Hello everybody,
Esme here speaking.
This is another episode.
The title of this episode is honesty and how important it is to be honest with ourselves and others.
Honesty is something that we could say can be equal to authenticity and being authentic means that whatever I'm in the inside,
On the inside,
I am reflecting outside.
Now that's the first component of honesty but the other component of honesty is that I am committed to it and I'm committed to it throughout my life and I'm committed to it even in hard times and even when it's even harder to admit to myself that I've made a mistake or to humiliate,
It's quite humiliating and humbling at times to be honest with yourself especially in front of other people that you want to have some sort of good image in front of and it's always great to stand with your honesty,
With your values.
How do you define that?
First of all,
You start with the values.
What are your values that you stand for?
What is something that makes or breaks you?
What is something that you can't go without and you have to be clear about those values.
Somebody the other day said,
I think it's Dr.
Ranjan Chatterjee who said that if you want to really be clear on your values,
You have to write them down and I find a lot of value in that because writing down your values,
How many people have actually thought their values true and written down those values in a paper and said,
Yeah,
I think this is it.
I tried that and it was a good moment of silence and meditation.
It was actually meditation.
It was a reflection and you sort of just gain perspective.
You sort of just come down,
Get inside,
See what's up and see your life in front of your eyes and what moments were you proud of and what moments you could have bettered and that's just so important and for me,
I just found my value that way.
Comparing myself today to myself of yesterday and to myself of tomorrow that I might be that possibility,
That probability is really important.
It really makes me excited to just like take a pen and paper and like get going.
What are my values?
How am I going to bring them into my life?
How am I going to live them?
Someone said that knowing the spiritual and I think this is in the Bhagavad Gita and I'm not sure but there was an example of a flower that has no scent and a flower that has a scent.
If you are knowing everything about the spiritual teachings and you are repeating them to people and you know everything,
Textbook,
Great,
You're like a flower but when someone approaches to actually smell,
There's nothing because there's no application but when you're actually applying the wisdom that you learned then you're a flower with a scent.
So I want to be that flower with a scent before I try to let that out there,
That these are my values but am I really applying them?
So that also is a question I should really be honest with about myself and I prefer to have these kind of honesty talks or maybe you can call them sit downs with myself every once in two months or once in three months to sort of just see my progress and how far I have gone with my values and how good I have been to expressing my honesty and my truth and how authentic was I in my relationships to shine that through and let it just speak and be honest about it.
I remember there was one time where I lied about something that I thought well if I said this they won't really like me so I'd rather just say this because it's more culturally acceptable because if I said the other reason why I'm doing it,
It won't make sense,
It will be blah blah blah.
So I doubted myself and I wasn't authentic in that way and I remember coming back home and just thinking about it and of course I had felt guilt about it and I had to go inside and see where that guilt comes from where well the guilt is actually helping me at this point because it's telling me oh you've broken a rule that you've set for yourself and then I asked myself for forgiveness and I said well I'll do my best and I'll make sure I don't do that again because it's not worth it.
This feeling of guilt,
This shame inside that I'm feeling,
This punishment that I'm feeling inside is not so good for me and so your body will tell you if you're not being authentic.
You'll feel it maybe in your third chakra will where that's your chakra of expression near your thyroid glands.
Even this chakra of expression is about living your honesty,
Being your truth,
Living and embodying that honesty and that inner self of yours,
Letting it shine to the world and I believe when we keep being honest one day at a time,
We start to reach enlightenment little by little.
We start to awaken to things and defects that we have and that's the second point I wanted to speak about.
Your defects show themselves to you.
They show up and they say hey look at us this is where you need to work more.
This is where you have some fear.
This is where you have anger problems.
So when I'm honest I revisit the situation for example in my meditation.
I revisit something that really just bothered me throughout the day or a situation that I couldn't accept.
Maybe a colleague that made a joke and made me really angry then I will go inside and say well why did that make me angry?
Now that is a great question because I can find the buttons of my own self.
I can find the things that trigger me and I can work on them.
Those might be fears,
They might be insecurities,
They might be old traumas that are unresolved or just situations that are unresolved.
It doesn't have to be a big word as trauma.
You find those little small anxieties that are just lingering in the background that you haven't maybe gotten the chance to poke in the past and now all of a sudden now that you're embodying your truth you're just starting to see them flourish and kind of blossom for you to catch them and be like oh there you go I gotcha you're helping me.
You're helping me reach my potential,
My better self and that's how the work gets done.
It gets done by accepting that we are defectful,
That we are full of flaws,
That sometimes we do things even though we set goals for ourselves.
We set values,
We break those values but at the end of the day it comes down to the fact that how much compassion am I willing to show for myself to go through this?
How much compassion am I giving myself to forgive myself for doing that mistake and maybe just go back and see what triggered me there?
This is an opportunity for me to grow more,
To be better.
Whenever there was a scenario where beating down and anger and guilt and shame and taking your emotions in has ever helped,
That never helps.
Forgetting doesn't help.
If guilt comes,
Let it flourish.
What is it telling me?
So I feel like this honesty thing is really changing my life because now I'm just like wait.
Even though if it's very humbling at times,
Humiliating maybe I can say that you see like a small situation and we can be judgy,
A small situation can really flip you up.
It can really make your day like what is happening?
You can have this thing like I meditate,
I do yoga,
I do my prayers.
Why am I still having these things?
Why are these small situations still affect me?
They shouldn't affect me and that can come as well.
What does that say about yourself?
This also has been something I've been working on myself.
I'm talking mainly about myself here.
This is my experience that I might go this end and I can see that the ego is coming out and saying all of these things to me and I'm like yeah but I'm not perfect and I'm not better than everyone and I'm not here to be perfect.
I'm here to be better and when I look,
When I strip down that layer of ego,
That layer that says why,
Why,
Why,
Why is this happening to me?
Why me?
And then kind of goes up into anger and things and whatnot.
I just kind of stop it.
I cut it from talking and I really just go inside and say whoa,
Whoa,
Whoa,
Okay let's see what's happening here.
So this situation happened and I felt this way,
Why did I feel that way?
And then I just sort of come back,
Maybe that's the inner child,
Maybe that's a situation in the past and you just kind of get to know yourself better.
It's like going on a date with yourself every single day.
You show up,
You give yourself that date,
That sabbatical.
It's not even that but it is like a holiday,
Right?
It is like a vacation.
It's like a day off.
You take your day off and you go inside and like what do we do in vacations?
In vacations,
We go to places in the world,
We just go to listen to ourselves for once.
Now we have access to do that every single day.
Why don't I just do it?
Why do I have to count days until I can have one free day?
No,
I can actually create that today,
15 minutes,
20,
30,
You name it,
That's all it takes.
You can start with five minutes because I know how hard it is to close your eyes and to listen to your thoughts.
I know what it is.
I know that it's hard,
It's difficult but start with incremental steps.
You can start from whatever number suits you.
Maybe just one minute of closing your eyes and being with yourself is okay.
Now just taking that compassion and really being with yourself and in compassion and embodying that truth and even if the suit is dirty and what I mean with the suit is dirty,
Even if I had put on a bad suit that day and I come home and I'm like I'm not proud of myself.
What I've done today is totally against my values.
Well,
That's great.
Let's sit down,
Let's face it,
Let's see it as it is,
Let's accept that it happened and let's learn from it because guess what?
Anything that is,
As Byron Katie says,
Learn to love what is.
Anything that is happening is perfect.
Now what do you take from that?
That's the biggest lesson to learn and as we are getting closer and closer to being compassionate with ourselves and to really embrace ourselves and love ourselves more and more,
The more we get to know ourselves better because we know that we can count on ourselves in hard moments when we really feel unattractive,
Like we really feel that we've done wrong but then we go back to ourselves and we believe in our power to make things better.
We believe that there is a part of us that is higher,
That is better,
That we can grab onto,
That we can bring back out of us after taking out those layers in just being and this is what meditation does.
Meditation is powerful and even yoga,
Oh my God!
It's so amazing the power of these things can do for you along with breath work,
Etc.
So that's what I like to do with honesty.
I think that's mainly the two things I do with honesty and of course being honest with others because that's what you come back home to.
Come back home at the end of the evening,
You come back to whoever you have in your life but before you do that,
Come back to yourself first.
Before you finish the evening,
Come back to yourself and see what have I done.
Revisit the things that have happened throughout the day,
The things that bothered you that could have been better but they were wrong,
The things that you think that are really stabbing you in the back with guilt,
The things that make you angry about yourself or why do they make you angry?
Maybe there's some fear in there.
So just having a little bit of compassion as well,
Navigating everything with the safety,
Making that safe environment for yourself because if you don't,
Then guess what?
It's just going to be a pity party or transform into a bloodbath and no one wants that.
You don't want to beat yourself down.
You just want to bring yourself up,
To believe in the good parts of yourself and to go on from there.
So this is really it about honesty and for me,
If this helps or anything,
I take honesty.
The first thing on my values list is honesty,
Honesty with myself and others.
I really think that's a life changer.
If I'm honest about how my shortcomings are and how I can change them,
Then I'm really doing the work.
So I hope this helped you in any way and if it did,
Please make sure to comment you'd like to add and whatever you'd like to express and thank you so much for listening to this and see you next time.
