Speaking My Truth

So I have this friend who's kind of "New-Agey."  I've always liked her, but I have sometimes found her ideas unconventional.  I know, for example, she does work as a spiritual birth assistant, which helps parents develop a spiritual and kinetic relationship with the baby while it's still in the womb.  She has also worked as a new energy practitioner, which involves channeling and balancing other people's energy.  She is also into reincarnation and angel readings and numerology and once paid for me to have a reading done by a numerologist/psychic.

She's actually a very smart woman and an extremely kind, loving, and spiritual person, but for a long time the skeptic in me felt like a lot of the ideas and practices she was into were...well, hooey.  That didn't mean I didn't love her or that I didn't believe that she wasn't benefiting from her own beliefs.  I just didn't quite buy some of them.

There are still some things she believes in that I'm not sure about, but others which I have since decided have more validity than I once thought.

I remember when I was still in the closet and trying to live the "good Mormon" life, I used to get laryngitis a lot.  I'd get sick and lose my voice.  As an actor, that was very frustrating.  It often meant lost work and pay.

I remember my friend, who knew that I was trying to figure out how to reconcile my homosexual attractions with my religion, once theorized that perhaps the reason I would get sick and, specifically, get laryngitis was because it was a physical manifestation of my inability to "speak my truth" (her words).  At the time, I dismissed this theory, figuring that these illnesses and loss of voice were just part of my particular health issues.

My friend had once been an active member of the LDS Church, but at the time she made this proclamation about speaking my truth she had pretty much left in the church and was pursuing these more New Age beliefs.  I was still trying to live according to LDS tenets and felt that my friend was losing her way spiritually.

I no longer feel that way.  I think there is much truth in many of the things my friend believes.  I don't know that I quite believe everything she believes, but I do believe in much of it.  I actually recently read the memoir of an actress I like, Ellen Burstyn, and much of her belief system reminds me of my friend, and I hope to write in a future post about some of the things I read in her book that spoke to me.

I do know this: since I came out of the closet and found Jonah, I do not get sick anywhere close to what I used to experience, and I have not experienced the laryngitis issues that once plagued me so often.  I think my spiritual health and happiness has had a great and positive effect on my physical health.  Maybe the theory about speaking my truth was true, after all.  In any case, I believe it is.