Openness & honesty ~ with yourself, with your partner

We hide ourselves from the world, for a good reason.

There’s a reason why we cover part of ourselves from the rest of the world, why we wear a shield of armor, why we remain partially hidden — it’s because the world is not understanding, the world is quick to judge, and the world is hypocritically condemning.

No one is perfect, and yet we are forced to put on a front as if none of us have ever made any mistakes. We know on some level that people around us have done imperfect things, said imperfect things, thought imperfect thoughts. But we keep it at that.

And often, these things we classify as “mistakes” or “flaws” are actually perfectly fine — causing harm to no one — but still they are unacceptable. If you do things differently, think in different ways, have different needs and interests — there is actually nothing wrong with that — and yet we have to cover it up in shame.

The world is judgmental and not understanding, people are quick to condemn you before they acknowledge parts of themselves that could be considered “imperfect” or even just “different.” If you do anything that goes slightly out of the box of what society expects from you, you can face unfairly harsh consequences — anything from social isolation to threatening your right to be alive.

The harsh truth is that we live in a world where being completely open and honest about who you are can come with life-threatening consequences. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t hurting anyone, or you haven’t hurt anyone, including yourself. And it doesn’t matter if the people judging you are dealing with their own secrets.

So we keep parts of ourselves hidden. Maybe it would be ideal to live in a world where we can all be completely open. Or maybe that’s the nature of reality, something that will always be a part of being alive, and maybe there’s a good reason for that.

But you should never hide from yourself!

Someone you should never hide from is yourself. We are all so conditioned to cover ourselves up to the world, that we also learn to cover ourselves up from ourselves. The one person you should always be honest with is YOU!

If you are completely open and honest with yourself, the worst that could happen is that you judge yourself harshly for being who you are. But awareness is always the first step. Only from there, can you work on self-acceptance which is necessary for self-love.

YOU are the first person you have to be open and honest with. And that’s extremely difficult. If you can do that, you should feel proud of yourself. Most people go their whole lives not knowing who they actually are because they are so afraid of facing themselves. Most people never even get as far as themselves.

Opening up to your partner

If you have a partner, you’ll never be able to be open and honest with them until you first learn how to accept yourself in your own mind. You will never open up to your partner if you can’t open up to yourself. That’s why the first step is to start with yourself.

Now, if you can go beyond that point of accepting yourself for who you are, then you can begin to try opening up to your partner. If you happen to find someone who you can fully trust, who loves you completely, then there’s no reason to hide any part of yourself from them. Opening up to yourself is hard enough, but opening up to your partner takes you to much higher level!

“Your partner” is different from “the world” if you truly love each other. To put it bluntly, the world does not love you. This is NOT to say you are unlovable because this has NOTHING to do with you! The world does not love you ONLY BECAUSE the world does not love ITSELF. The world is competing against one another, the world is relying on material pleasures in order to find spiritual fulfillment, the world is all mixed up. When the world shames you, it represents their shame for themselves, and has absolutely nothing to do with your worthiness or lovableness.

Anyway, two people are only truly in love when they have learned to love themselves first. And then that self-love/inward-love reaches the higher point of outward-love.

Difficult journey

True love is very rare. There are many couples not actually in love with each other. Rather, two people struggling with self-love, leaning on one another as distraction. Some people are desperate for love because they want to find a person to focus on in order to distract them from themselves. They think they can skip the self-love phase and instead turn to someone else. But that’s not how it works, you always have to love yourself first, or else it’s going to get very messy at some point.

Self-love is possibly the most difficult journey you will embark upon. It’s chaotic, it’s the destruction and breakdown of old thought-patterns and conditioning. The only thing more difficult, crazier, scarier, and Earth-shattering than learning how to love yourself is going beyond that point, after you’ve already found self-love, and learning how to love someone else.

If you have a partner and you are looking for the deepest love, the first thing you should do is learn how to love and accept yourself fully. Do not cover up from yourself. Know every single part of your soul. And if you can get there, then it’s time to love your partner to the deepest level possible. You have to open up to one another. And as just mentioned, that’s extremely difficult, crazy, scary, and Earth-shattering — but 100% worth it.

Find someone who understands

At first, there’s a good chance they won’t understand. Just as you begin to open up to yourself, you naturally judge yourself before reaching self-acceptance. The same way, your partner will probably judge you at first as a knee-jerk reaction. That’s what we are conditioned to do. But the difference is that they will try to understand you. If they can’t understand you at first, they will at least make an effort to understand you.

There’s a difference — your partner finds out something about you that’s different, confusing, maybe considered unacceptable to society — there’s a difference between immediately dismissing it verses further investigation and attempt to understand. Don’t be afraid of your partner judging you, maybe you should even expect it as a natural reaction, but what you should look for is what they do after their initial reaction.

• Do they ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist? Do they say it’s wrong or strange?
• Or do they ask questions, pay more attention, think about it more?

It makes sense as to why we hide parts of ourselves from THE WORLD. But there is no excuse to hide from YOURSELF! And going beyond that, if you have a partner and you are both in love, there’s no excuse to hide from EACH OTHER! It’s not about initial reaction, because it’s an ongoing journey — it’s about progress.

And that’s why I said before, maybe there’s a good reason for why the world is closed off and judgmental. Perhaps it’s because of polarity. The fact that you can be completely honest with yourself, and then with another person, makes it that much more special, important, and majestic — considering the rest of the world forces you to hide.