Daily Meditation: Is That True?
Satya: fun to say, hard to practice!
Really speaking the truth is difficult: it means never giving someone else even a slightly different impression from what you know to be true. The most serious lie is to make false claims about our spiritual realizations. It's also just generally good to avoid divisive talk, harsh words, and idle pratter.”
— The Essential Yoga Sutra: Ancient Wisdom for Your Yoga by Geshe Michael Roach, Lama Christie McNally
My friends make fun of me because one of my default responses to anything is: is that true?
Part of it is that I don’t understand sarcasm intuitively, so I learned to clarify if someone is being literal or just teasing me.
It’s a good question to ask difficult, cyclical thoughts as they arrive:
Is that true?
And then:
Well, what shall we do about it?
How do you know what is true?
It’s hard for me because I don’t trust my own thoughts.
I learned not to trust them after years of depression taunted me with the sweet luxury of suicidal ideations.
I let them haunt me for a long time, and then finally, I agreed with them.
I told them: You’re right, it would be easier to be dead than to be alive right now. What are we going to do about it?
That truth set me free.
It gave me the sweet luxury of making the harder choice: to be alive, but also to live enlightened in love rather than apathetic in depression.
It allowed me to look at the fog of my depression and say, if this is it, so be it.
But if there’s a way to make it sweeter, kinder, more loving, let’s try to do that instead.
Like the afternoon sun burning off the morning marine layer, I experienced an enlightenment, and it’s been a little easier, a bit lighter, a bit more lighthearted, a bit more enlightened, since.