenly the incessant thoughts, the nightmares, and the startle-response all disappeared.  There is no doubt at all; I healed from sharing my story! 


THE DESTRUCTIVE PROPERTIES OF TELLING YOUR STORY 

What is amazingly interesting to me is that while holding the belief that "telling your story" can set you free, I've also managed to hold just as powerful of a belief that the only way to true freedom is to leave your story behind. Ultimately, this represents the metaphysical/spiritual/"New Age" belief that, in order to achieve enlightenment, one must dis-identify with her/his story... in all of its many forms.

This spiritual perspective contains a lot of veracity. It is derived from the very VERY deep truth that we create our own reality (this is where the concept of visualization comes from). Indeed, what we think-- and what we say (to both ourself and others) repeatedly -- are heard by the universe and are actually re-created, re-manifested, in our present life. This is akin to the maxim, "what you focus on grows." 

If "what you focus on grows," than telling a story in which you are a victim becomes extremely dangerous. Right?

Have you ever heard a story that goes anything like this? 

"When I was a child, I grew up in this unfortunate circumstance, and then this happened to me which caused this bad thing to happen to me, which led this person to mistreat me, which led to this stroke of bad luck, which caused me this pain, which led to fear, which led me to this destructive behavior/experience/relationship that I have today."

And what have you noticed about people who tell this story? Have you noticed that they are overwhelmed with happiness and joy which bubbles over in everything they do? Have you noticed they are filled with self-love and live truly beautiful lives of prosperity and abundance? 

Most likely not! You have most likely noticed that these people, who choose to see their lives in a negative light, and who focus energy on feeling victimized, are still constantly put in situations in which they are the victim. 

It's not to down-play their real or perceived victim-hood, only to suggest that, by choosing to focus on being a victim, and by concentrating so much energy on their sad story about their lives, these people are actually creating more of it... more back luck, more abuse, more situations in which they are victim. 

There is no way around it, we create our own reality. Eleanor Roosevelt was on to a HUGE truth when she said, "no one can make you feel inferior without your consent."  

So what is one to do to live a beautiful life? Well, spiritual proponents suggest we should release our story... that we would benefit immensely from not identifying with any story, small or large, that revolves around a tale in which somehow we were victimized. 

I will admit... this is not an easy thing to do! Imagine living the rest of your life without ever discussing any of your experiences in a way that made it seem that something wrong was done to you. 

Could you do it? How much of what you say and think now would have to disappear? Would you have to fundamentally change your personality to accommodate this new way of being? Are you ready to take responsibility for the creation of absolutely every experience in your life?  


HONORING AND RELEASING YOUR STORY 

You might not believe in magic, but do you know the true meaning of the word abracadabra? It isn't just a fun phrase from Disney movies. It literally means, "I create as I speak." 

And let me be clear, you have created every experience in your life! What you say about yourself and what you think about yourself will become your truth. Do yourself a favor and say beautiful things.

I know horrible things have happened to many of us. I am not immune. I have been sexually assaulted multiple times; I was just diagnosed with lupus (a lifelong disease that has no cure); next week I will find out if I have cancer; I come from a broken family; I have no relationship with one of my parents; and, all throughout my life I have been haunted and terrorized by a cadre of malevolent spirits and other-worldly begins! I get it... AND I've made the mistake of defining myself by these experiences.  

At many different times in my life I have defined myself by these sad stories. I've told them publicly, I've told them privately; and, worst of all, I've told them in my head, day after day after day after day!!!!!!!

Each time I choose to make a sad story the center of my reality, something incredible happens... my sad story is recreated in the present and my life becomes sad. 

So what is your story? Is it serving your highest good?

No matter your life experiences, being a victim is always a choice. Indeed, "no one can make you feel inferior without your consent." 

As I've struggled with the two opposing truths about stories, I've developed my own sort of best practice, which is this... 

HONOR YOUR STORY THEN ABRUPTLY RELEASE IT 

Telling your story, if you do it truthfully, IS healing. Nevertheless, telling a sad story over and over will attract more sadness in your life. If you are ready to have a more beautiful life, tell your story once, in a venue that will help others, then release it. 

Your story isn't you; your story is not inherently true; your story is nothing more than one perspective on your "life"... a perspective you can change. 

I genuinely believe that every experience in neutral until we place a label on it. Be careful which label you choose! 

This truth has taken me a long time to understand and practice, and is probably demonstrated most poignantly in my most recent video on "The Dark Night of The Soul." 

Certainly my own "dark night" was the worst experience in my soul's history, from one perspective. From another perspective, it was the most beautiful and trans-formative experience of my life. Either way, despite it's significance, my "dark night" is not the center of who I am nor does it exist in the present moment, which is the only moment that matters. So I told the story, and then released it. 

It is a beautiful thing to "stand in your truth" and it is an equally beautiful thing to "release all things (people, events, beliefs, objects) that no longer serve you." What I've realized these past few months that you CAN do both: you can tell your story AND you can leave your story behind. 

We often fear that, without our story, we have nothing interesting to offer the world! But recognize this fear for what it is, a fear. Also recognize the fundamental truth, borrowed from Lee and Sherry, that "fear is a lie."

Without your story, you do not have nothing to offer the world. Without your story, you have everything to offer the world.

Be Present; Be You; Be Love. 

You are a spiritual being. You are NOT a story. 

Love and Light,
Jess 

A Toast To New Beginnings

It's the first full day of spring, the astrological new year, and the first day of Aries (shout out to all my Aries readers).

I'm out in nature this morning reveling in all the beauties of this time of year that I missed so intensely in Benin, like frost glittering in the sunshine. 

This was the content of many day dreams as I sat, sweating, under my tin roof in Sirarou. I will forever be grateful for a the simple pleasures the seasons bring. 

Happy New Year everyone. Here's a toast to fresh starts and new beginnings, like this blog.

Choose Faith, Not Fear my Friends. Your faith will take you far indeed.