The following are five reflections that might inspire you to practice speaking your truth. You Are Not Responsible for Other People’s Feelings

While many of us lean on mindfulness to help us through times of inner and outer chaos, we can cultivate the greatest resilience through consistency in our practice, even when it doesn’t feel urgent. Ask yourself why. Get clear about what is bothering you and why you need to speak up. Plan how you might express this effectively. Then choose your timing well. And I just hope—I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks’s heart almost 11 years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and it's here with every woman who chooses to say, “Me too.” And every man—every man who chooses to listen. She told the story of Recy Taylor, “a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road.” But she’s upbeat about it. Being replaced on a major show earlier this year without even an explanation stung, but she’s able to laugh it off. She’s content in this new life, happy to focus on bringing positivity to her audiences. She’s no longer giving the uncomfortable act. In many ways, she has turned to her Happy Place, and that suits her just fine.But the decision was also “due to what I was going through personally”. She won’t explain further other than to say that for three hours a day she’d be chatting away behind her BBC microphone while feeling utterly dreadful inside. I think of authentic communication as sharing the unfiltered essence of ourselves with others, including our identities, feelings, needs, boundaries, and desires. This is one of the worst and most anti-science nonsense I have ever read. The world DEPENDS and PROVES to us that objective truth exists outside ourselves – or our trains won’t run, cooking can’t happen, government function, or the universe itself hold together. The world doesn’t magically change if I change my feelings about it.

On the journey to becoming that woman, I have learned that authentic communication is like working a muscle: hard at first, but ever easier with exercise. This can’t be stressed enough. Being honest saves you the stress of digging yourself in a hole by lying. If someone finds out the lie, you have not only dug yourself deeper, but have to dig yourself out. Why not just be truthful instead? 5. It will shape up your morals Unnecessarily Apologetic: What others consider a perfectly reasonable comment from you, in your mind can easily be perceived as a mistake or “too much”. You feel the impulse to offer an apology when none is warranted.On reflection, it seems to me that the speech’s take on “truth” would’ve been improved not by eliminating any notion of speaking “your truth,” which has its place, but by phrasing that final anecdote in a way that made one point more clear: that Recy Taylor wasn’t just speaking “her truth,” she was speaking “the truth” to power—and that her unpaid claim to justice is inseparable from that fact. It’s something I do wish to change. When I imagine who I the type of person I would like myself to be, it’s someone that is authentically themselves and I hate to say, I’m really not that person right now—but I’m working on it