"Radically owned honesty means disclosing yourself completely while taking full responsibility for your experience."
From a reader:
“What if the truly enlightened thing would be to actually fully own the judgements and resentments we have towards others, and bring this honestly in the dynamic, trusting that the other one will defend their own self-love, and personal path to enlightenment, owning our humanity, instead of trying to be the bigger person? I wonder if the spiritual ambition of being okay with our triggers and taking full responsability, is sometimes the exact thing that is preventing us from showing ourselves honestly in our triggered selves, and thus, holding us back from the vulnerability that would lead us to the enlightenment we are seeking.”
Disclaimer: I address other facets of this multi-layered question/comment in these blogs:
Most of us censor ourselves to avoid hurting others or ourselves. Even if we’re not actively dishonest, we may lie by omission, especially towards people or in situations we dislike. We might express gratitude while feeling angry, show care while feeling disappointed, or pretend equanimity while feeling disgusted. The idea of radical honesty—sharing our thoughts and feelings with full transparency—can be terrifying. This fear is revealing. The intensity of fear I feel when I imagine doing it reflects how alienated I feel from my surroundings. Apparently, I believe that the totality of myself is not acceptable to the world I live in.
By censoring myself, I limit my freedom of expression and prevent others from truly seeing and understanding what matters to me. This undermines the sincerity and depth of the connections I can form. Additionally, by not sharing how others impact me, I withhold valuable personal feedback that decreases the transformative potential of our encounter.
At the other extreme is raw radical honesty: showing what I think and feel—including my judgments, blame, and projections—without holding back. While this can be liberating and transformative, it can also cause harm, re-traumatize others, reduce intimacy, and potentially sever connections.
At House of the Beloved, we aim to capture the best of both extremes through a practice called radically owned honesty. This means disclosing yourself completely while taking full responsibility for your experience.
It follows five principles:
Disclosing myself: Sharing the raw truth of how it is like to be me, without pretending or censoring.
Owning my experience: Taking full responsibility for my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.
Being different together: Accepting others and myself as we are while staying connected.
Humility: Letting go of assumptions and ideas of right and wrong.
Love: Extending myself to support both my own and another’s existential development. (Also listen to our podcast: A Case Against Love.)
This practice is a reciprocal commitment to support each other’s spiritual or existential development, and the shared willingness to extend ourselves in this process. It’s also a choice to do our own work: I own my experience, and you own yours. When I blame you, you extend yourself to help me explore that experience so I learn to take ownership. In this process, I am taking, not giving. Mistaking unowned projection as a gift to another confuses taking with giving, even though the interaction may still be valuable for the other. (Also read: caring by not taking care) Disclosing my triggered self is integral to the practice; however, marinating in my projection and expecting others to solve it is not doing the work—it's getting stuck in foreplay.
A few scenarios to illustrate these ideas:
I’m completely free to disclose what I’m thinking and feeling, as long as I don’t hold someone else responsible for my experience.
If I intentionally use another person to process my frustration, I’ve reduced them to a means, not an end, thereby not supporting their existential development.
If I'm unwilling to rethink and explore myself to support the other’s existential growth, I risk passively enduring their presence instead of actively supporting my own existential development.
If I passively endure something I haven’t consented to, I’m not disclosing myself.
If I don’t express my anger because I fear its impact on others, I’m not owning and disclosing my fear.
To explore and discover ourselves, we must dance on the edge between welcoming in and venturing out, between censoring ourselves and projecting onto or blaming others, between undoing and expressing ourselves. It’s a continuous process of reciprocal colonization (or de/reterritorialization in words of Deleuze & Guattari), until we fully understand how our minds create the world. This oscillation can only happen in the open hands of humility and a willingness to extend ourselves for both our own and another’s existential development. (Also read humility as self-love and stop colonising yourself)
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Implementing the ideas above may seem complex, but it isn’t. You can start your practice by follow five simple steps:
Be radically honest with yourself about your experience.
Own your experience.
Disclose yourself.
Listen deeply to others, without assumptions.
Be with what is, without trying to change anything.
Join us to practice every Tuesday evening, click here to join our whatsapp group.
Want to dive deeper? Join our Inner sky training.
(Gratitude to Jolanda Scherpenzeel for her feedback, which helped improve this post.)
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