What is most important about the truth, omission and lying is always safety first, like all things in life. To have awareness of the space around you, the context of where you are helps you determine the level of safety and then the level of honesty that is possible to engage with. At Wilding Education we wish to have a culture where we can be honest with a wild abandon while feeling deeply secure in our rightness with the world, ourselves, and each other. Whomever you are engaging with is a part of your story, a part of your life journey that you are sharing with them and creating a story that you will remember for the rest of your days going forward. We are writing, creating, interplaying with the wide scope of our imagination and we can make this really good. How good and how strengthened we are in our experience can greatly depend on how much honesty our parameters allow and how much responsibility we each adopt that determine how vast and deep the territory we get to explore internally and in our surroundings. This moment is precious and, like a diamond, the more clarity the stone has, the more value is attributed to the stone; and what is authentic between us increases the life value and strength of our connection.

Many times we might just go along with what everyone else says to be included but there is a rub…. we might not feel so good inside because there is an inner truth that gets *upset when it is not spoken for, when it is not included and feels sacrificed to be included in the social sphere and then one might wonder why one might have a stomach ache, or just feel unwell, sometimes physically. Some wonder if anti-depressant medication is on the rise in order to dull the pain between what is real on the inside and what is real on the outside. This is why it is important to tell the truth, when it is safe to do so, is to keep the inside, our truth, our true heart, our true feelings in good health by being voiced or at least not contradicted.

The feeling of safety in telling the truth is a barometer of how much trust you feel in telling what is true. It might be just an unknown. The situation might be safe or might not be, according to the parameter of inner experience and inner perception.

Being true to ourselves is the greatest power we have in being genuine and trustworthy then to others. In some cultures honor and a handshake is all that is needed to secure an agreement. These cultures use honorific language to differentiate the weight of the importance of which the spoken word is designed to hold. In Japan there is this example, among other cultures. In Japan ones word, ones honor, is all one has and people will commit suicide if their honor, their word, is besmirched and the community is angry and the person who lied can feel so much shame and is even expected to kill themselves out of honor. This is an extreme example. In this culture that has many traditions, the community depends on everyone’s honor and honesty for the strength of their community and society to not only survive but become stronger. If two people trust one another, even if the truth is uncomfortable, it is certainly better than a lie if the other person has earned one’s trust or at least has given no reason to create distrust.

Wilding Education Truth Culture

A Path of Building Trust by Earning Trust

Rough draft. Under Construction. Unpublished.

If you *feel like withholding the truth then explore what the reason might be. Most of the time it is easy to tell the truth when there are no consequences … like the sky is blue, the leaves are green, I am hungry or I am thirsty, these things everyone around us can easily accept as normal. When truth is normal, it is easy. Feel how it feels to just say any easy truth. Easy. But what if something has a consequence? Consequences are both inner and outer. Out in the world consequences like losing some privilege or acceptance by others is the outer consequence.