Answering Tricky Questions

• Why did you do that?

• What do you really want?

• Who are you when no one is looking?

These are tricky questions. Like you, I have tried to answer them during important conversations. Sometimes I was successful and sometimes I totally bombed. I've learned some things about how to answer. See what you think.

First of all, with these Tricky questions, cowardly answers like "I don't know" or "It's none of your business" are usually not gracefully received. This shoulder-shrug answer works okay until you turn 20. For grown-ups, what is required in answer to these questions is a story.

Story answers sound like this:

Why did you do that? I did it because I was pissed off. I got mad when you said X and I didn't want to listen to you anymore.

What do you really want? I want to find someone to spend the rest of my life with. I want to travel and have a deeply satisfying life.

Who are you when no one is looking? I'm a wreck. No one would believe what goes in inside my head.

Compared to the cowardly answers, these story answers require deeper thought and a great deal of creativity. The object is to tell a story that most closely resembles something like your general idea of the truth.

However, keep in mind that you are telling a story to achieve a purpose. Your purpose may be to justify yourself. In that case, you want to tell a story that supports the fact that you are right. Your purpose may be to get closer to the person you're talking to in which case you'll want to reveal as much as you can about yourself without scaring her or him away. Your purpose may be to learn more about yourself. This may require a detailed, probing story during which you furrow your brow many times as you speak in your endeavor to understand yourself.

If you are in a spiritual situation, you are looking to your story for movement. My spiritual master, Kalindi G., says, "It's about movement and movement means change,

every day growing into more and more light."

One way to do get movement from your story is to tell your story with the same attitude you would have if you were dissecting a frog in Biology class. You are right there wearing gloves holding the scalpel and dissecting, but you are not the frog. You are learning about the frog by taking it apart with a scientific interest and, hopefully, deep respect. After all, the frog gave his life for you. And you, in spiritual work, are giving your "life" (the illusory self) up for God or Higher Purpose or whatever word you want to use.

Stories can serve a spiritual purpose when they're told as the answers to tricky questions. The spiritual purpose is movement so the story is best told with distance from the illusory self and with an intent to let go. You tell the story not to become a more "solid" person, but to let go of being a person at all. To let go of your history, your concepts, your opinions, your, well, stories. The story you tell falls to the ground like an autumn leaf. It's purpose was to move you and to help you let go of who you thought you were when you started to tell it.

This is the most powerful kind of story. But it's still a story. Next time I want to talk about how to actually tell a story that will move you spiritually.