Honesty is always the best policy – and here’s why!
Honesty is a simple thing to do and be. Is it always easy? I’d say yes and no is a great answer to that question. But let’s step back a little. What is honesty? Why is your honesty important to your pet’s well-being? How does honesty support powerful presence in your life?
Honesty can be defined as ‘uprightness of character or action’. Honesty implies a refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any way. I have found that the best place to begin with is self-honesty. For me, that looks like being really clear about what my ethical and moral standards are, and then doing everything I can to be in alignment with them. It also includes being honest with myself about how I am feeling as I move through life (emotional honesty). Or in other words, I won’t lie to myself about how I feel. And then, from that alignment, I take my honesty into the world.
How can you help your pets by being honest? Number one, if you are honest with yourself, you’ll be able to clearly see where you might have weaknesses. For example, if you have anxiety, you’ll then face that, and most likely act to deal with it. Then you’ll reduce your anxiety, and your pets will benefit immensely. Or maybe you’ll see that you have a habit of letting things slide – maybe ignoring your pet’s yearly health check reminders. And then take steps to be timely, and to make sure that your pets do get the preventative health care they need, and that might pick up a problem early, before it’s a serious issue.
Not only that, lack of honesty in life inevitably leads to undercurrents of fear about being ‘found out’. That causes stress. And any stress that affects you also affects your pets.
Your presence is the most beautiful gift you can ever give your pets!
Today’s world is full of distractions. Your mobile phone pings with messages, reminders, or social media ‘likes’ or replies to your posts. Your attention is continually being mined by all sorts of companies. That’s one influence that continually erodes your presence.
Or maybe you have old trauma that you haven’t met, that is still living inside you, but suppressed. It takes a lot of energy to keep all of that stored up in your system, energy that is not available for you to be present with – or in other words, there is less of you here and now for your pets.
Presence is the most precious thing. The more you grow your presence, the more you have to bring into all of your relationships, and also to what you wish to create in life. The more honest you are over time, the more your presence will naturally grow, and the more your pets and people will naturally trust you.
If you are in a room full of people, the person with the most presence will invariably be the center of attention. That’s because true, pure presence is the sexiest thing on the planet. Everyone wants more of anyone who is truly present. That’s partly because it’s kind of rare in today’s world.
Here’s a simple way to increase your presence. Simply bring as much awareness as you can into your body, moment to moment. Be with whatever you are experiencing in yourself while you do this. You can try this with your pets as soon as you finish reading this article. Just sit down, connect with your pet – gaze and/or touch – and gently bring as much awareness as you can into and throughout your body.
This helps with self-honesty, too, because when you are present in your body, you are connected with how you are feeling. Then let everything else go for a few minutes, and give your pets the honest gift of your undivided presence. You’ll notice all sorts of wonderful things happen when you do this, and especially if you make it an everyday practice!
I did a short video digging into this topic- you can drop into my YouTube channel and watch that by clicking here…
You can also pop in and read last week’s article on Listening and Showing Up at this link.