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So I'm just back from retreat and there's some of you sitting here that were part of our week long.

And one of the stories, and this wasn't from this retreat, but that really illustrates, I think,

the experience of deepening practice.

And a young man went to a week long retreat and he described at the end this incredible rollercoaster,

rubs and downs, these moments of incredible stillness or joy and a sense of being in the flow.

And then other moments were just caught in obsessing and comparing with other people and jealousy.

And he said, you know, I get it, that the joy is in getting real.

It doesn't have to do with any particular mind state.

The joy is in finding that presence and space that really has room for this changing life.

The title of this talk is Radical Self-Honesty, The Joy in Getting Real.

And the ideas they really go together that our basic suffering arises from the unseen, unfelt, unincluded parts of our psyche.

That's where the suffering comes from.

And when we pull away from any part of our lived experience, what happens is that we have to erect defenses.

And we have to keep on erecting them to keep a distance from what we really don't want to feel.

So those are the stories, the justifications, the reactive emotions and so on.

So there's always this undercurrent of fear and deficiency when we're not being real and honest with what's right here.

And what happens is that our identity gets organized around the defense system.

Around all the ways we're trying to get what we want and avoid being seen and controlling things.

Sometimes described as a false self.

That becomes our sense of who we are.

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