We’ve all heard the “truths” “they” spout:

If we forgo alcohol, our lives will automatically fall into place.

We’ll stop smoking and run marathons.

The red meat we consume will cause body odor and lead to obesity, and if we become vegetarians we’ll immediately lose weight and smell better.

Eternal happiness awaits if we give up our corporate job and follow our passion.

And my personal favorite: “Diet Coke actually causes your body to gain weight. Did you know that?”

I’m here to tell you that these are lies. I know, because I live it.

I’ve never smoked—anything—not even experimentally in college.

I haven’t drank alcohol (other than NyQuil when I’m sick) in over 20 years. The only shot glass I own is plastic and measures in milliliters.

I stopped consuming artificial sweeteners and red meat a year and a half ago, and I quit my corporate job eight months ago.

On top of that, I meditate at least twice most days.

All of this, and I still feel pretty much average. Depressed and tired sometimes. Happy others. I’m willing to bet this would be the case for most of us. Because, honestly, if what they said were true and I feel this average then everyone else who smokes, drinks, works, doesn’t meditate, and eats steak would feel like crap all the time.

Thank goodness we always have a full moon or Mercury in Retrograde to explain why life is something other than rainbows and sunshine, even when we’re doing all of the recommendations.

I forgot to mention when I stopped drinking Diet Coke and eating red meat, I gained 25 pounds. How the heck did that happen?! That’s definitely not what “they” said.

Ah, wait! Here’s where we went wrong: We forgot to love ourselves first.

If we had just loved ourselves, then we would immediately drop all old feelings for the gaslighting narcissist who ghosted us.

{Sigh}

From the midst of all of the “lies,” here’s some truth:

David R. Hawkins, author of Power vs. Force, explains that a truth is true within a certain context. As we evolve, our truth changes. What once resonated with our soul, no longer holds any validity today.

He states, “Paradoxes and ambiguities arise from confusing levels of consciousness; an answer is true only at its own level of consciousness. Thus, we may find that an answer is ‘correct’ but simultaneously ‘invalid,’ like a musical note that is correctly played, but at the wrong place in the score. A statement may be true at a high level of understanding, but be incomprehensible to the average mind.”

This is why for some a juicy red steak is happiness, and for others it’s barbaric and cruel.

This is why some people lose weight when they stop drinking Diet Coke, and other people gain 25 pounds.

This is why some people vote for Donald Trump.

So what do we do now? How do we navigate these paradoxes? In order to understand the paradox of conflicting truths, it’s helpful to understand each person’s starting point. Their starting point is their truth—even if it’s untrue for others at a different level.

For example, anger is a better feeling emotion than depression. So if you’re coming at anger from a place of depression, you step onto that rung of the ladder to step up to the next one.

The trick is to feel the emotions—even the negative ones—mindfully. This is explained by Esther and Jerry Hicks in their book Ask and it is Given. “[T]here are so many who have convinced you that your anger is inappropriate—but of course, they are not inside of you, so they cannot feel the improvement that the angry thought really is—that they often counsel you against your anger…only to leave you back in your former state of depression. But when you consciously know that you have chosen an angry thought and that it has brought you relief, then you can consciously know that you can move from the angry thought to a less resistant one…right back into your full alignment.”

However, it’s necessary to note that there are negative emotions and positive ones. So while anger feels better than depression, it’s still overall negative, and therefore, it serves better as a pass-through emotion rather than a state of being. Nonetheless, we can use negative states as a leverage to get to the next best feeling emotion available to us.

So for some of us, feeling better involves getting over our ex-boyfriend by sleeping with his brother…or sister. You know, whatever works. Just as long as we do it mindfully.

And then there are those of us whose truth means we get to the next level of happiness by learning to love ourselves first.

For others of us, joy involves recognizing that there is no “us” to love first. In fact, there is no “other” either. We recognize that we are love and the body is a vessel for the One consciousness. We no longer see Jesus’ statement, “I am The One,” as referring to himself as separate or special from everyone else. In fact, we see it as a unifying claim that he is the same Oneness as us all.

And then for the remainder of us, this is all lies. It’s all a bunch of new age lies.

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Author: Kari Zahar

Editor: Travis May

Image: Video Still