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Discerning our own
truth/Discerning personal truth
Discerning personal truth exercise
Reviewing the results of the discerning personal truth exercise
General statements about what serves and doesn’t serve you
One of the more difficult things for us as a human being to fully
accept is that as a
unique individualized consciousness there are
things that are true for one and not necessarily true for another.
As a human being, we share a tremendous amount with other human
beings. We tend to think we are all the same. However, there is no
“normal” or “standard” human being. The medical profession has
worked for years with normal distribution curves that give a broad
range of values for any human parameter. Sometimes the distribution
curve is narrow and at other times it is quite broad, Similarly,
there is an ancient recommendation to have good thoughts, good words
and good deeds. The question is, “Who defines good?” What is good
for me is not always good for you.
What needs to be understood is that, if we are
open to feeling, we
can feel what is good for us and what
serves us. But to know what
serves us we must become aware of what we feel and how our body
responds to an untruth and/or something that does not serves us. The
recommendation made here is that if you have not does so, do the
following discerning truth exercise.
Discerning personal truth exercise
(Top)
This exercise is best done if someone narrates the text of this
exercise. Trying to read this exercise rather than just being able
to listen and do what is directed will break your concentration. If
you are reading this material alone, it is recommended you go find
someone to slowly read this exercise to you. Or, record the exercise
on a tape and then listen to it.
To get the most out of this exercise, give yourself permission to
feel. Tell yourself that you are free to feel whatever it is you
need to feel in this exercise and that you are perfectly safe.
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Close your eyes and calm yourself
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Focus on your breathing
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Allow your awareness to follow the rise and fall of your chest
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Imagine a stone dropping into a large pool of water
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Every time you breathe in, see a stone drop into the pool and a
ripple formed
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Every time you breathe out, the ripples expand outward and
dissipates creating a perfectly calm pool of water.
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Continue to watch a stone drop and watch the ripple expand outward
dissipating again and again with each breath.
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Each time a new ripple forms and dissipates, know you move to a
deeper calmness.
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[To the narrator: Give some time for the individual to be with
their breathing before continuing the exercise.
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After watching the stones and ripples for a time, think of some
object or thing, a personal experience, a person, an activity or
whatever you choose that has great and unparalleled beauty and joy
for you. You are free to choose whatever you wish. You can be at any
time or place and at any age. The place can be real or imaginary.
Just think of some object, thing or personal experience that gives
you unparalleled beauty and joy.
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[To the narrator: give some time for the individual(s) to find
their object of focus]
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Every time you breathe in, experience this object of unparalleled
beauty and joy
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Every time you breathe out, allow yourself to savior and feel the
experience of this object of focus throughout your entire body
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Continue breathing in the experience and breathing out allowing
yourself to full feel and savor the experience
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[To the narrator: allow some time to feel the experience]
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As you experience this object of focus that gives you this great
beauty and joy, notice the feelings you have.
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Allow yourself to be with what you feel and allow the feeling to
permeate all of your being.
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Pay particular attention as to how you would describe what you
feel and/or recognize what you feel at some future time
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Feel the beauty and joy of this experience
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Tell yourself you will always remember what these feelings of
great beauty and joy feel like and you will recognize them in the
future.
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Allow yourself to feel the beauty and joy this object of your
focus gives you
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Allow yourself to be present to this beauty
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Now, tell yourself all that you have just felt and experienced is
a lie and totally untrue because you hate whatever it is that you
said gives you bliss and joy.
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Tell yourself you hate the object of focus
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Tell yourself all that you just experienced is a fabrication, a
lie.
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Tell yourself you have been deceived and that beauty and joy is
not found in the object of your focus
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Allow yourself some time to feel the lie
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[To the narrator: allow for a few moments to be with the feelings]
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Now notice how you respond to this revelation about what you
cherish and how and what you feel.
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Pay particular attention to how the feelings have changed
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Observer and record the feelings you had both when you were with
the object of focus that gave great beauty and what you felt when
you told yourself a lie
Reviewing the results of the discerning personal truth exercise
(Top)
There are several things one needs to understand from this exercise.
One is what we felt in thinking about what give us great beauty and
joy contains the elements of what
truth feels like to us. It
contains all the elements of what truth feels like to us at this
points in time and/or is the “direction” of truth in our life. That
is, (1) the feeling we had is the type and kind of feeling we will
feel when we experience something that is personally true for us and
(2) as our
belief structure changes and we gain more experience in
life, we may find what is true for us changes.
The comment as to the “direction” of the feeling means that,
although what we feel in the future may not be exactly like what we
feel now, what we feel now is the type and kind of feelings we will
have. The feelings in the future may be different because we may be
in a different environment. For example, the feelings we have in
laying down and resting have an element in common whether we lay
down on a nice soft bed or a slab of stone. The feelings of
truth at
different points and times in our life will have elements in common.
If we follow the common feelings, we will always be moving in the
same direction in our life. We can learn to discern these common
elements of the feeling and use them to measure how true something
is for us.
Realize that what gives us great beauty and joy is unique to us. It
is
our truth. The feelings of great beauty and joy we feel also
contain the feelings we have when we embrace what is true for us
and/or a truth about what we desire to create. What is true for us
serves us
and who and what we are. What is true for us does not
cause us to deny the essence of our being. It allows us to grow and
expand into the awareness of who and what we are. If we are open to
our feelings, we may literally feel ourselves expanding. It is said
what we felt contains the elements of what truth feels like because
we can, and will, feel what is true for us whether or not something
is pleasurable.
Two things do need to be noted about our personal
truth. One is that
as we gain experience in life it may, and most probably, will
change. However, the second point is, the feeling that makes us feel
alive and full of life does not change. That feeling is immutable.
As we move into life and into those activities that give us life we
will have a greater fulness and/or
passion within our being. This is
the essence of the
internal compass and is reflective of
why we
incarnated and the experiences we incarnated to have.
What we felt in telling ourselves that what gives us great bliss and
joy is a lie contains the elements of what we feel at this point in
time when something does not
serve us
or the “direction” we are
going does not serve us. That is, if we continue to do things that
give us such feelings (the feeling of this lie) we will be going in
a direction in life that does not ultimately serve our best
interests. What we felt is a combination of what we feel when we
know we are lying to ourselves and what we feel when we experience
an untruth for a lie is an untruth we tell ourselves. What needs to
be understood is what is untrue for us does not ultimately serve us
and who and what we are and we can feel when we are not being
served. What does not serve us causes us to deny the essence of our
being in some way. What is untrue for us does not allow us to grow
and expand in awareness. Rather, in some way, we have to deny what
is to live or act in accordance with that untruth.
To live or act in some way that is not true for us is the same as
telling a lie to ourselves and, if we are aware, we will feel it. To
continue to tell the lie and/or live in the lie and not feel pain or
discomfort we will have to numb what we feel. This in turn lays the
seed for
addictions and/or desensitizing ourselves to what we feel.
As a minimum we can become aware of how an untruth seems to steal or
drain our energy to be enthusiastic in what we do. We may even see
and feel ourselves shrinking and collapsing much like a balloon
whose air is being released. Or, we may simply find ourselves
going
to sleep at whatever level of our being that is not being severed by
what we are doing. The more we lie to ourselves the more and more we
move into unawareness about ourselves. In doing so, we become more
and more insensitive to what we feel. The more we lie to ourselves
and/or live the a lie, the less
passion, energy and
enthusiasm we
will have to give life and/or for life.
General statements about what serves and doesn’t serve you
(Top)
There are some general statements that can be made about what severs
or doesn’t
serve us.
Typically, activities that
serve us
cause us experience one or more
of the following: we feel an expansion within our being; experience
a lightness of being; experience a feeling of bliss and joy within
our being independent of what is happening externally; and/or a
calmness in our being as we are actively engaged in whatever it is
we do. The more we feel what we would describe or interpret as a
feeling of bliss and joy in what we do or one of these other
feelings, the more that what we do and experience is probably in
alignment with our personal
truth.
The more we feel what we felt in telling a lie, the more our
experience is in alignment with a lie relative to our personal
truth. What needs to be understood is that we can feel truth. We can
feel what is true for us and the essence of our being and what is a
lie where we in someway deny our essence. We only need to be aware
of what truth and a lie feels like. In essence, this exercise was an
initial calibration of our ability to feel and use feeling as your
measure of personal truth and realize we have an
internal compass.
The next task is then to
calibrate that internal compass and learn
how to use it.
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