Hello dear ones,
For Lent I gave up lying. Now, I was never a particularly pathological liar, but I once I started paying attention I did find myself lying daily. You might too if you started looking for it. There are ten practices for ethical living laid out in the Yoga Sutras, and satya, translated as truthfulness, is number two, second only to non-violence.
I noticed three main reasons why I lie, which I’ll talk about over the coming weeks. The first is for expediency, as in, I lie when it takes too long to tell the truth. So instead of giving all the details in a story, I’ll just condense everything into something much shorter but slightly less true.
And at first I thought that maybe this doesn’t matter. What’s the big deal? Isn’t that just a technicality? But rather than argue about whether this matters or not, I decided to dig deeper and identify where this habit came from.
As far as I can tell, lying for expediency relates to two things. One, a lack of patience, which comes from two, a sense of lack of time. As in, I feel like I don’t have enough time, so I get impatient and start telling lies.
So in response to this, I’ve been cultivating patience, and a sense of abundance when it comes to time. I’ve been slowing down, and really noticing when I’m rushing, when I can’t bother to tell the whole story.
And then I ask myself, is it true that I don’t have enough time? What will I lose if I stop and tell the whole truth, or tell the whole story? And more importantly, what might I lose if I rush away after spouting a half-truth?
This week look for the places where you are impatient, where you feel like you don’t have enough time, and look for the ways that you’re cheating yourself out of a whole experience. Can you cultivate a sense of abundance? Can you slow it all down?
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Much love,
Bear