The Art of Honesty

What is this about?

I’m excited about this new course! It tracks my own personal growth leaning into the vulnerable edge of unshrouding long hidden inner experience. Giving voice to that in honest self-expression is enlivening, empowering, and healing, giving a different confidence for navigating the field of life and relationships than does empathy. 

Why might you want to explore specifically the direction of honest self-expression?

You may also be off balance in the direction of listening and giving empathy more than bringing your own voice, speaking your feelings and needs, sharing your life’s experience and requesting what you would love.

Or you may have found that when you do try and bring yourself it doesn’t seem to land so well, doesn’t bring the hoped for results or the longed for care and responsiveness. Perhaps you give up, withhold, play passive-aggressive or score keeping or resort to attempts to extract what you want. Maybe you believe you have to ‘choose your battles’ and only bring your experience and needs to the table when things are really bad.

My experience (with myself and others) is that when we give up on the possibility of being heard it leads to frustration, resentment, lost life energy, and a sense of distance that’s created because we are not fully and congruently present. A Hebrew expression refers to it as being “one thing in the mouth, another in the heart”. This sense of being divided inside and out costs us and our relationships.

Giving voice to life, the art of honesty is about letting life flow through us. Because of our jackal conditioning and others’ jackal ears, just speaking our jackal doesn’t usually work so well and often leads to the above experiences. So in this course we look at getting in touch with our inner experience and speaking from embodied presence with resonant language. In my mind, much of deeply effective honesty has to do with the place we’re speaking from more than the words we use. We will explore this direction experientially and reflectively and relationally so that we can speak powerfully, from the heart, committed to our needs and open to different outcomes, with care for ourselves and others. We will cultivate the courage and the craft of being honest, powerfully and effectively vulnerable and human, and of asking for what would make life more wonderful.

For me, this approach to being deeply in touch with Life as it flows through us and knowing how to confidently give voice to that is a spiritual path and practice. It is an integral dimension in the art of being alive and of being alive together. As we learn and lean into it, we can discover and develop an exciting creativity, enlivening power, and pathway for intimacy, meaning, and effectiveness.

This course is offered to those who have completed level 1 and 2 with me or the equivalent. In certain circumstances we’ll employ our discretion to determine whether suitability exists.