Today I made a commitment that I’ve been meaning to do for months now: to designate a day for writing. My original intention was to finally finish an article for this site that I’ve been working on for months.  But I’ve been so twisted up in my perfectionism that I still haven’t finished it.

I’d like to think that I write to share truth, my truth. I hope that in sharing it, someone reads it, understands it and is able to find their own truth in my words. That’s the reason I write—not for attention for perfection so much as honest resonance.  But this morning I began to realize that if I was slogging through that article maybe it was because I was trying to write a topic for everyone else, instead of honoring my own truth.

Honoring one’s own truth is often buried in our myriad of other problems and concerns. We can feel it nagging at us, our inner wisdom bumping up against the list of to dos and doubts that tend to overtake our lives. We put it off, we tell it to wait because we have something more important to do. Bills to pay, deadlines to meet, grass to mow, events and obligations requiring our presence and attention.

But in reality there is nothing more important than discovering, listening to and honoring our truth. And once you’ve seen it, you can’t ever erase it.

Truth lies at the heart of meditation. When we meditate we let the layers of programming, obligations, stress, societal conditioning fall away from our present experience for the safe span of a moment in time. I like to imagine it as veils softly dropping away to reveal the treasure they were concealing underneath.  Once stripped away of all these protective, masking agents, we are left to sit with ourselves completely unfiltered. We get to experience ourselves as we actually are instead of who we told we should be. We get to hear what our heart and soul want to tell us instead of the harsh restrictive messages from the rest of the world. We get to bask in our potential, our wisdom and our capacity for love.

If you’re here it’s because you want to encounter that or have already. But let’s not minimize that it can be overwhelming to encounter ourselves on that level. We spend so much of our time trying to meet others’ expectations, falling deeper into a pattern of spiritual debt because we aren’t aligning with the needs of the soul. We are constantly confronted with the needs and expectations of everyone that we often suppress the messages of our own truth. It’s a struggle to listen to ourselves and even more so to act in accordance with that truth.

Meditation allows us the opportunity to recognize that misalignment in a loving, gentle and powerful way. It provides some relief from the constant barrage of messages that our imperfections makes us unworthy of love, pleasure, accomplishment, success or happiness. And the hope is that once we’ve seen that truth that we actually are worthy then we can carry that into everyday life and create meaningful change to better align to that truth.

But it takes time, patience and practice to learn how to carry that forth into our daily lives. I had encountered that truth and it told me that I should be writing and teaching more, that this was my path to the success and peace that I craved. Yet, my waking self, succumbing to the habits of unworthiness, perfection and people pleasing, found ways to sabotage that path:

You should be working instead.  You don’t have anything interesting or new to say. Why would anyone listen to you, you’re not an expert?  

But once you’ve seen your truth, you can’t ever fully hide from it. Doubt and second-guessing try to pull us away, but in the end, we can’t ignore truth. It is persistent in its radiance.

So, today I chose to do something super scary and allow my words to align with my purpose and path. To open a document and just start writing because the more I try to hide from what I want to be, from allowing my inner self to shine forth, the more out of place I feel in my everyday life. And although I may continue to struggle and flail around a bit, I also know (finally) that I am worthy of honoring my own truth.  

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Bio: Janet is a Colorado native, mother of two, mediator and compassionate attorney who loves laughter, bringing others joy, finding the miraculous in the ordinary corners of life and serving in humanity with dignity and care. She can be found at @SharpSweetBella on Twitter where she geeks out about the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, law, politics and pop culture.