The Joy Diet: Week 2, Truth.

It's week two of reading The Joy Diet by Martha Beck with The Next Chapter Book Club.  This week's ingredient for a joyful life is truth.  There are so many juicy morsels in this week's ingredient that I hardly know where to start.  So I'll start with the truth.

The truth is that this week's ingredient challenged me in many ways, much more so than last week's "nothing".   And, if we are being honest, I didn't explore this chapter as fully as I might have liked, mostly due to a lack of time to get quiet and get introspective.  But here is what I know:  I've spent the past two years--in other ways, the past five--excavating my truth.  And it feels good.  Really good.  But it is a marathon and not a sprint and sometimes it is really challenging.

Beck includes a few useful questions for experiencing truth:  What am I feeling?  What hurts?  What is the painful story I am telling? Can I be sure that my painful story is true?  Is my painful story working? Can I think of another story that might work better?  And, my favorite of the questions and one that Beck labels an "action criterion", of the options available to me, which one brings the most love into the world?

Admittedly some days I got stuck at "what am I feeling?", which I think happens to everyone.  But on the days that I could work past that to the "Is my painful story working?" and "Which options bring the most love into the world?"  I tried these questions in relationship to questions and situations both big and small that I faced this week and found that it totally changed not only my perspective, but also how I reacted to what I was facing.  Turns out truth really is all it is cracked up to be and it brings a sense of peace with it.

And I leave you with a quote:

"Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor of the Nazi death camps, said, "There are two ways to go to the gas chamber: free or not free."  It is the truth that offers us this freedom, the freedom to test what we are taught, to accept what we feel in our hearts, to believe what we know in our bones, and to love ourselves--including the worst aspects of ourselves--until we see through enough of our illusions to discover who we were really meant to be."~Martha Beck, The Joy Diet, p. 44

{Photo credit: emdot}

Blog Award!

A big giant thank you to Allison from Life Unqualified who passed on this blog award to me!  It means that she thinks I show honestly and sincerity in blogging, which means a lot to me.  Check out her blog too!

Now I have to list 10 honest things about myself and pass on the award!

1.  While my favorite movies are dramas (Amores Perros, American History X, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Water), the movies I could watch on repeat all day long (and do, thanks to TBS, ha!) are Wedding Crashers, Bridget Jones' Diary, Knocked Up and Old School.  I can never get enough!

2.  I shut myself off from most of the world in order to work, go to school, do reading/papers and work out but I do wish very often that I had more friends and a wider social net.  I am hoping once school is done in May to get back to that.

3. That being said,  I need alone time like I need air and it is often hard for me to honor that without feeling guilty.

4.  I'm pretty superstitious even though I know it is silly.

5.  My least favorite thing to do ever is to unload the clean dishes from the dishwasher.  Maybe not least favorite thing ever, but pretty close.

6. I have a lot of trouble thinking of ideas for blog posts.

7.  I'm allergic to roses, jasmine and lavender, which makes perfume shopping and flower owning very difficult.

8.  I'd like to learn how to paint.

9.  Being in a long distance relationship is one of the hardest but most worthwhile thing I've ever done.

10.  I still sleep with my baby blanket.