Perhaps the essence of health is in the foundation of truth.
This would be nothing special except that perhaps I have spent my life running from the truth in one of its many forms. It seems the more I discover the truth the more I realize how afraid of it I am, or was, or will be. The truth has never been my friend, whether from the parents who denied me of it, or the childhood spent finding ways to bend it, or adulthood lived ashamed of it. No, I have become so unfamiliar with truth that it seems almost foreign to me, and those things foreign to us seem to scare us the most.
Yet love, if not life, demands nothing but the truth from us all. Whether it be the reality of suffering, the loss of love, the bitter chill of hate and intolerance we are forced at some time in our existence to face truth head on. We may be ugly, we may be fat, we may be mean, we may be short, we may be…
We may be, period. Regardless of what follows that simple grouping of three words, we may be. Truth is those three words, and what follows those words are perception bound in a need to be something else. I may be ugly, depending on the one describing me. I may be fat in in a room of those thin. Yet I may be, or I am, regardless of what follows.
It is this simple truth that helps me cope with such a fear of that truth. If what I am is and what follows irrelevant, is the truth really to be feared? Is the judgment of others that which need concern me at all? Is it just that the I fear not the truth, but that judgment of others? I can see in my life that there were very few times I feared the truth, yet I can see clearly how I fear the consequence and the judgments of others. Perhaps the best way to find truth is to disregard the judgment of others and to just allow what is to be.
Simple enough, let the test begin.