A Case for Radical Honesty

I’ve been thinking about capacity a lot lately. Mine, the people I’m working with, the people I love.

It’s at an all-time low, y’all.

Collectively, we have not acknowledged what this means. As far as I can see, we are pretending.

I want to make a case for radical honesty. It is not working to pretend we can move at the same pace we used to just because our culture is obsessed with productivity and numbing out. Just because we’ve staked our identities on work. Now, I know that for many of us, our survival depends on faking it at work, and this may be why “quiet quitting” is spreading through the collective as a survival strategy, but we can be honest with ourselves, at least, that we are pretending.

We harm ourselves when we pretend, when we make a commitment without following through, when we fake it or lie. Our bodies lose trust in us. We have to live with the shame or shadiness or disconnection that occurs when we lie. We lose clarity. Take that burden off yourself.

We are living inside the lie of capitalism which tells us we are individuals, but our bodies are deeply interdependent. We are social creatures. Have you ever seen a whole field of deer whose white tails all go up at once? We are no different. Our nervous systems co-regulate with each other, and this happens faster than we can think. After six long years of tribulation, the entire field we exist inside of is filled with folks who are living full-time in one of these trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, appease, or dissociate.

It might look like a toned-down version of what you’d see at the scene of an acute disaster. Fight might look like irritation, an undercurrent of rage, or blaming others. Flight might look like flakiness, scatteredness, ungroundedness or staying high. Freeze could look like hopelessness, slowness, numbness, or depression. Appease may look like smiling, people-pleasing, toxic optimism, and moving toward dangerous people. Dissociate might look like glazed-over eyes, disappearing into the phone or TV, refusing to hear or see what is obvious, intoxication or denial.

In a state of overwhelm, each of our brilliant bodies will default to the technique it learned to best survive in childhood. Thank goodness. I also think it is constitutional: nature AND nurture. Ayurveda understands every manifest thing in this world through an elemental framework. Vata is air and ether; Pitta is fire and water, Kapha is earth and water. I have only tested this anecdotally, but I believe that people with a predominantly vata constitution will default to flight and dissociate. Pitta people will fight. Kapha people will freeze and appease.

It’s possible your response to overwhelm was shaped by abuse. In my constitution, I major in kapha with a minor in pitta. It makes sense that I might naturally freeze and appease, but I also had a lot of fight in me that was methodically squashed. My dad was belligerently drunk almost every night of my childhood, and at six, seven, eight, nine…and on and on until I left at 17, he would often force me to sit and listen to slurring tirades of insults against me for what felt like hours without crying or responding in my own defense. I got really good at jaw-clenching, tightening up every muscle in my body to tamp down my full body-and-soul somatic response. Forced freeze. So while anger might be my natural response, I was shaped to implode instead.

That was a long time ago, and my dad is dying of end-stage liver disease in hospice, a harmless childlike person I have come to understand and forgive. I can’t change what happened, but I do have practices to build my own capacity in the present.

There is something to be said for engaging consciously and honestly with being forged in the fire of life. It can wear us away to nothing if we turn away from our pain, or if we go too far down the road of escape and denial. But it can also burn away our ignorance and misapprehension of the world and ourselves, leaving us with a heart courageous and bright enough to illuminate our path through a sea of illusion. This is a time to shine, if you can bear it.

Being radically honest includes a body-first orientation. I don’t know about you, but I’m 47 and I’ve spent most of my years overextending, bending my body and spirit to the situation, pushing harder than I can with the promise of some future rest. This rest usually comes far too late in the form of collapse, escape, or illness. I’m speaking mostly about work, but I learned it in my family. If you grew up with narcissistic or alcoholic parents, as I did, you might have learned to prioritize their comfort and needs over your own as a matter of survival. And if so, you probably carried that into your intimate relationships, friendships, and work roles. Or maybe you were lucky enough to have your lived experience validated and included as a child, but because we are all living in a river of white supremacy culture, you may still feel pushed to perfectionism and urgency and the like.

There is an alternative.

There is a concept in yoga called vinyasa krama, or wise sequencing. This recognizes the arc and flow of things and is generally used to talk about planning a sequence of events, or a sequence of poses when leading a yoga practice. It creates a sequence where things naturally flow, one to another, generally in an arc from stillness to activity and back to stillness, where each action prepares the next or balances the last, but it is more nuanced than that.

In this case, I would argue we ought to be honest about where we are collectively in the current sequence of things. We ought to admit the fact that we are indeed living in troubled times. Six years of tribulation have left us in a place of slow collapse. This is not start-up energy. It is not a time to rise up with a groundswell of hope and effort, or grand sweeping gestures. It is autumn in every sense. A time of decomposition, a time of slowing into stillness and rest. A time to gather into our centers everything that we love and everything that we need to survive and emerge again, somewhere on the other side, hopeful and new. Our death-phobic culture does not want to even admit it is time to slow down and let go, but our body’s deep wisdom is an eternity older than our culture and if we are honest with ourselves, we know what time it is.

Our culture exists at the extremes of overextending and numbing out, exerting to exhaustion then collapsing, using blunt force to thrust our bodies from one pole to the other in an effort to balance. This is not wise. The yoga sutras offer us the concepts of sthira and sukha as polarities we can use to find center, even as the center is always moving. Sthira translates to steady, stable or still. Sukha means comfortable or easeful. We are always somewhere on a continuum of steadiness and ease. If you stand up, you may notice you need to exert a certain amount of muscular effort to remain standing because relaxing too much would have you crumple to the floor, while too much muscle contraction would be exhausting and unnecessary. There is a point of balance between the two that is just right. You could think of it like Goldilocks and the Three Bears: not too much, not too little, but just right. By slowing down and noticing, you can see where you are overextending and where you need more support and structure, where you need to relax and rest, where you need to exert yourself. This is honest action.

Now we do have to persevere, especially as midterm elections are coming, and there is always work to be done, but I am arguing today for true perseverance. Not the kind that is fueled by coffee and alcohol and trauma. Not the kind that kills the body to accomplish the work. True endurance is slow and steady. It is honest. It brings the body with us. May we all find the hard-earned peace that comes with radical honesty.