Hey there Truth Seeker,

Welcome to The Beare Truth Newsletter.

In this edition we’ll look at:

• Our relentless pursuit of having all the answers.

• Our conditioned avoidance of emotions.

• How to let go and be authentic.

Early in my life, I learned that having the right answer was the holy grail - the great protector from shame. To avoid being called stupid, dumb, or weak, I scrambled to get it all figured out.

We live in a culture that emphasizes intellect over emotion, fixing over letting go, and forcing over allowing. It’s exhausting, isn’t it?

Not knowing takes practice. Getting out of our heads and into our hearts is a learned skill. The good news is that it opens a vast world of satisfaction. The bad news is that it takes a lot of support, which many of us avoid.

Especially in families that put high value on intellect and avoiding emotions, we worked very hard to have an answer or solution for everything. It served some of us well. Until we started to see - usually due to conflict and loss - that there is so much more to life.

Having all the answers is an unattainable goal; one that many of us have sought relentlessly for decades.

There’s another way.

As a reminder, you are part of a growing community here. Not everyone is focused on this kind of healing, so your insights are valuable. Please reply with your experience and comments.

Consider

There is so much encouragement everywhere to “improve” and “get better” and “achieve.” I’ve spent many years collecting degrees, certificates, and licenses only to increasingly understand that I don’t know shit.

Talk to people with advanced degrees - most will tell you the most important thing they learned is how little we know. Many studies have shown that we are running on less than 5% consciousness. The rest is running us until we surrender and make friends with our buried emotions.

Usually, it takes a considerable amount of pain to let go of the thinking obsession. We endure serial relationship conflicts, job losses, substance use problems, and many more.

If we live through it, some of us lucky ones find our way to recovery. When we are hanging out with others on the path of healing, it becomes normalized to look at the beautiful mess we’ve become due to trying to have it all figured out.

Surrender and vulnerability are traditionally avoided like the plague. But consider this: It takes way more courage to be vulnerable than it does to be the tough know-it-all.

Think about it; It’s much easier to be tough and have all the answers, than to take the risk of being the imperfect human that we all are. Learning how to live with imperfection could also be considered “coming into reality”. This awakening is not always easy.

Pain is our best friend if we see it as course correction vs. a thing to avoid. A wise-ass friend of mine often says, “I wish you a lot of pain, my friend.” He’s come to understand that our pain - if acknowledged and felt  - brings wisdom and freedom.

Our grief, fear, shame, and anger are natural signposts for growth. We were conditioned to hide, repress, and deny these feelings. In recovery, we see that these are the doorway to a much more authentic life.

I’m not saying it’s easy. When I came into this work, being emotional seemed like a great evil. A powerful group of loving men had to be patient and firm to get me to open up.

It’s a pretty simple idea to “be who we are” - but it is not easy by any means. The conditioned intellect will fight at every turn to assert its tiny slice of knowing. With time, support, self-reflection, and body-focused healing work, we settle into an increasingly genuine self-expression.

Not knowing takes practice. And it opens us up to being.

AN AFFIRMATION

Today, I am open. I am letting go of my pattern of having all the answers. With support, I am giving my intellect a much-deserved rest and letting my heart lead my life. I am feeling all my emotions and settling into the flow of this life.

Solutions

1. Try stillness: If you have been conditioned to think as a default mechanism (which is most of us) meditation is a strong medicine. At first, getting still will bring up many feelings. Our brain will panic and take us in a thousand directions. Any breathing meditation, if you can stick to a daily routine, will train you to calm down your thoughts and your nervous system. This will allow you to access emotions. We are very practiced at following our thoughts. The ancient and widely practiced act of meditating will confront this pattern. This is why they call it a meditation “practice.”

2. Get support for healing: Find a body-oriented trauma healer. Get in an experiential group. Heal your inner child. An amazing community group that focuses on inner child healing is Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA). Consider The Deep Waters Experience or another of the programs on this list: Recovery and Trauma Resources.

3. Notice your patterns: Is your automatic response to discomfort to try to explain? Are you able to notice the feelings in your body that drive this pattern? I’ve written extensively about how to access emotion in my new book, Stop Doing Sh*t You Don’t Want to Do: A Straightforward Guide to Letting Go of Unresolved Trauma

Questions for Growth

Take this into your journal.

1. Do you sometimes try to have “the answer” to avoid embarrassment?

2. As a child, what were you taught - or what was modeled for you about feelings expression?

3. Have you hidden your emotions for survival? How has that affected your life?

4. What steps to healing have you taken? And what progress have you seen?

We’ve spent so much effort trying to get it right. Let’s take a break and support each other in learning how to BE…exactly as we are.

Rumi wrote, “Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

I’ll meet you there.

With much warmth,

Bob

To keep your healing alive, engage with this community, and support my efforts to rally this movement of healing:

1. Reply to this email with your experience and insights on this topic (Let me know if you don’t want it published - otherwise, I sure will!)

2. Get my new book - Stop Doing Sh*t You Don’t Want to Do is out now! Get it here. And write an amazing review here.  The Audiobook version is now available on Spotify, Google Play, and Libro! 

3. Tell me what you want - Over the next couple of weeks, you’ll get an email with a quick question. It’ll take you 1 minute to answer. Please open it and reply. Sooooo helpful.

From previous newsletters on Sustainable Change, here are the thoughts of some of our community members: