In Martha Beck’s recent book, The Way of Integrity, she explains her “Year of Not Lying at All” self—challenge and the shifts it brought about in her life.
Honestly, I nearly jumped out of my chair when I read that. I felt absolutely electrified and that's why I keep talking about this.
Lying is ultimately not about the stories we tell others but, at its very core, the stories we tell ourselves. And whatever we tell ourselves just ripples out to others like goo.
How do we fix this? As I’ll continue to say, pay attention to your body. The body never, ever lies. Period. It’s the best boundary-protecting traffic cop, mood ring, yippee or what-the-hell indicator you could ever ask for.
For example, let’s say a situation has you feeling tense. There’s a knot in your gut, you feel moody and your throat feels tight when you talk about it.
That’s great. Like the robot in Lost In Space who yells “Warning! Warning – Will Robinson!”, your body has just let you know that something unwelcome is entering your energy field.
What happens next? Now the mind gets on board. (No. Not the spaceship.)
But here’s the glitch. If we respond with our old thought patterns, we stand the chance of staying in what Tony Robbins refers to as the Crazy Eight. That’s where we repeat extreme behavior patterns in an endless loop.
How do we switch up deeply embedded thought patterns?
Interrupt the pattern.
Martha offers one way of interrupting the pattern when she references Byron Katie’s process of “inquiry”, also known as “The Work”. Katie, as she is called, outlines this process in her book, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life.
This is an extremely oversimplified summary, but here goes.
When faced with unsettling thoughts, two of the questions Katie says to ask yourself are “Is it true?” and “Can you absolutely know that it’s true?”
There’s more to her process but these two questions are the patterns interrupters. They’ll get you to stop and question your own process.
I won’t leave you here on a cliffhanger with only the first two questions.
The next two questions are “How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?” and “Who or what would you be without the thought?”
Try this out. Let me know what happens.
Thank you, Martha and Katie.
