Hi, this is Michael Kreuzwieser and I am writing you today out of my own experience and also what I noticed in workshops and working with individuals in coaching sessions.

Radical Honesty and similar methods can be a great way to get more in contact with yourself and the being that lives inside of you beyond your personality and behind who you think you are.

Radical Honesty or any other authentic and honest way to express yourself can easily be used to avoid what's true, control yourself or the people around you, and stay trapped by your mind's ideas.

It can be a fine line between being radically honest to support yourself in being yourself and living a more free and joyful life and creating another idea about yourself and how to live life.

The mind is a great tool and is sometimes very quick to hijack new methods of personal liberation and use them to enforce apparent control instead of creating more freedom and aliveness.

You can use Radical Honesty correctly and still suffer, feel numb, stressed, and trapped in the mind.

I think if you use Radical Honesty mostly in service of your being, you should feel some positive outcome after a while like:

Being less stressed
Less tension in your body
Fewer loops in your mind
A sense of freedom, joy and peace
Deeper connection with friends & partners
Excitement about life
Creative ideas about your life
Being more loose about how others are or live their life.

I want to outline some of the most favorite and powerful ways to sabotage yourself with Radical Honesty by instrumentalizing it for the ideas of the mind to stay in control.

Avoiding through Correctness

If you get stuck on doing Radical Honesty in the “right” way, you may end up missing the moment-to-moment experience. Instead of expressing yourself to simply authentically connect with life as it is, both within and around you, you might end up chasing an idea of how it "should" look. Radical Honesty is about embracing the present as it is, rather than conforming to a concept or doing it right.

You can use the “correct” language to avoid feeling what you are feeling instead of expressing yourself in a more “messy” way and be less in control - but more alive and real.

Any method can be hijacked by the mind by turning the method into a new jail of how to behave, how to say things correctly, and how to be correctly honest.

Avoiding through Control & Instrumentalizing

You can tell the truth with a hidden agenda to control people and to get what you want without asking for it.

For example: you might be very honest while dating because you know the other person really appreciates honesty and you secretly manipulate by telling the truth.

By that you still don't tell the truth - you tell the truth to get a certain outcome of the situation. That will be in the way of real connection and intimacy and will keep you busy internally.

Balancing Things Out

You might try to be honest just to keep things balanced, but this isn’t real honesty in service of your being. For example, offering some appreciation to someone who feels down or is angry with you might seem honest and kind, but may not be the full truth.

More honest would be admitting that their sadness makes you uncomfortable and that you’d like to make them feel better to ease your own discomfort. It’s okay to feel this way; the key is simply revealing your real feelings and motives.

Boost Your Ego

You can tell the truth to get more appreciation from others or to sell your polished spiritual Ego. You can tell the truth to get approval from others and to maintain a certain picture that others should have of you.

When you do that, you will still stay trapped in your mind made jail of control. You will make an extra effort in social situations and probably you will be busy pretending and scanning people for their reactions.

The truth in service of your freedom and aliveness will be that you admit what you are doing and that you are seeking approval through telling “the truth”.

What To Do?

The main way to interrupt your hidden agenda and to get to the benefits of telling the truth is to simply reveal more background information:

Your agenda
What you really want
How you pretend to be honest
Your desired outcome
Your strategies
Your extra effort
Your righteous ideas about how to be correctly honest

It will usually take some time to notice that your mind found another way to stay in control when you are new to Radical Honesty and especially when you are already experienced and have practiced for some time.

I think it is a lifelong challenge to reveal again and again all the strategies of the mind to twist something freeing and beautiful into another way of self-sabotage and suffering. It is lifelong training of your awareness to just get better and faster at tracking your traps.

I want to mention our upcoming Radical Honesty Advanced 8-Day Intensive Workshop in Germany in German - for people who are already experienced with Radical Honesty and ideally have been already to another 8-day workshop.

Me and Marvin Schulz will be leading the workshop.

It will happen from the 11th - 19th of January in the countryside between Hamburg and Berlin in a beautiful venue with a Sauna & hot tub.

In this workshop, we will go deeper and especially look at how to implement Radical Honesty in your way and style without perfectionism and strict rules.

If that is interesting for you, here are all the details:

https://marvinschulz.com/calendar/radical-honesty-advanced-8-tage-workshop

If you are looking for a shorter workshop to try out Radical Honesty or reconnect with the practice, Marvin Schulz and I will also lead 2 more weekend workshops in German this year:

22nd-24th of November in Berlin

13th-15th of December in Leipzig

I wish you all the best with your honest journey

Michael

Michael Kreuzwieser is a Forrest Yoga teacher and Certified Radical Honesty Trainer who incorporates conscious sensuality practices into his work. He is passionate about creating safe spaces of experience for mindful, authentic and honest expression & intimacy.

Upcoming Workshops led by Michael:

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