To Tell the Truth
What does it mean to live in truth?
When my body starts talking to me I realize my mind is the one that is lying. Again. Her voice can grate like nails on a chalkboard. Other times her volume and intensity turn up and make my insides throb like the pain of a thousand knives relentlessly stabbing. Sometimes she simply makes me feel tired. No matter how she speaks to me her voice beckons me to listen. To stop being so resilient. To rest.
What I have learned over the years is that my body has a wisdom that is more reliable than my brain. That my mind can make up any story I want to tell myself. And, man, am I a good storyteller.
Culturally, we have been taught to dismiss our feelings or find ways to manage them with a host of “self-care” practices. With my background as a therapist, I used to agree with this idea of management and would help people bypass their emotions by teaching them regulation skills.
And for myself, well, I had a million different ways I bypassed. And my bypass looked good. I was a somatic-based therapist who practiced every kind of spiritual and emotional self-care modality known to man. I knew how to talk the talk, and I believed myself, too. I traveled to 70 countries, had amazing adventures in the mountains, more friends than I could keep up with, and a successful business with financial ease. I did bypass better than anyone else.
I have never been afraid of death. I am afraid of not fully living.
It took me falling while running down a 14,000 ft mountain and several years of grief to understand just how deeply I was escaping myself and shutting others out to stay safe. In that dark night of soul, I found that I was practicing exercises and integrating concepts but that is not the same as a deep embodiment. Many people out there think they have stepped into embodiment just as I did but now I see how most don’t understand what true presence really is.
I have come to understand how wrong I, and the majority of the mental health and self-care world, have been. We aren’t meant to be stuck in our heads to figure it out or to distract ourselves from discomfort. These activities can make us feel in control because often times the truths we already know feel too scary to own because they might be a disruptor to our lives. We might have to acknowledge or change something we don’t want to face. The task is not to find a fix but to more deeply trust ourself and our inner knowing. The task is to grieve and allow all our emotions to come forward as the bountiful messengers they are.
We aren’t meant to feel better but to get better at feeling and listening to ourselves.
For decades I thought I was doing that but as one mentor eventually put it, “You’re a walnut. You’re a tough nut to crack because you’re too smart. The walnut also looks like a little brain. Do you want to keep being a walnut?”
So, I had break-up with my toxic positivity. I hadn’t been kind to my anger, her wisdom was silenced and like my body she knew things that I needed to hear. I had to stop making things ok too fast and open myself up to real vulnerability and not the faux vulnerability that social media likes to depict that gives the illusion of intimacy but really risks nothing. I had to stop being so gifted at immediately seeing the lesson and the gift in my hardships and having gratitude for whatever hard thing was happening in my life at that moment.
The only thing that honored my experience was my grief and all the emotions I finally allowed myself to feel. I think I was scared that if I went too deeply into it, I would lose the joyful, playful, loving, and vibrant parts of me. That I would go back to how I felt as a child when I wasn’t allowed to be in those aspects that are my true nature. That life would feel like suffering and I would finally have to feel all I never felt about the trauma I had endured when I was younger. But I was actually keeping my joyful part in a box, too. I wasn’t living in real freedom.
So, I learned the hard way. For me, it got to a point where it wasn’t even optional anymore. My body, she sat me down and took away my choice and it was the greatest gift I will ever receive. I thought for a long time that my body was betraying me. A lot of trauma survivors feel this way.
My body wasn’t betraying me; I was betraying my body. Now I sit in a seat of gratitude and marvel at the gifts she has brought me.
Sometimes we don’t like the way our medicine tastes but I found it tasted better than walnuts and was more nourishing, too. As I opened up to more of myself, others could come in and show up more for me, too. I received more love than I could have ever imagined as that was medicine, too. I’ve come to believe we are only as alone as we want to be and I was alone for a long time even while existing in a room full of people.
What will it take to make you willing to listen? When will you join your body in it’s quest for empowerment?
When I sit in a seat of love, truth and presence my body feels at ease. She is quiet, she has a gentle full body hum in her vibration, her spine is solid, there is an absence of pain. My body no longer has to feel the pain for me because I honor all the parts of me that need to be witnessed in their experiences. I have learned to be in harmony with her and I no longer need the novelty I used to seek and yet my life is more alive than ever. I have deepened into a life that honors my wholeness and I am content and at home in the truth of my body.
Cat Jensen is a Practitioner and Facilitator of Presence that teaches other Therapists, Coaches, and Healers how to embody and express their light and love as an overflow offering, rather than joining others in their shadow. She is here to disrupt the way we live amongst and with others and invites clients to stand more fully in choice and join the path toward liberation.She also offers presence and intimacy workshops and sacred circles, women's circles, moon circles and sound baths to the general public as they are inspired to attend.Hear more of her story here:
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