One of the most commonly overlooked spiritual practices is daring to be completely honest with everyone you encounter. Some may say others cannot handle the grace of honesty, but true honesty is not a strategy or a weapon of any kind. It is the willingness to be open and absolutely transparent in sharing how any moment feels in your heart. It has nothing to do with confrontation, accusation, or any form of blame. True honesty is the willingness to stand completely exposed, allowing the world to do what it may, and say what it will, only so you may know who you are – beyond all ideas.

Feelings such as shame, guilt, doubt, envy, anger, and resentment arise whenever we have prevented ourselves from speaking our deepest truths, or withheld a depth of sincerity from being shared with others. With nothing to withhold or hide, the truth is spoken freely – at no one’s expense. The truth contains no form of blame or judgment. Instead, it celebrates how intimately you know yourself by how open and available you’re willing to be. Knowing this, life’s deepest wisdom always remains the same: you’ll feel better when you’re totally honest.

This is why honesty is also the ultimate healing modality. Honesty is the absence of avoidance, no matter what situation appears. Inevitably, life transforms when the value of honesty is no longer dominated by an attachment to convenience or the threat of rejection.

When honesty is regarded as your highest value and acted upon with kindness and compassion in every personal encounter, you invite the precision of life’s inherent perfection into all areas of life. In doing so, every relationship and circumstance transforms at the rate in which true sincerity of heart leads the way. This reveals life’s natural way of being, which cannot be known on the deepest level until you’re being completely honest.

Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love’s value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and of oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can ‘surmount,’ without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency: I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again.