Inner and Outer 'Workings' of Our Cycles of Truth

There are 12 Cycles of Truth as shared  by Twylah Nitsch, the Seneca  Elder who brought these teachings into the world.
As I have worked with these cycles, I have come to see the first five Cycles of Truth are invitations and instructions for relating to our inner growing, knowing, being.  They are in some ways correlated with our senses.**
1. Learn Truth--touch
2. Honor Truth--taste
3. Know/Accept Truth--smell/scent
4. See Truth--sight
5. Hear Truth--hearing/auditory
(Working with each of these cycles incorporates and helps us develop our intuitive/sixth sense.)

The remaining seven Cycles of Truth are invitations and instructions relating to knowing, being and expressing in the world around us, in our relationships with all-people,creatures, places and things. As we work with cycles 7-12 our intuitive senses and our connection to our understanding of Source also grows and develops.

6. Speak Truth  --speaking only truth as we understand Truth
7. Love Truth --Truth as expressed through our heart
8. Serve Truth --live servicing truth as we understand what is Truth
9. Live Truth -- awareness of Truth resonating in our being
10. Work/Walk Truth  --conscious and intentional expression and actions in/of/with Truth
11. Share Truth --willingness to share in actions, words and intention our understanding or Truth
12. Thank Truth --living in/with gratitude

When Jamie Sams wrote her The 13 Original Clan Mothers, she honored the 13th Cycle 'Be Truth', is the clan mother, Becomes Her Vision.  This cycle occurs as the final new moon of the year in our Gregorian calendar.  In my work, I use this thirteenth cycle as a month of reflection, self assessment and integration.

**These are my interpretations and understanding.  It is not my intention to represent them in any way as 'official'.

Self Reflection: Moving through the 13th moon cycle,  take time to review and reflect on your experience with each of cycle of Truth.

How Truth Reveals Our Lives

 "...Does truth work in our lives?...Truth Heals the body, purifies the soul, reforms the sinner, solves difficulties, pacifies strife. There is no such thing as undemonstrated understanding. If you wish to know where you really stand spiritually, look about you at your environment, beginning with the body.  "There can be nothing in the soul that is not demonstrated sooner or later in the outer, and there is nothing in the outer that does not find some correspondence in the inner." (pg 201)       From Emmet Fox, July 20, (1886-1951), a pioneer of the New Thought movement, continues to inform many wisdom teachers and spiritual searchers.  Around the Year With Emmet Fox,

It seems all great spiritual teachers, mystics and holy ones were/are seekers of Truth. All of them! When we seek the vision for our life, Truth is likely to show up in one of the many forms we experience working with the moon cycles, which is just one path for searching and knowing Truth.  

Self Reflections: When I intentionally follow the path of my unfolding vision, I am living my life purpose as best as I currently know it, with the Truth I currently know. I can trust teachings on Truth to pop up synchronicitically in my life. This synchronicity is confirmation of my connection to Creation

All Truth Cycles Imply Movement

Rhythms and cycles imply movement
They also imply there is a repeat in pattern, an ongoing return to repeat,
or to begin again further down the path
or further up the spiral.

Life has rhythms and cycles as well.
Perhaps this is why some of us are drawn to journal amidst the moon cycles,
using the Cycles of Truth as our guiding star.

To Share Truth is 'Walking Our Talk'.  We are growing, changing and 'choosing' beings.  The moment we entertain stubbornness or status quo we are no longer in a present time, we then are no longer in Truth. A very blunt spiritual teacher once said to me "You are either dynamic or dead; ultimately there are no other options."

We are all walking a spiritual path in our life, and by being conscious of our path we remain in motion. Our spirituality is a dynamic process; spirituality is NOT passive!

Self Reflection: Do I experience my spirituality as dynamic? passive?

Carolyn comments: Depending on where the teachings on the cycles of truth are sourced, the 10th and 11th cycles both may refer to Walking the Truth.  This could be a confusion in translation or interpretation, but I have come to understand this seeming confusion not as confusion, but as an invitation to be conscious of the ACTIVE action required in both October's cycle of 'Work/Walk Truth' and November's cycle to 'Share Truth' as Bob and Lee Nitsch name these cycles, or 'Walk Truth' as Jamie Sams and Kenneth Cohen acknowledge it. The teaching source (Grandmother Twylah Nitsch) is the same.

Challenge and Truth

A challenge is a call to change.
Challenge is embracing an inner urging to change.

Almost always--this change is toward growth, creativity and joy.
Almost always--this challenge, takes us into a shared space with others, and out of aloneness.

For many people, it is so much easier to resist the change, and instead experience the higher cost and tougher challenge of trying to stay the same.

It is a challenge to live truthfully.  Not because we have so much 'bad stuff' to hide or stop doing,
but rather because we humans have this bizarre shame about letting our light out into the world.

When we accept the challenge of sharing the goodness we are aware we have, then our goodness that still remains hidden will share itself. It emerges, most often (maybe even 100% certain) without challenge and difficulty, but with a sense of ease and flow.

Self Reflection:  What is my goodness? How could I share it more fully?

― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Stepping Fully Into the Meaning of Love Truth in Our Life

We step fully into the waning phase of the Moon Cycle of Love Truth.  Jamie Sams’ Clan Mother story relating to this Cycle of Truth is the tale of Loves All Things. It is the story of the intense pain and harm which comes from the misperception that Love is impermanent, cannot transcend time or space, and of the damage that we as human beings can do when we do not understand the true nature of Love. 

Love is the source of ALL creation.  What does it mean to Love Truth in all her forms and all her presentations? Even those whose form we cannot begin to understand? We come to understand by reflecting on our journey through the moon cycles and through the cycles of truth as we have experienced them in our lives, so far.  Remembering our whole life is the journey, and we are in the midst of this journey. We will continue to grow and become.

When we have opened ourselves to Learn Truth, to Honor Truth as we learn it, to Know and Accept Truth as it is revealed to us, we can then See and Hear Truth.  When we live with these qualities growing within us, are able to Love Truth as it comes to us, from us and through us.  We begin to understand that our loving others is another way Creator/Great Mystery/God loves all things.

Self Reflection: Love is the Source of all creation.

As We Move to a New Year of Truth Cycles...

Being and living the vision for our life: Everything in the universe has a template for it's structure and existence (it's potential and possibility).  We, as human beings, are no different in this sense than rocks, trees the elements and the stars.  We are what we are.  Yet, as human beings, the template of our potential is often co opted by our ego and our thinking brain (a simplistic description; read Ken Wilber's  work on Integral living if you want to know more).  We have brief, fleeting moments of awareness and knowing--where we ARE fully present, and the person we dare  to dream we could be-if/when...makes herself/himself known to us! 

We are already who and what we were created to be.  But...because our sense of self is not in alignment with our 'Divine Template' it only means that we must learn how to bring our vision back from the distance of 'someday' to the present moment.  

We already are the person we sense we are called to be.  We CAN and WILL learn to experience ourselves as this person! How? We start by paying attention to the reaction of our senses in our daily lives.  We notice our preferences, likes, dislikes, prejudices, beliefs.  No judging, just notice.  No judging, just notice.

Self Reflection: The process of becoming who I am is not so much about becoming more, but a process of shedding, letting go, dropping what is not 'me'.