The ability to be honest and truthful with oneself allows us to better receive honesty and truth from others.
We would all do ourselves a great service to just get real. Get up close and personal with our inner demons, our regrets, our fears, our lies, our secrets and lay them all out and do some serious business with them. Toss what needs to be tossed. Own what needs to be owned. Release what was never ours to grip. Get brutally honest with yourself. Ugly cry if you have to.
I see a lot of weighted people around me and it breaks my heart. And I’ll be honest, I struggle with the inner ick just like everyone else. But recently I have been hit in the “you know better than to carry this stuff around” gut and it has shaken me up. In a very good way. I do not hold onto pain and regret. It’s just not my thing. But I do have the tendency to hold on to my failures. Instead of choosing to learn from the fail I just keep revisiting it while never making any progress and, ultimately, wasting time.
In truth, I think it’s okay to visit these things. We need to become familiar with what doesn’t work in our lives so that we can better recognize those areas and learn to avoid them or reconstruct them. But we have to learn from them and grow. The alternative just isn’t life-giving to ourselves and, more importantly, to others.
So, I challenge you, friends, to take inventory of your inner icks. Take some time to identify what might be holding you back, stunting your growth. Plan to get uncomfortable. But also plan to find comfort in knowing that you are much more stronger than a lie, a regret, a bad choice or a failure. They only own us if we let them.
