The Courage to Be Honest

I have always been fascinated by ancient wisdom. I remember when I was a teenager, I had a book about the I-Ching and the coins. I did not study it further at the time, but now I’ve found myself diving into its mysteries a bit more. Not necessarily directly through the I-Ching, but through the Gene Keys system. This system has been a companion, among other studies, along my own healing path.

But I find it nice to go back to the root for my contemplations. And for me that is the poetic language and imagery of the I-Ching. Today, I am contemplating the 22^nd hexagram, which is “Mountain Over Fire”. Traditionally, it speaks to beauty, grace, and the way our inner nature finds expression in the outer world. This hexagram sits prominently in my Gene Keys profile, and represents the central challenge and obstacle within my own life.

To me, the fire represents the painful parts of us, and the mountain represents the journey. Humans have an innate fear of fire, and likewise we often have a fear of witnessing our own wounds. We avoid the fire or spend much time trying to put it out. But we must pass through the fire so that we may scale the mountain. Once there, we have a better view and the fire no longer burns our skin.

To me, this means we begin to speak without projecting, listen without judgement, and view fellow travelers with compassion and understanding. To me, this is grace, and a path toward transforming darkness into light. We pass through each fire, each wound, each emotion one by one as we scale the mountain, getting a clearer view with each step.

There’s a lot of pain in my own childhood, many ways in which I felt unloved and neglected. Looking back now, I can see how afraid I was to enter the fire. I spent a lot of time looking away from the pain, making sense of things in ways that allowed me to keep moving forward, and perhaps convincing myself that certain things didn’t affect me as deeply as they did.

But these past few months have been calling on me to come face to face with some of that pain. And in doing so, I’ve begun to recognize that moving through the fire requires something more than simply acknowledging that we’ve been hurt. It requires a willingness to be deeply honest with ourselves.

Honest about what happened. Honest about how it made us feel. Honest about the ways we’ve learned to protect ourselves. Honest about the very patterns we may dislike in others but recognize in ourselves. Honest about the ways we’ve continued to neglect ourselves through our own words, thoughts, and feelings.

Because we cannot transform what we aren’t willing to acknowledge. And we cannot find our way through the fire if we’re still turning away from the flames.

I think one of the greatest areas of struggle for most people is sharing one’s true feelings. We worry what the other may think, we worry that we may hurt their feelings, we worry that they may reject us.

Emotional honesty takes strength and courage.

It means being willing to acknowledge what we’re feeling, even when those feelings are uncomfortable or difficult to make sense of. It means allowing ourselves to recognize when something hurts, when something feels off, or when something in our lives is no longer sitting right with us.

And yet, how often do we talk ourselves out of what we’re feeling? We convince ourselves that we’re overreacting, that things aren’t really that bad, or that we shouldn’t feel the way we do. We might minimize our own experiences to avoid making someone else uncomfortable, or push aside our needs because we’re afraid of disappointing someone.

Sometimes we become so accustomed to accommodating the people and circumstances around us that we lose touch with what is actually happening within us.

This is where inner honesty becomes so important. Before we can communicate our feelings to another person, we have to be willing to acknowledge them ourselves. We have to be willing to sit with what is there, without immediately trying to explain it away, make it more palatable, or convince ourselves to feel something different.

And this isn’t always easy. Sometimes what we uncover challenges the stories we’ve told ourselves. It may ask us to reconsider certain relationships, familiar patterns, or choices we’ve made. It may even bring us face to face with truths we’d rather not acknowledge.

But this is part of moving through the fire so that we may reach the mountaintop. The high vantage point where we can see our life, our choices, and our intentions with greater clarity.

The truth is honesty has never been something that comes easily to me. Lying was a way of protecting my heart from getting hurt. And old habits can be hard to change, but not impossible. I have done so much inner work within myself over the last few years, but this was the one area that I was avoiding.

The other truth is that now that I have faced the fire and met this fear of being honest and truthful and sharing my true feelings head on, I wonder why I was so scared to do this in the first place.

I feel set free in so many ways. It’s hard to describe how much my life has changed in just a few short weeks, really. All the time and energy I spent avoiding sharing my feelings and speaking my truth has been freed up to move into other areas of my life. My relationships have improved, my self-esteem has grown, and things that once seemed so difficult, or nearly impossible to manage or move through, I now see with hope, possibility, and confidence. I can create from a place of love instead of fear.

Grace isn’t about never getting burned. Just as fire can consume, so too can our emotions take hold of us. They can sweep in and burn through us quickly, like a raging fire.

So perhaps grace is found in learning to work with the energy of our emotions rather than allowing ourselves to be consumed by them. We learn to wield the fire, to direct its flow rather than let it run wild. And with each passing fire, each emotional moment in our lives, we gain a little more clarity, a little more compassion, a little more patience, and a little more understanding of ourselves and those around us.

Perhaps there’s something in your own life that you’ve been standing at the foot of, afraid to take that first step. What truths have you been avoiding? What feelings have you convinced yourself aren’t worth acknowledging? What conversations have you been afraid to have?

Maybe the invitation is to find the courage to walk through it.

Because sometimes, the very thing we’re afraid to face is the thing that will help us find our way up the mountain.

So keep going, keep climbing, and don’t be afraid to go within.

Much love,

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