Satya: fun to say, hard to practice!Really speaking the truth is difficult: it means never giving someone else even a slightly different impression from what you know to be true. The most serious lie is to make false claims about our spiritual realizations. It's also just generally good to avoid divisive talk, harsh words, and idle pratter.”— The Essential Yoga Sutra: Ancient Wisdom for Your Yoga by Geshe Michael Roach, Lama Christie McNally My friends make fun of me because one of my default responses to anything is: is that true? Part of it is that I don’t understand sarcasm intuitively, so I learned to clarify if someone is being literal or just teasing me. It’s a good question to ask difficult, cyclical thoughts as they arrive: Is that true? And then: Well, what shall we do about it? How do you know what is true? It’s hard for me because I don’t trust my own thoughts. I learned not to trust them after years of depression taunted me with the sweet luxury of suicidal ideations. I let them haunt me for a long time, and then finally, I agreed with them. I told them: You’re right, it would be easier to be dead than to be alive right now. What are we going to do about it? That truth set me free. It gave me the sweet luxury of making the harder choice: to be alive, but also to live enlightened in love rather than apathetic in depression. It allowed me to look at the fog of my depression and say, if this is it, so be it. But if there’s a way to make it sweeter, kinder, more loving, let’s try to do that instead. Like the afternoon sun burning off the morning marine layer, I experienced an enlightenment, and it’s been a little easier, a bit lighter, a bit more lighthearted, a bit more enlightened, since. Here’s the translation I like. Here’s the truth: every part of life is suffering.That’s what the yoga sutras tell us.The Buddhists agree, but there is a purpose to suffering: to deepen your compassion, which is your desire to reduce to suffering of others.Not all of us feel that way.Some of us think that by deepening the suffering of others, we will relieve our own.That’s not how it works.That’s not how I work.Here’s what you get if you seek compassion: wisdom. It starts with non-violence.If your thoughts and actions are violent, so too is your life.If your life is violent, so too is the world. How can you bring a gentler sense of yourself to the world, right now?Let’s do it.