You and Everyone You Know is a Liar

You, my friend, are a liar.

How does that make you feel to hear those words?

Do you believe them? Do you feel triggered by them?

Do you…deny them?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Satya recently. Satya, one of Patanjali’s ‘Yamas’, or principle restraints in yoga. I initially thought this concept was pretty straightforward - telling the truth.

Easy. I always tell the truth.

I’m a truthful person.

A beacon of authenticity.

Sincere.

Honest.

Until I realised that I have been lying to myself incessantly. Everyday. Since I can remember.

And you have been too.

Being truthful is much more than not verbally telling lies from our conscious minds. Telling someone we’re late because the taxi took a wrong turn [lies] or that we just aren’t ready for a relationship right now [lies] is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Bending of the truth goes much deeper than that.

As soon as we begin life on this earth, our pure truthful essence is instantly clouded by layers and layers of conditioning. The sole reason for this is to be accepted by everyone else. To be accepted by all those other people who are drowning in their own clouds of their own making. The more we grow, the more the playful and innocent sunshining truth of our nature gets blanketed by a thick and weighty cumulonimbus.

And as it builds and builds, and our being is desperate for a heavy downpour of reality, we put our sunglasses on, whack on a pair of shorts and sit quivering in the cold outside convincing everyone that the sun is beaming down.

This may be hard for you to accept if, like me, you consider honesty to be one of your primary values. The sudden realisation that you’ve been lying to yourself and others consistently can be a daunting fact to accept.

But what do you mean I’m lying to myself?

There’s a few common ways that we all do this. Firstly, to hide our emotions.

This was the first red flag I noticed in understanding my deceitful nature.

Expressing my emotions has never come easily, in fact for years I went through life completely oblivious to what emotions even were. Upon feeling anything intense, my immediate response was always to distract myself.

Feeling sad? Eat a doughnut.

Feeling angry? Gossip about the person who’s making me angry.

Feeling scared? Go get drunk.

Therefore allowing myself to lie, to myself, and by doing so, blocking other people’s access to my true nature too. Living a lie, pretending I feel one way when I really don’t.

Why? Because it was easier.

Easy to go along and make everyone happy and content all the time.

No space for realness.

However, this response to emotions was so ingrained into my way of living life that it wasn’t just like flicking a switch and just becoming myself. It was made even more difficult when the outside world reacted so well to my masked persona. By not expressing “negative” emotions people would think I’m chill, cool, easy to be around. My happy-go-lucky nature wouldn’t challenge anyone else’s projections and so life could be a smooth sail.

Until, it wasn’t.

Until I questioned - does anyone actually even know me?

Wait, do I know myself?

Who the hell am I??

The emotions, much to my surprise, never just dissolved either.

They stayed there, stored in my body, begging to be experienced so that they could reveal a truer essence of me.

Another easy way to see our lying nature is how we physically show ourselves to the world, especially in connection with herd mentality. Trends in today’s society envelope us - in all aspects of our lifestyle. From fashion to diet to what we own and what we do at the weekends. How many times have you done something just because you think you ‘should’? How many things have you bought because you feel inadequate without having it?

We just want to fit in.

Even if it costs us who we are.

The words ‘should/shouldn’t’ have plummeted humanity into an anxious blob of conformity. Our intuition is skewed by the incessant noise of society which now, is not only on a physical plane, but a digital one too. This noise bombards us with who we should be and eliminates our connection with who we really are.

I think this becomes more difficult when we realise that the path to personal truth can be a lonely one.

All of our lives are consumed with actions to impress and be accepted by the group. Going to uni because your parents [family group] want you to. Spending your last £100 on a new outfit that you don’t need because you want people to admire you [friend group, and wider societal group].

To go on a solo quest inwards, to discover your true self, almost feels counterintuitive to what you’ve been doing your whole life. The search for your own truth can only be discovered by YOU.

You can’t buy it.

And you can’t be taught it.

And newsflash: you can’t find it through your partner either.

Just be yourself...

Connecting with groups of people who are on their own search for truth can be an ultimately beneficial experience. However, only you will ever be able to take the path to the depths of yourself, alone.

It’s also not as simple as just being yourself.

The only way to unmask the unconditioned wholeness of yourself is a long winding road..

But how do I even begin??

In the Yoga Sutras, Patañjali says we can only trust the holy scriptures. In today’s world the amount of information online and around us, telling us what to do to “be the best version of ourselves” is overwhelming. Furthermore, the oversimplification of today’s rhetoric to ‘be yourself’ is expounded by people, many of which are themselves, in the depths of their own cloudy lies.

I wholeheartedly believe spiritual scriptures hold the answers. We are always desperate for new information and the hottest discoveries but I cannot tell you how revolutionary it has been for me to go back in time and learn from philosophers and teachers who lived thousands of years ago.

The same themes tend to come up time and time again.

And when you look at new age influencers and ideas you can see how they all stem from ancient wisdom.

The game of...
One of the lessons which reverberates through spiritual philosophy is that, an important first step towards discovering your true nature is to stop blaming other people.

Stop blaming your parents for your habits,
Stop blaming the government for why you don’t have enough money,
Stop blaming your boss for why you're stressed.

It all starts with responsibility. Accepting your own reality, and beginning to be more objective with yourself. Meditation, nature and people you can be vulnerable with are your biggest allies. Combining your search for truth with the courage to be honest with how you’re lying can be life changing.

Secondly, stillness is also exceptionally important. If we’re always in action mode and never being still with ourselves, we have no real time to process what is real and what isn’t.

Stillness isn’t just sitting still tho. Stillness doesn’t mean scrolling on your phone or watching netflix in bed. It’s actually setting aside time for things like meditation, guided breathing exercises or even giving yourself space to just be creative with no expectations.

We may also experience stillness within dynamic spiritual practices like yoga - when the body may not be still, but we have learned to still the mind, which is our biggest obstacle on this path of truth.

If you find sitting still exceptionally hard, even for 5 minutes, you’re not alone. This means that you probably have a lot of falsities to cut through. That you’re still attached strongly to distracting yourself from your emotions and your true self.

Start slow. Start with a few minutes a day or…

Go outside

One space which is not bound by lies, is nature.

Spaces of nature are not clouded by judgements. And so being in the natural world is monumentally important for us to get into a flow with our truest selves.

Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations -

“We should only conform to those whose lives conform to nature”.

Granted, that use of should could be questioned, but the deeper meaning is that people who live in accordance with the natural order of life, are those who we can trust. It is those people who are making an effort to melt the lies and see clearly with their own true eyes. To be in accordance with the flow of nature is to be trusting of the guiding light within you and not so easily conforming to the herd.

And what we surround ourselves with, is what we become.

So where better to be than the true spaces of nature?

Our individual expressions of the universe are different, but the deepest sense of truth is always the same. And the deepest truth is not in friction where nature abounds.

The same recipe does not work for every person concerning life. Yet the gurus and sages of the past and present are those beings who are conforming to nature. Their own nature, and in turn, flowing with the nature outside them. As within, so without.

So we would be wise to listen to their wisdom.

They’re not always ancient philosophers in white tunics. These are the people whose presence makes us feel alive. They allow us to feel safe and content sharing our true feelings and beliefs. Surround yourself with those people when you can.

For me, it sometimes feels like I just want someone to give me the answers. Tell me who I am!!

But no one can give you the answers. The answers are so deep rooted that it could take lifetimes to uncover them…(sorry!). And as I’m sure you’ve realised, life never remains easy, and neither will be the search for truth. Even if you go through a period of complete contentment, this rarely lasts for too long, especially the older you get. In these challenging moments it makes sense that Buddha would call this life suffering.

The good news? Well, the truth, your true self, is quite the opposite. As you progress in the journey moving inwards, the lies slowly dissolve around you. The more you recognise your emotions, express them in a healthy way, listen to your intuition and do practices to connect with your soul, the more lies resolve.

And guess what?

It is the lies that are causing us pain.

Mental pain, yes.

But even physical pain.

Trapped emotions that have been covered with lies can even manifest as physical pain and disease.

So, avoiding the search for your purpose and true self is not an easy pain free ride either.

Clarity is possible.

Finding your true purpose is possible.

And if you’ve got to the end of this blog, I’m willing to bet you’re hungry for it like I am...

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