Transparency

I’ve been thinking about transparency a lot lately. It is a word that has surfaced over and over again in my recent journey to heal my marriage after my husband’s affair. At first the word transparency seemed to apply only to him. When we were in the middle of working through the pain and lost trust it was necessary that Dan become as transparent as possible in order for me to regain some comfort-trust, in the relationship. At first this was pretty uncomfortable because before the affair, we were used to quite a bit of autonomy with all kinds of things going on in our individual lives that we had no need or time to share. But after the affair, I needed to know what Dan was doing, who he was doing it with, what he was thinking. It also felt like I cared more, I wanted to know. It was hard, especially for Dan, but somehow he understood how the importance of being transparent was in order to come full circle with trust again and to heal. It was hard for me too, because I never considered myself the kind of person who “keeps tabs” on her mate- I always just trusted him. Now that we are well on our way to closing that chapter in our lives, I started thinking about transparency in relationship to my own life and how I move through the world. I don’t want to have secrets. Secrets feel like fear and lying. I don’t want to hold back or be ashamed of anything that I do or have done. By shining a light on my life and being transparent, I hope to invite others who share some or any of my experience to share their experiences with me. In doing that I don’t feel so alone. In fact I know I’m not. Before doing Kundalini Yoga this past Saturday night the instructor talked about transparency and how much our world has changed with social media and modern technology and communication. We know an awful lot about each other and we can use this knowing, this transparency to bring us closer; make us feel like the human family that we are. The instructor said, “Transparency equals freedom” Tonight at a lovely gathering of new friends over food, passion fruit margaritas and drumming, I spoke with someone who said everything we do is all out there anyway. Do we think that nobody sees us? Even if you don’t believe in god or a higher power, our highest self always knows. So this transparency to me is a calling to bring forth my highest self, to move in this world as if everyone can see what I’m doing, to be the kind of person I am aspiring to be, unashamed, alive and free.