Retruthing - How To Question Everything
When was the last time you updated your internal data system?
Your smartphone and computer give you notifications when new information is available and it’s time for an upgrade, but how about you? What about your life? How often do you reflect on if you’re operating on old data?
The act of Retruthing* could be one of the most powerful exercises you’ll ever do. It’s one that unlocks doors to your subconsciousness, rewrites the script of your life, and paves paths for whole new worlds to unfold.
Ready to learn more?
Photo: Camylla Battani
*Retruthing is a word I made up myself. You find the definition of retruthing and how to practice it further down the page!
A Coded Script
Ever since you were born, you’ve been programmed with a ton of data that make up for the living, thinking, and feeling person that you are today. Past experiences, culture, family, and friends — anything that happened to you before this day, has helped program the code that is now your “truth”.
It’s easy to think it’s everybody’s truth, but it’s actually only yours, and they all differ from other people’s. Inside your family, many of your “truths” might be shared, but since you have your own friends and experiences, your truths are uniquely yours.
The truths I’m talking about are coded in our subconsciousness.
The subconscious mind is like your lifeguard who’s there to pay attention to your surroundings and warn you when something seems off guard. She exists so that you can go on living your everyday life without having to spend energy rethinking everything you’ve already learned, like how to breathe, walk, eat a sandwich, and say “I’m sorry” when you bump into someone on the street.
We need our subconscious mind or else we’d be spending all our days figuring out how to open doors and operate a microwave. it also helps us stay safe by recognizing that a red light means stop. We are able to do a lot of things we do on autopilot because we have this script in our subconscious mind.
But it’s not just simple life stuff, it’s also about the values you hold and how you react to certain people. If you’re told as a child that men of color are dangerous, your subconscious mind will automatically trigger warnings when a colored gentleman enters the room. If you’ve grown up believing money is hard to come by you might find yourself struggling with money. w
So, what if you’re still doing things out of habit that you were taught as a kid? If you’re like me, gazing into your thirties, that means that you’re operating on data that is 20+ years old!
Talk about outdated software!
What’s more? Teachers of epigenetics* (the study of how the environment and other factors can change the way that genes are expressed) claim that we spend 95% of our days in the subconscious mind! That means that for the majority of your waking hours, you’re operating from this script you barely recognize is there!
Are you living YOUR life or someone else’s?
*If you want to learn more about this, I HIGHLY recommend listening to our two-part conversation on Hey Change Podcast with Bruce Lipton — Episode 69 and Episode 70.
Retruthing — Questioning Truths
Photo: Timon Studler
Retruthing is the act of questioning these “truths”. Maybe not the scientific ones that Einstein and Newton spent years figuring out (unless you feel tempted, and if so, go for it!), but the truths you live by every day out without ever really paying attention.
It’s the beliefs that shape your thinking and habits, the coded network of thoughts and ideas that make up the data script for who you are in this world. A script built on information that you have gathered since you were a child, handed to you by family, society, and other social networks.
The first time I challenged one of my truths was when I decided to stop eating animals. I had read the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foyer over a summer when I was twenty-two, and my worldview was flipped. I would never see myself or my daily actions the same way again.
Coming from a family with no vegans or vegetarians, it was foreign for me to think that eating animals would be bad. I was raised by good parents who loved the outdoors and had taught me to treat animals with respect. My dad was a bird nerd and I don’t know how many hours we’ve spent by the side of the road, binoculars glued to his face, while we waited for him to be done watching whatever bird he had spotted so we could keep driving.
My belief — my truth — was that how I lived my life, was infused with a lot of love and respect!
Growing up in Sweden, I was raised on a diet rich in pork, beef, dairy, and fish. It was in my DNA to believe that in order to be healthy and strong, this is what you eat. So when I was introduced to the animal cruelty that takes place behind closed doors and the suffering that went into delivering food to my plate, the ground beneath me started to crumble.
It made me reflect on all the things I had grown up believing that may no longer be true.
What do I do without even questioning that may no longer be true? Which ones of my daily habits do no longer resonate with me and my values?
This summer was when I first realized that the script (our truths) we run by is incredibly powerful and if we never question it, we may live entire lives that aren’t ours. Because how do you know if what you do is powered by your own thoughts and beliefs, or what you’ve been programmed to believe since birth?
To make sure that wouldn’t be the case for me, I came up with the concept of retruthing!
Definition - Retruthing
(Re-truthing - i.e. redefining the “truth”)
Verb
The willingness to question what 'is' and to let go of ideas, thoughts, and perceptions as they have lived in our heads up until now, to co-create a sustainable and more compassionate world.
‘Retruthing’ refers to one’s ability to understand that things and circumstances always change and that it is our duty as human beings to adapt to the flow of change; to continually find ourselves in new worlds, communities, and realities; new truths.
As defined by Anne Therese Gennari, www.theclimateoptimist.com
How To Practice Retruthing
Practicing retruthing is taking a seat in the audience to watch your own play.
It can be a bit uncomfortable at first because you’ll begin to realize all the things you do that you had no you were doing (awkward!) but it’s also quite fun, and once you’re able to watch the play in full, you can step in and start rewriting!
Here is how you put this exercise into practice.
Step 1 - The What
In the coming week, take a seat in the audience and start paying close attention to your thoughts, habits, and reactions. Keep a notebook close or start a note on your phone where you jot down your discoveries.
What do you fill your days with? For example, what’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?
What kind of things do you buy in the grocery store?
What activities/things in life make you happy?
What things do you do that doesn’t make you happy, but you do them anyway?
What triggers you in other people’s words and actions? What makes you feel frustrated, angry, happy, or sad?
How do you see yourself and the world? What do you tell yourself is possible/not possible? In what ways might you be impeding your own growth because of old beliefs (about yourself or the world)?
Step 2 - The Why
Once you’ve acknowledged a behavior, emotional reaction, or thought pattern, try to identify why you act, react or think this way. What is the root of this behavior? If you go down memory lane, what clues can you find from life that might be the reason you act this way today?
Is it something your parents told you as a kid?
Has society taught you to feel this way?
Were you hurt as a teenager and left with deep wounds?
Become the investigator and take some moments where you allow yourself to just sit and reflect. Try to find the why’s!
Step 3 - Identify Truths
Try identifying three “truths” that you live by and then begin retruthing these beliefs. For example, if you eat meat every single day, why is it that you do so? Is your “truth” telling you that you need to eat meat to stay healthy and strong? And if so, what would the new truth look like?
Write down truth number one (the one you live by now) and then write down the new truth that you’d like to start living by tomorrow. Read both out loud and see how they make you feel. Most importantly - how does the new truth make you feel? Do you believe it?
Here’s what this could look like:
Old truth: Change is hard and scary. I don’t like change because it means uncertainty and the potential for failure. The fact that the world around me is so uncertain and ever-changing frightens me, how am I supposed to know what to expect?
Retruth: Change is so fun and exciting, you never know what awaits you around the corner! I love change because it empowers me to become someone new. Life is ever-changing and I want to be ever-changing too. By embracing change and seeking opportunities to grow, I know I’ll live a life where I truly get to thrive!
You don’t have to believe the new truth right away and chances are that you won’t. Your ego operates on old data, remember, so if this is not part of your code yet, it will feel uncomfortable. But that is simply because there’s no data in your subconscious supporting that belief. As soon as you start doing, you’re adding new data to your code, and it will get easier and easier for every time you do it!
Step 4 - Retruthing
Now here comes the fun! Write down the new truth — the retruth — and put it somewhere you can see it every day. Decide to act boldly on making this new truth a part of your life! Take baby steps but don’t back down if it feels uncomfortable (it probably will) and pay attention to how it makes you feel. Do this for a week and keep a journal, what emotions are surfacing due to these new action steps in your life?
Opening Doors to New Worlds
Photo: Daniel Gonzalez
Understanding and mastering retruthing is quite wonderful because not only will you understand yourself better, you will be much better at understanding others as well. When we have more understanding, there is more room for compassion, which means there is more room for change.
That change starts with you. It can be hard to see it at first, but the fastest way to change others and the world, is by committing to changing yourself. When it comes to the work we need to do to tackle climate change, it’s essential that we understand this.
If you are who you are because of these “truths”, what will happen once you dive into that subconscious of yours and start moving things around? Will you have the chance of creating a completely new life? Maybe even an entirely new world?
I believe the answer is YES, and I firmly believe that if we understand the power we hold in our subconscious coded “truths”, we can unlock potential for redesigning society and, ultimately, change the world!
