the body is a truth meter

okay, i'm going to be honest about something.
 
i have not always been the most honest person in the world. there. i said it.

on the one hand, there was a lot of the good stuff in the form of "lies" - the sort of tall tales and mythologizing that i said i did in order to entertain people. and people were entertained, sure. but also, let's not forget the dark side, whereby i had to create a world and i dreamt up identities so big that the only way to support them was through telling half true epic tales. the truth is that lying came as easily to me as breathing, stories would flop out of my mouth without me even thinking about them, and it is only because of my excellent memory that i was able to keep track of them later. (oddly enough, i never really got "called out" on my tall tales, i hope it's because people were intelligent enough to know they weren't true??)

the funny thing is that in all reality i have lived a life that is, well, chock full of enough adventure to fill a novel or two. i didn't really need the stories, you know?

but the stories came out of my mouth going back as far as i can remember. and then when awakening started, it began to be increasingly uncomfortable, not just emotionally, but actually in my physical body.

i should also mention at this time that i have had a tendancy to be a shoplifter also in the past. not from people or local/small businesses (as if that matters?) but from corporate chain type stores. i have always been financially poor (rich in the heart!) and when i needed an expensive holistic tincture for my winter sicknesses i didn't hesitate to steal what i needed from the overpriced natural-chain-grocery-which-shall-remain-nameless.

so, since my brain first blew up two years ago this march, i began to notice that as the storytelling would start to come out of my mouth, i would notice it, i would be in a rather detatched witness perspective and, watching myself, i could also see the body start to flood with adrenaline and see how the eyes got shifty and the whole body itself seemed to cave in upon the telling. after a time, the stories just sort of gave up.

since christmas, in this last week and a half, i have exaggerated one time, not even a storytelling, something along the lines of "i read 14 pages of the chapter" when i only read 9. i didn't even think about it rolling out of my mouth, and then when it did, my body felt like i'd been dipped simultaneously in boiling hot and freezing cold water. it was highly, highly uncomfortable.

then yesterday, at that same nameless chain grocer, i had to refill my water gallon from the spout, and wanted a new gallon also since i had only one. when i went up to the cashier she was only going to charge me for the water itself (29 cents a gallon) and not the gallon jug (6 bucks) and for about one hundredth of a second i thought, oh yeah, i will save myself 6 bucks. and then i was flooded with such a powerful, terrible rush in my cells and bones that i felt like i had ground glass pouring through my veins. i said "don't forget to charge me for the jug too, honey, i just picked it up" and *immediately* the glass in veins sensation stopped.

so. whatever else there is to report psychologically, spiritually, awareness wise or whatnot, i have been shown something that i knew all along. if the body says something isn't right, by giving out these stress feeling, guts in a knot feelings, the glass in veins feeling etc.... listen.  the thing  about the truth is that it is always true, and never wasn't true. so our bodies know what is real even if we don't think that "we" do.

i'm not even making a moral judgement here on shoplifting, or telling tall tales. it's just that from where i live, i don't find it to be honest behavior for me. and if my deepest prayer is for truth, so much that my heart shines in commitment to truth, then doing something dishonest is just.... well, backwards. off track. not standing fully in my truth.

my beloved teacher adya says that our bodies are truth meters and after these two moments this week i see with absolute clarity what he means.