An online Weekend of Self-Inquiry

July 8th-10th, 2022

Living Truly: The Call to Embodied Integrity

There is a vital Truth of freedom and integrity our hearts yearn for us to remember.

Our chronic and habituated forgetting of this Truth shows up as insidious forms of self-betrayal. Wherever we haven’t learned how to embody true integrity in our lives, this is usually entangled in self-betrayal.

How do we habitually betray ourselves for some sense of safety or security? For love, sex, power, image, social acceptance or belonging?

How do we betray ourselves by living and making choices from fear, from a perpetual avoidance of loss, rather than from a deep well of courageous trust and self-honor?

At what cost does this self-abandonment occur? And then how do we justify this self-abandonment?

This is the level of self-inquiry that gives way to true seeing, and liberation.

Our lives are fleeting, precious, and can be over in an instant! Our willingness to choose and to realize integrity is inseparable from our capacity to come all the way home to love, sanity, fulfillment, and peace.

Waking up to the ways in which self-betrayal is at play in our lives has the potential to serve our deepest freedom.

This weekend promises to be a powerful, intimate conversation dedicated to supporting one another in choosing Truth, and coming home to embodied integrity!  

Design of the Container

Weekend Intensive Includes 6 Zoom Meetings*:

Our first meeting will be on Friday, starting at 5 pm PST.

On Saturday we will meet three times:

11 AM, 2 PM, and  5 PM, PST. 

On Sunday we will meet two times:

11 AM and 4 PM, PST

Meetings will last around 1.5 hours each.

This will be a space for us to explore the potent topic of living integrity, and what it takes to be true to ourselves in the very places we have the deepest tendencies of self-betrayal.

We will sit in stillness, we will consider different facets of this extremely potent topic, there will be some dyad-work amongst participants, and there will be a chance for you and I to work together directly, examining how this is uniquely relevant in your life, and how it is you are inviting a deeper realization of freedom!

This will be an intimate group in which we can share our growing edges, questions, prayers, self-honesty, stillness, and surrender.

*All Group Meetings will be recorded in the case that you aren’t able to attend live.

Private Facebook  Group

We will have a Private Facebook Group available for participants to share what’s coming up for you, any insights, breakthroughs, revelations…

Let yourself be seen, witnessed, held, celebrated, and supported.

I’ll be checking this group daily and contributing as I’m called.

Optional Private 1:1 Mentoring with Jesua:

For those of you who wish to receive additional private coaching, holding, or mirroring around this topic, you are welcome to schedule private mentoring sessions before or after our weekend together, at my discounted rate, as my schedule allows. This can be an extra fruitful way of engaging with this material!

All Private Sessions Can be Recorded.  

Choosing Integrity 

I have made many mistakes in my life, but the most consequential mistakes I’ve made have always involved betraying in some way what I know to be true.

These are the mistakes that have delivered essential lessons in discernment, self-respect, and integrity.

Particularly when self-betrayal has occurred for love, intimacy, financial security, or for some sense of belonging in community, that’s when it seems the teaching carries the greatest weight.

Perhaps this is because life is always conspiring to point its finger back at us—as the greatest source of love, prosperity, fulfillment, and belonging we could ever wish for?!

I am soulfully passionate about this topic of integrity, inquiring into what it means to live truly, and what it takes to be true to the truth at all costs.

I experience this as the hottest fire of continuous spiritual inquiry—an invitation to examine with radical self-honesty what our lives are given to.

Navigating trueness is a moment-by-moment choosing; something that asks for ongoing vigilance and spiritual maturity.

In my experience, integrity is the respectful response, action, or honoring of what we know is right and true.

Integrity requires a willingness to align our lives with our deepest heart’s knowing. The discovery of embodied integrity is profoundly intertwined with a realization of immense self-respect and self-love.

Integrity and self-love go hand in hand.

So why doesn’t everyone choose integrity?

Choosing integrity over what feels safe, comfortable, known, and familiar requires us to face and embrace the discomfort of the unknown.

This is the integrity born of profound trust, courage, and the willingness to let TRUTH become the most essential bottom-line in our lives.

We finally choose this level of integrity once the COST of our self-betrayal becomes evident in a way that we can no longer dismiss it.

We choose it once we know that we can’t settle for less than true freedom, peace, and self-love.

What Kind of Self-Betrayal am I talking about?

Self-betrayal always includes lying to ourselves at some level.

We lie to ourselves very simply in order to protect our comfort or avoid discomfort.

More specifically, we are almost always lying in service of securing relative freedom, money, relational connection, sex, love, image, or power.  These are the primal human drives and needs that we learn to secure at all costs, even the integrity of our hearts and souls.

These can be deeply engrained, familial, cultural, and inter-generational imprints and tendencies of self-betrayal We inherit and learn this tendency of self-lying and self-abandonment. 

There are the small, daily self-betrayals that add up over time, which often show up as an addiction to any number of substances, or to behaviors of avoidance or indulgence…

We become addicted to saying yes, when the true answer is no. Or no, when the true answer is yes. We betray our own clear discernment and make choices for the wrong reasons.

We become habitually ensnared in insidious patterns of lying, denying, dismissing, and abandoning ourselves, in avoidance of conflict, or in order to stay safe, loved, connected, etc…

And then there are big betrayals that span over time, like staying in toxic or essentially unfulfilling relationships… because of our fear of what leaving this relationship would mean for our lives, for the other people involved, for our image, our social identity, or our financial security.

There’s the common betrayal of staying in a certain profession or line of work that feels entirely dishonoring of who we are, or in a toxic financial contract, because we are attached to the relative security it affords us, to the perks or the promise of future reward, or because we are afraid to lean into the vulnerability and uncertainty of what’s unknown or unfamiliar…

This is big, scary stuff. It’s not to be minimized or spiritualized.

It’s easy to have compassion for ourselves and one another around these insidious forms of self-betrayal. 

What a tender place of universal misperception— this belief that in order to have enough, or to be safe, or to be loved, or to avoid conflict, or to belong, we need to betray the truth of our hearts and souls and the deepest knowing of who we are.

The Wake-Up Call

What does it take to wake up to the costs of self-betrayal?

Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a certain intensity of suffering at physical, mental, emotional, relational, or soul levels in order to finally get our attention. This kind of wake-up call insists that we finally examine what role self-betrayal is playing in our suffering.

When I have betrayed the truth, because of a fear that to honor it might cause me to lose whatever I’m attached to—whether that be a form of relationship, or work, or money, or image, or whatever—this is a form of self-betrayal that has had ever-increasing consequences.

I think this is especially true for those of us who commit to a path of truth.

When we name our devotion to the truth, the stakes are immediately raised, and the price of self-betrayal gets higher and higher.

Sometimes the costs aren’t evident right away. Sometimes they take time, and maturity, to reveal themselves.

Sometimes they are immediate—like a terrible hangover, or an infection after untrue sex, or like getting overwhelmed or resentful after saying yes, when we really meant no.

Some of the consequences of self-betrayal are layered and insidious and have to be carefully and skillfully unwoven. Consequences such as vital injuries to our self-respect, self-worth and self-trust.

A personal example:

Many years ago, as a young, married mother of two little ones, it took my physical health beginning to deteriorate, in order to finally face the heartbreaking choice that my marriage needed to end.

I was terrified to face becoming (the dreaded) single, working mother. I was heartbroken for my children to lose their parents living under one roof. I was devastated and ashamed by what I perceived as a failure to keep my marriage and family in tact.

Years of dysfunctional relating, and the emotional, mental, spiritual and financial strain this had caused, hadn’t been enough to make me look at the underlying self-betrayal at play. I was attached to the image of our marriage, the social and cultural matrix our matrix was embedded in. I was attached to the idea of being married. And I was deeply attached to the dreams of family I had been fostering since I was young.

In my case, it took my body starting to fall apart, and my fear that I wouldn’t be able to be the mother my children needed me to be, in order to find the courage and trust to see what I needed to see.

Once I saw what needed to happen, and began to line up my actions with this truth, my life and family found a new, truer form, aligned with the deep integrity of my heart’s  knowing.

Navigating divorce and embracing single motherhood with two young children was a deeply challenging process for us indeed. It took years to fully metabolize the grief of that loss, and to truly heal and forgive the grievances it included.

But it was the truest choice, and the relief of allegiance to the truth is undeniably life-giving. My physical health returned, and my heart and soul grew exponentially, as they always do when we choose integrity over self-betrayal.

 A profound self-respect, dignity, and self-love blossomed inside me, as I ended a multi-generational pattern of women and men staying in marriages that were not true. In this, I liberated my family line from a unique torch of self-betrayal.

(Please know, that by sharing the above example, I am not advocating for divorce as a rule! For many, it would be an immense self-betrayal to leave a marriage or a job or a life situation. I’m always only advocating for choosing the truest choice. I’m advocating for our seeing where we are lying to ourselves in our lives, and for finding the courage and integrity to stop this lying. Sometimes that means doing the necessary work required to bring the marriage, or the job, or the situation into alignment with our truest hearts. Sometimes it means moving, leaving, or changing the form. Every situation is unique!) 

Making Truth The Bottom Line

Integrity does rely on courage… the courage of self-honesty. The courage to face any lies that are being told, and to stop this practice of lying. The courage to experience directly whatever pain, fear, loneliness, and self-hatred has been habitually covered up by our lie.

Integrity does require essential trust. Trusting that in our choosing to be true, life has our backs, no matter what this looks like.

Our fear is usually in regards to what we imagine we will lose in aligning our lives with Truth, but what is often overlooked is the ongoing, insidious loss inherent in self-betrayal.

When we make Truth the most important thing, the most essential bottom-line in any choice, this can radically change the trajectory of our lives.

This weekend promises to be a powerful, intimate conversation dedicated to supporting one another in choosing Truth, and coming home to embodied integrity!