I was given a wonderful gift when I was twenty-five. My two best friends patiently, kindly, and firmly showed me what a pain in the butt I could be. It took about three hours.
The three of us were a musical trio. We spent a lot of time together writing, rehearsing, traveling, performing...and arguing. When you write and rehearse together, arguing (contending for what you think sounds best or works best) is inevitable and necessary--it's how you reach a synthesis of the best gifts each person has to offer.
But at that point in my life I wasn't arguing to in order to reach the best synthesis--I was arguing to win: stubbornly, aggressively, and endlessly.
Finally Bob and Brown got so frustrated that they did what amounted to an 'Intervention.' They decided to be just as stubborn as me--yet they also brought the kind of gentle patience and genuine affection that eventually enabled me to trust them enough to let down my defenses and open my heart.
Because I respected both of them a lot, once my mind and heart were open, it was easy to 'take to heart' what they were saying--that because of my relentless attachment to being right, we as a group weren't getting to discover (together) our best potential.
Those three hours with those two friends were a life-changer for me.
Jesus said, "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." I learned two things that day--that the truth can be excruciatingly unwelcome and amazingly helpful at the same time.
Recent psychological research has shown that three things are often helpful for people struggling with 'Life': drugs, cognitive therapy, and meditation. We can try to the last two without a prescription--and they share a common denominator: that truth can set us free.
Where Freudian psychology works by re-telling family traumas over and over in order to better understand our stories, Cognitive therapy works by asking (over and over), "Are these stories true?" Recent research has shown that Freudian therapy doesn't work very well--and Cognitive therapy does.
Bob and Brown taught me the same basic principle at twenty-five. But I didn't know how to consistently work with it until I began to practice meditating.
Investigating what's true and what's not is a major component of Mindfulness Meditation--watching and listening to what the steady stream of consciousness in each of us is saying, AND asking, discerning, "Is it true?"
When we reach even the most basic level of awareness practice, we begin to see (over and over and over) what our thoughts are endlessly whispering in our inner ears. And without anybody having to nail our butts to the wall we see (over and over and over) that much of what is being said simply IS NOT TRUE.
It's hard to let go of ideas, points of view, preferences, beliefs we accept as true. But it's not nearly as hard to let go of what we've seen for ourselves as false.
Truth sets us free, even when it's disagreeable.
Free is good.
