What Else is True?

One of my best tools for working with problems or thoughts that feel impossible to overcome is the question:

What else is true?

My fears and doubts like to absorb all the oxygen and energy in the room, and rather than arguing with them (which can backfire by taking even more energy), I often look for some other true thing I can give my energy and attention to instead.

It’s a simple discipline of investing in the truths and thoughts that are most life-affirming and practically useful, while divesting from those that are not.

It’s a practice of giving energy to truths, possibilities, and thoughts that inspire some measure of magic, goodness, and possibility.

Not as a way of bypassing or shielding myself from the hard stuff, but as a way of *deepening my capacity* for it.

I practiced this with a client recently. They felt stuck on a problem in their life and kept saying: I’m so bad at this thing. I’ve never succeeded at that thing, and I’m not sure I ever will.

Now, this person is an absolute rockstar, and when I pointed out all of the other truths at play here - all the things they’ve achieved and all the gifts they bring to the table - I felt the energy start to shift.

That problem was still a thing to be dealt with, sure, but in the presence of all of those other *very real* assets and accomplishments, it looked a whole lot smaller and felt a lot less scary.

I also think about the hard stuff happening in the collective. I’m not willing to look away or pretend it’s not happening/doesn’t matter that our government is doing harm or that the climate is changing in catastrophic ways.

*And* what else is true?

It’s also true that people are helping, that love and magic exist, that what we do matters, that there is always more than I can see, that there are things worth living and fighting for...

And when I can focus my energies here, I’m not only happier and more grounded, I’m more helpful, responsive, and present to what’s real around me.

Because energies of magic and possibility (that we can create with our own minds, just by welcoming the *whole* truth) offer a creative, dynamic space.

And it’s a space where we’re far more likely to find unexpected solutions and creative ways forward.

So what else is true? Where does the realness of beauty, magic, and possibility exist for you? And how might you take one small step in its direction?

Confronting the Lies

I think it’s important to remember that the dominant culture we live in lies to us on a regular basis – about who we are, what’s real and what matters, how we “should” live and spend our energies, what’s within the realm of possibility, etc.

And I believe we need to name and call this out because lying and manipulation are abusive tactics (whether those abusers are people, institutions, or systems). Denying reality, deflecting responsibility, and unilaterally defining the narrative are all ways of maintaining power and control over others.

There’s also lying in the form of gaslighting, which is the strategy of using lies and manipulation to destabilize another person’s sense of reality by telling them over and over again that their perception and memory are wrong (and can’t be trusted) to create a sense of separation from their embodied knowing and inner truth (often in a very direct way, like telling someone they left the oven on when it was the abuser who turned it back on – or hiding their keys and pretending to help them look).

And because we sort of expect people to tell the truth unless they have a compelling reason not to, a steady stream of lies can be super disorienting and eventually make us question our own experience, memory, and sanity.

There are nuances to the ways abuse happens on interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels, but a common goal of these tactics, whoever/whatever employs them, is to maintain a power dynamic of control over another person through confusion, disorientation, and disconnection.

Systems of oppression do this; capitalism does this - because if we’re confused and ungrounded, we’re easier to control and more vulnerable to suggestion because we’re seeking that equilibrium and solidity wherever we can find it after being pushed off our center.

And in such a reality, getting grounded in our bodies and developing strategies of deepening into self-trust, personal power, and embodied truth are essential (and radical) practices.

Calling out lies and manipulative tactics when we see them is an essential practice.

Telling our stories and speaking our truths are essential practices.

Seeking out support, affirmation, and connection are essential practices.

Engaging in these practices of embodiment, truth-telling, and self-trust are not only essential for our own well-being; they also disrupt systems that depend on lies and other abusive tactics to maintain the status quo and create spaces in which abuse is named, challenged, and resisted.

So when we trust and love ourselves - when we tune in to our deep, embodied knowing - we create more flourishing, not only for ourselves but also for others and for the world.

Freedom and Adulthood

As a young, not-yet-adult person, I often heard some version of this refrain from the grown-ups in my life: “you better enjoy these years of freedom now before the bills, responsibilities, and stresses take over your life – because being an adult is *super* hard.”

And they weren’t wrong about this.

As it stands, I have to go to work to make money to purchase the basics and essentials of my survival (as most of us do in capitalism). I have to fix things, do tasks, file taxes, make calls, and solve problems (not the fun kind). There are also the difficult feelings, scary circumstances, and collective sufferings to deal with at the same time.

But adult life is not the grim reality I imagined.

Because what I didn’t understand then is that I would be in possession of a vast and glorious freedom – along with the raw materials (time, energy, possibility) to shape this life how I wanted, even with some less-than-ideal pieces in the mix.

Circumstantially, life is probably harder now than it was then. But here is the key difference: as a teen and young adult, there was a cacophony of voices crowding my spirit that did not belong to me. I believed what they told me and did not yet have the wisdom and perspective to see they were not helpful and not my own.

Growing up (still in process) has meant doing the work of finding my own voice and real self and making that my center.

This is why life has gotten better the deeper I traverse into adulthood: Because understanding this point has made me infinitely more free.

I have the freedom and self-possession to choose – to exercise my agency around how I think, what I believe, where I point the compass of my life, what I say yes or no to, and how I spend my discretionary time, energy, attention, and money. And this is so, so good.

I understand life now as a journey of deepening into the truth that my life and self belong entirely to me. And to me, that is freedom.

The Comforts of Uncertainty

In recent years, uncertainty has become one of my greatest comforts. I find so much relief in reminding myself of all I do not know.

Mystery has become a pathway to peace.

My mind (like yours perhaps) loves projecting, predicting, and catastrophizing. It loves looking at a frustating situation, hard moment, or painful truth and spinning and extending it into distrous visions of cataclysmic ruin.

Left to its own devices, my mind usually opts away from the reasonable, low-drama approach. We’ve had to work hard together to get to any measure of calm composure and grounded equanimity.

And while its talents for creating patterns, making judgments, and crafting predictions have been immeasurably helpful in all sorts of ways, my mind often needs to be reminded that it is not the omnipotent power it presumes to be.

So this is what I do to help it along: I remind myself that every thought I think and every idea I believe is less than the absolute truth (because my mind does not have access to absolute truth). I remind myself that there are gaps – often significant ones – in my stories, beliefs, and predictions. I remember that interpretations of reality and actual reality are two very different things. I remind myself that I can never know for sure what will be real in 5 years, 5 weeks, or 5 minutes.

An important note: uncertainty is not denial. In other words, uncertainty does not refute what’s real or bypass what’s hard. It doesn’t say: I can never know anything, so I’m just going to opt out and ignore reality. It simply says: I do not and cannot know the whole story. I cannot know the future of what is now. And I cannot grasp the whole of reality in all its complexity, possibility, and dimensionality.

Which brings my energy and attention back to what is here for me now: in this moment of time and location in space.

Since I cannot know how the story ends, I am left with presence, mystery, and an open space where the only real and necessary thing is how I choose to live these questions: what will I do, and who will I be in this moment before me now?

Our Inherent Unwastability

One of the fears I’ve had to work through in my life is the anxiety-producing story that I am always in danger of “wasting” something finite and precious, like time, money, or most worrisome of all: life itself.

This is an anxiety born of a particular worldview - that the whole of reality is bound by laws of linear time and finite space and that meaning is only ever created by how much we can get done within those parameters. Put together with capitalism - a system that places us in constant and ruthless competition, mandates productivity as way of being, and asks us to get from here to there in straight, efficient lines - it’s no surprise that scarcity fears run so rampant through the collective.

In one sense, there is truth to all of this. I do have a limited amount of time and resources that are mine to manage carefully and steward wisely.

But as I’ve come to see it, this is not the whole truth, and when scarcity becomes the entire story, we are allowed no margin for error and no space to breathe.

When I get caught up in these fears, I often stay small out of terror that any mistake will propel me out of my prescribed orbit and into uncharted mystery where I might - god forbid - have to spend extra time and energy navigating the unknown and excavating the unexpected.

So what I’ve been working through for myself and with clients is finding and connecting with what is unquantifiable. What I’ve found is that there is a truth, power, and life-force within each of us that is ultimately uncontainable, and therefore, unwastable.

We are whole and vast. And from this vantage point, all the detours, question marks, and empty spaces we dismissed as losses and wasted opportunities might actually be the keys to our becoming, deepening, soul’s alchemy.

Resistance and Stepping Between

I stepped between two people about to fight this week. Not to convince them to stop or to force them to do anything (because I couldn’t) - just to get in the way and interrupt the momentum of the conflict.

I didn’t do it to fix the problem, resolve the conflict, or determine the outcome. I did it because it was the thing to do in that moment.

This shifted some things around how I understand our political resistance. Instead of asking, how can I fix it? I wonder if often a more helpful question is: Given what’s real, what must I do in this moment?

Because I don’t know the answer the first question. I don’t know how to fix this.

I cannot single-handedly abolish ICE, end migrant detention, open our borders, or stomp out xenophobia and racism. And while I believe we can do these things collectively, we will drive ourselves to a breaking point if we make our agency contingent upon our ability to fix this mess immediately.

But we can make things harder. We can interrupt spirals of panic and hatred. We can bring clear energies to turbulent spaces. We can surprise, scare, and disrupt authoritarianism. We can make things more difficult, complicated, and uncomfortable by inserting our bodies, voices, and energies into what is already in motion.

The two people I stepped between may have still been able to get at each other, but it certainly would have been more cumbersome and complicated with (6 ft, 180 lbs) me in the middle. Suddenly they both had new questions to consider: can I get around this person? Do I want to try? Am I willing to harm a third-party? Even if the answers were all yes, having to consider them at all slowed it down, if only by fractions.

What spaces of pause, dilemma, and interruption can we create?

Resistance invites us to get creative with our power and agency. It asks us to use our power to derail, connect, refuse, dissent, create, dream, transgress, step in, stand up, and speak out. It asks us to find new and inventive ways to become radiant beacons of our truth and power.

So even when it’s hard and feels impossible, I’m remembering: All of it counts. All of it matters. And all of it’s essential.