Speak Your Truth

Speaking Your Truth

There is the thing you actually think. And there is the thing you say instead.

Not because you are dishonest. But because somewhere along the way, most people learned that what they actually think is not always welcome. That it creates friction. That it costs something in the currency of approval or belonging or keeping the peace. And so the filtering began — and ran long enough, and quietly enough, that most people have stopped noticing the gap between what is true inside them and what comes out.

In this episode, Kit Mann looks at what the Taoist tradition calls te — your inherent nature, the thing that is specifically and irreducibly you, underneath all the adaptation and management and performance of an acceptable self. And at what it costs when that nature is consistently suppressed. Not to the relationships. To the person doing the suppressing.

This episode is not about being more assertive or saying hard things to people who need to hear them. It is about the practice of staying close enough to your own nature that you have something true to say — and the return to the self that happens when you start saying it.

Also: a listener question from James Key in Tallahassee, Florida, on guided meditation for Taoists — and why the forest the guide takes you to is not your fores