Yoga of the Heart
Ten Ethical Guidelines for Gaining Limitless Growth, Confidence, and Achievement
by Alice Christensen
From Chapter 5: Truthfulness: Don't Lie to Yourself
How many of you are basing your entire self-image — such as your looks, abilities, accomplishments, and self-worth — on lies told to you by others or by yourself? The self-hate, discontent, and loneliness that I see in so many people is often caused by acceptance of lies told to them by themselves and others.
If you accept lies as true, negative attitudes will grow on your heart like a mold. You will have your own "little shop of horrors" living with you. Many debilitating feelings such as fear, insecurity, and anxiety are based on lies: lies that you tell yourself and lies that you accept from others as true, never having learned how to find out if they are really true. This pattern begins early in childhood; a child doesn’t know how to tell what is true and what is not. And so you simply accept what others tell you; you begin to accept lies without question. Eventually, those lies seem to become the truth.
Many people continue accepting lies into adulthood, developing an entire secret inner life that no one ever knows about because it is contrary to what they have been told as children. Thurber’s famous story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is a good example. Mitty was raised to live a certain kind of life which he hated; he had a completely different, much more exciting life in fantasy. His tragedy was that he could not bring his fantasy into form. He was stuck in the life he had developed during childhood, a life that did not allow him to portray his true feelings.
External life becomes a superb acting job for people such as Walter Mitty as they try to become someone they are not in order to fulfill the picture of themselves that a lifetime of lies has created; meanwhile, their true nature remains hidden. So many people suffer tremendous loneliness because of this pattern. In hiding, they become separate from their real self, the spiritual body.
If people told you, as a child, that you were bad, stupid, ugly, or incompetent, does that make it true? When you place labels on yourself based on lies, you are caught identifying with the physical body and judging yourself according to another person’s opinions.
To correctly practice the Yogic ethic of truth, you must learn to recognize truth in yourself.
From Yoga of the Heart: Ten Ethical Guidelines for Gaining Limitless Confidence, Growth, and Achievement, by Alice Christensen (Daybreak/Rodale Books, 1998).
Copyright 2002 by The American Yoga Association. All Rights Reserved.
