Little typographicals, such as capitalizing the O in honesty, can be surprisingly welcome and meaningful. That pointed out to me that the word honesty is quite similar to oneness. It produces a similar resonance in one’s chest. Honesty is a big word. I hear people saying it mostly as “Honestly, I think…”. To indicate that now they are being frank and revealing their truth about the matter. It implies that they are generally not so honest. I believe this to be real. Honesty is a forceful state of being. Forceful because one being honest is grounded in truth, and the force generated from grounded movement is magnificently greater than that which is ungrounded.
There is a direct metaphysical corollary of honest communication and grounded movement. In all movement arts (i.e:. dance, tai chi, ) we learn to assume a grounded stance to begin moving from. In communication I believe there is an assuming of stance, which may be grounded in reason, logic, knowledge, understanding, or actual honesty.
At times my sense of honest communication personally, feels like my self, my body, moving in a soup of tensions. Tensions are both the cords upon me connecting me to the things I care about and that weigh upon me; and the constructs of my mind stretching and working to form the meaning of my truth. One might read this, and think how can one be working so hard to be honest?! I believe it is work. Integrity is not free, because we are always pushed and pulled upon by the general pressures of society, culture, family, impulses, and language itself. Honesty is a challenge, and it gets deeper as you progress toward oneness.
On the other hand, I sometimes find honest communication feels like enlightened dance in an open field. Our own energy state will determine the quality of our mental environment. One could be walking in the streets of New York City, and be overcome with an ecstatic thought! And one’s mental environment would be quite different than others around them. Reality points to everyone having enormously different potential environments to move in mentally. Although, people want the security of sameness and thereby squish their potential mind energy into neat little packages – which may never be opened again if someone chose to stiffen their mental sphere.
This idea of packing down the mental potential is not surprising. We all have controls for “good behavior”… Our honest opinion may be “bad etiquette”.
I strongly believe that the tipping point toward an honest communication society is grounded in two things: Compassion, and Evolution of Language. These are two important business ideas for humanity! Let’s get down to the business of genuine, honest, true communication. I know in my heart that honesty is a game changer; we will be a renewed society through honesty.
Compassion is important because we have so much pain in the world. When someone opens their mouth to address someone else, there is a good chance that the someone else is in pain. And the collective pain of humanity is too immense to comprehend. Compassion enables a person to consider painful things without being afraid, without being disgusted, without being mentally disconnected from someone else. There is wonderful power in compassion to help with honesty. Firstly, when ill feelings are held about someone’s behaviors or attitudes, compassion is a tool for crafting non-violent language to transform what could come out as disgust into something considerate, meaningful, and firm.
A grounded, non-violent message to one’s “enemy” is the only kind that will result in improved connection with them. No one is inherently our “enemy”. We can leave behind bigotry. Bigotry is haunting our society though with a powerful tool of division; the instinct to fight or flee from those who are different is difficult to recognize some times. And it is surely not easy to overcome. We shall overcome, through compassion, and through an evolution of language.
An Evolution of Language is what I believe our society needs most. We fail to recognize how the constructs of our languages impoverish our relationships. We too often hurt one another unintentionally with our words because our language is so offensive! We too often tip toe around “delicate” issues because our language is so offensive! There is a societal tendency to assume that avoiding certain words will keep certain realities or feelings at bay. The language generates a conceptual framework of words; our language arranges ideas into words and grammar in particular ways. We can change the way we use language by intelligent choice of words and innovative pairing of honest words and movements. With honest exchange as a central pillar of our relationships, we could start evolving language into honorable, respectful, compassionate, sensible, meaningful, and clear illuminations of truth. Does this not sound healing? Responsible? Fantastic, maybe?
Well if you have never heard of “NVC”, Non-Violent Communication, you wouldn’t know that this concept is already well developed. There are practitioners of Non-Violent Communication who instruct and provide guidance through personal feelings-based communication with those with whom we have important relationships. One major concept is regarding our way of expressing statements of our feelings – to recognize the difference between “I feel” statements which identify our own feelings that we have, and statements identifying our thoughts and reactions to their behavior. One point to help clarify this is that our feelings are just the things we feel inside. When we explain our feelings, we need to make the feeling plain. It is easy to jump into “I feel that…(you intended this, or did that, or deserve so and so)”. We have plenty of thoughts (pleasant and unpleasant) about other people, especially when we’re in a relationship. Feelings are our own emotional switchboards — they can receive messages from other people, and messages from our thoughts of course, but it is our emotional status that needs recognition before we can feel understood in an emotionally charged situation. How one feels inside is their state which reflects needs being met and needs being unmet. Hello, I’d like you to meet Your Needs. Painfully, most people on this wide planet are not getting very many needs met every day. So, so much work is needed.
I believe there is complex destiny at work in all of our lives. All of our relationships have value in some way. All of our works in the world have some value. Yet, the lessons of life may be obscured by fixed objectives and demands we pick up along the way. Some of our learning is really in unlearning and unwinding our patterns of excess – especially excess of tensions. Our movements and our thoughts when we are tense are strained and electrified. When a switch is electrified, it turns one way or another. But our bodies, our minds, our human beings are complex. There is a dynamic electrical circuitry with multiple-level responsiveness. There are multiple signals involved in movements and thoughts which continually negotiate reality. So, what about excessive tension? The signals are cranked up beyond the range of continuous negotiation of reality. A tense hand reaching to catch a ball won’t have the dexterity or level of sensory feedback engaged as an easy hand. The tense hand moves in the projected directions the mind instructs and controls consciously. The easy hand moves in relation to the arm and shoulder, and is connected to the core of the body which is also anchoring and/or lifting the total movement. The tense hand anticipates the brain’s signal to grasp the ball to be caught, whereas the easy hand is open to receive the ball’s contact initiating flexion of fingers and catches the ball easily, receiving it’s force fluidly. The tense hand may miscalculate the grip, and have less potential for contact with the ball because of the degree of rigidity. A “perfect catch” is possible with the tense hand, but that requires perfect timing and precision, whereas the easy hand expends less energy, has more potential for adjustment, less potential for injury, and more potential for power in returning the ball because of fluid movement.
Well then… what does this represent in our communication styles? Maybe that seems obvious? To me, there is actually a lot to represent here. So is the ball the message communicated between two people? Perhaps so. The tense hand is the hyper-conscious controlling style of communication. Many people thrive in business, law, and other words-working professions through powerful control of dialogue. The cost of this style of communication is neglect of the under-currents of feelings, and secondary impacts and implications, which can be rationalized and justified as “just how it goes”, “unfortunate side-effects”, “necessary sacrifices” or “necessary evils”. The hyper-conscious mind is often highly rationality-driven but emotionally simplistic. Conscious mind over-powering any subconscious impulses it can. There usually needs to be a calculus of emotional response-feedback timing and pattern recognition and decoding. Everything is processed in conscious thought. It is a highly literal approach, but rather slow and unaware of the subconscious workings and needs. Someone who has suffered abuse and/or neglect can develop heightened patterns of hyper-conscious control because they experience prolonged pain of unmet needs to the point of suppressing emotion, and cranking up the charge to control their environment in order to meet needs.
Perhaps we can have compassion for the ordinary people who carry this hyper-conscious style of communication with them everywhere. Maybe they secretly long to relax their minds’ controls enough to let someone else in. Perhaps integrating the subconscious is an extraordinary, painful process, but that may be worth paying in exchange for the wholeness and connection one feels. There is a lot of work for us all to do, so let’s avoid comparing and contrasting each other. It seems to me that most people have too much tension and stress. I have the karma and blessings of being a massage therapist and Reiki healer who helps get rid of muscle and energy tensions. I see some major patterns in our society showing up in our bodies. Poor posture is ubiquitous. I tell people that the biggest culprit for poor posture is the eyes!… Look at any blind person other than someone who has lost eye sight later in life – you can observe that they generally have excellent posture and balance. These things are somewhat more important to a blind person, but they are both more aware of their bodies, and not constantly distracted by visual stimuli that the rest of us are magnetized toward, hunching away at a computer for example. The blind person may also have an emotional depth and sensibility that is admirable. I believe that for many people, a high level of visual stimuli overloads us mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and the body sags in response.
So here we have it. Stillness within the visual field enables a balance that occupies a deeper truth of the body.
wholearts 