April 28

HONESTY MONTH: DAY 28: “Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.” ― Mark Twain

This should not be true; but, sadly, it is. We live in a culture of dishonesty and evasion. When we are taught as children to NOT speak up about what is true in our homes and families, we are taught to lie. This was very true for me as a child. Keeping secrets is and was a family heritage. I stopped that trend when I got here to this deal. Why? Because the source of so much of my shame were the lies I had told to others in my life to keep covering up the shame. As I did this, I created a deeper sense of shame. Pretty soon my life was all about the lies and the deceit to cover up who I had been, where I had come from, what was really going on there, and who I was now and where I was headed. I began to believe these lies and live into them. This is really challenging to stop when we get here. The biggest reason (for me) for Step 4 is to get honest with who I have been, and who I am becoming, as well as what all of that means. This is not as simple as it sounds, because I also have to tell the truth about my motivation and feelings. These became quite lost for me in the years of lying and pretense that had colored my early life. I no longer knew what I was thinking or feeling, because I was never in touch with those things. The only feelings I could identify in the early days were “shitty” and “f-d up”…both of which are NOT feelings. Learning to identify my feelings and the things that are underlying my behaviors is the best part of “uncover, discover and discard”; but as challenging as anything we do here. I seldom ever questioned what I believed about life. Now I have a completely different view of what life is about, what my part in it is, and where I want to be on my last day on this planet. A very empowering place to be! I know what I believe about what happens to me, because I spend a great deal of time sitting with my heart and letting it tell me who I am and why I am here. Those eternal questions can ONLY be answered by opening my heart and sitting with it. And I can only get to know who I am based on my relationship with self and that Power in this Universe. The Creative Energy that drives it all is what I am made of…it IS my Essence, my Spirit, my Power Greater than Myself. If I use the word God, it sometimes feels quite limiting, because there are so many religious connotations. These give me a sense of limitations and rules governing who I have to be to be involved in the relationship with that Power. I am not interested in rules and limitations. I don’t think that is an accurate depiction of who and what this Power truly is. So I eschew that whole dynamic in favor of the biggest picture I can paint of who and what drives this Universe. It surely isn’t me…that much I know. I have a very powerful relationship with what does drive the Universe, so I am comfortable knowing how it feels and how I feel when I am joined. Today I am grateful for Step 4, it has freed me from the shackles of limitations and rules and dogma that kept me locked in the cage of dishonesty.