Spiritually Transformed | A Path to Find True Freedom: Being Your Authentic Self | Radical Honesty

When I was younger, I remember criticising myself for each ‘negative’ or ‘critical’ or ‘judgmental’ thought I had with the conviction that if I had that thought I was a’ bad’ person. I’ve started regular meditation many years ago and for a couple of years or more, before lock-down, I was attending a Buddhist Centre in Holloway Road, London. I liked what the Buddha says about the function of the mind (not of the brain), which is to produce thoughts as much as the function of the heart is to pump oxygenated blood to the cells, and as much as each organ of the body has its own particular function. Therefore it is the mind that produces thoughts, not me. This understanding removed from me the conviction that ‘I am my thoughts’ and the negative connotation connected with it since every single human being in this planet has ‘negative thoughts’.  The real question is: “If I am not my thoughts who am I?” I am not even my body, since my consciousness comes only from my brain. Am I a spirit...

Being humble gets easily confused with being humiliated.  In today’s world, where in many occasions our public figure, the social platforms ‘facade’ has taken over our humanity and vulnerability, humbleness sounds like ‘a Bible preaching stuff’ or a ‘Jesus like’ behaviour that takes us nowhere and it is not even considered as an option. If we want to grow spiritually, we have to recognise that the reality is quite the opposite. For example,m if you speak or watch any sport star, let’s speak about Emma, for example, (I am sure lots of you know of whom I am taking about after the US Open 😀💕), she has deployed a lot of humbleness to be able, day after day, since she was a child to learn and improve her strokes, her serve, and make minimal changes day in and day out; she has to face her fears, work on her mental strength, to feel her fear of failure - which requires lots of humbleness to fail over and over again and needs to be firstly addressed (by failing over and over again and ac...

 The most precious asset in life is time. Time is limited, time is scarce, time can end now.   When I was young I was behaving in ways that were destroying all my efforts for success and fulfilment. I was destroying time. It was so painful to see myself doing it and despite being aware it was happening I could not stop it. It took me a long time to change, one day at the time, one step at the time, sometimes falling back to the same old behaviour, to the same old unbearable pain.  Destroying over and over again, out of guilt for not fulfilling the dreams my parents had for me, for being myself; out of fear of change, of letting go of an identity that was not mine but only a survival kit, a facade, an armour which did not fit and made me bleed.  I was very successful even when I was young but I could not see it. I could not see my creativity, my beautiful mind, my kindness, ingenuity, my love for knowledge and my dedication to justice. I could only feel not good ...

Many of us connect faith with the belief in God and cannot define faith in agnostic or atheist ways. This was a challenge for me as well and I really wanted to change this concept when I was young since being Italian culturally faith equals believing in God. So I decided to look at the word and act in it via my life with faith by taking actions not driven by fear. This was the way for me to develop faith without the need to have to believe in God. I am not saying I do not believe that there are forces in the world that are more power of me, or course there are (and many) I am saying that I find it difficult to identify one of those forces as ‘God’ since I find it easier to believe that ‘God’ is everything and that everything is ‘God’ simply because everything exists.

Even if Honesty is a universal concept and, as such, should not be subjected to interpretations, being such a wide concept it does get interpreted and, as a consequence, applied differently by people.  Its interpretation is connected with culture, family upbringing, personal ideas and values coming from previous experiences, from inner states of fears, etc… Being honest starts to examine your motives and ask yourself: "Which is the reason am I acting in a certain way or I am thinking in a certain way or, which are the motives making me feel in a certain way?" The application of the spiritual principle of honesty starts internally, it is an inside job and then it expands outward like a ripple.  Sometimes in searching for our motives we miserably fail since it is in the nature of every human being in some situations hiding a bad motive under an apparently good one.  We always need to maintain humble and question ourselves even when we feel we have the 'honest’ answer on exa...

When we speak our truth we are humble because we take a risk to be disliked, judged, sometimes even be misinterpreted. Sometimes we feel we could loose a friend, or even a family member.  By doing this we may feel feelings we do not want to feel, feeling of loss, grief, sadness, shame or guilt.  When we are feeling those feelings we become free, the more we feel those ‘negative feelings’ the more they disappear from us. Being honest and speaking our truth becomes easier and easier and the freedom becomes bigger and bigger.  We feel the bliss of freedom and we find integrity again.

Why was I a 'people pleaser' and what I was trying to avoid? How did I stop being a people pleaser? When I was young I was a people pleaser, it was the most dishonest act I could perform and it was so painful. Being a 'people pleaser' meant, firstly, being dishonest with myself: I could not say no (I could not find the courage to say no) and I was covering up my total terror of others’ opinion of me, or of their presumed rejection or dislike of me, with a 'fake personality' of being a kind, loving and caring person.  You cannot be loving and caring if you do not love yourself first. You can only fake it!  So, obviously, by being firstly dishonest with myself (in regards of the real motives of my dishonesty) I could not possibly being honest with others. Secondly by being dishonest I was actually depriving people to feel their feelings and I was manipulating their feelings towards me. I was depriving people, and especially people close to me, of their freedom to ...