There’s no brilliant without crazy; no wisdom without ignorance; no love without hate; and no courage without fear. Yet we hope to be one without the other—a rose without thorns. We forget our agreement— to fully experience the light and the dark, which is to be human.
We can’t own our gifts or our divinity without also owning our pitiful self and our stupidity, without realizing that our mistakes are what we came here for. They can offer our greatest moments of awakening.
There’s no north without south; no found without lost; no laughter without tears; and no sunrise without sunset. We come here to feel and express it all: to move through the crazy to find the brilliance; to move through hell to find heaven. Only then can we clearly choose light over dark, love over hate, and courage over fear. This is our mission here in this dense realm.
Pretending to be perfect—all good, brilliant, enlightened—is an impossible dream here on planet Earth, for we are imperfect human beings. Yet how we waste time longing for it and seeking it in others. When our beloveds’ weaknesses are fully revealed, we stone them, hate them—just as we despise ourself—for being fallible. But this is to miss the point of being human.
How eager we are to see another person’s flaws, to forget that we too have flaws, are made from the same fabric, have spoken the same words, and made the same mistakes. To realize our divine nature is to know that we are all made of this same imperfect fabric.
Create your beautiful life. Sew perfection into every moment. But embrace the defects hidden in your cloth. Know that under the surface, your beautiful life is woven with the same anxieties, fears, hatreds, and mistakes as the life of your greatest enemy. Then you’ll realize why there’s nothing ever to forgive.
Offer a hand to the one who hurt you the most; you’ll help them see their gifts and remember their divinity. You’ll help them be who they came here to be. Doing this will save you.
The moment you see that your greatest shame, your greatest pain, is also your greatest gift, you’ll understand why you’re here and who you are.
Love your pain and fear, embrace your darkness. It will lead you to your gifts, your courage, and your divinity. It will open your heart. Love the entire story of your imperfect life, especially the grotesque mistakes and ugly self-doubts.
Release your need for perfection in anyone or anything, yourself most of all. Love the thorns along with the rose. Become the person who embraces the thorns and the gifts in everyone, including yourself. Know that one can’t exist without the other. Doing this will heal you. And it will save the life of everyone you meet.
THE IMPERFECTION OF PERFECTION
There is no perfection here, but we long for it, like longing for a dream. The impossible perfection lives elsewhere, in another realm from whence we came. It’s the perfection of love, wisdom, and spirit. It’s higher consciousness.
Our attempts to recreate perfection here on Earth are often focused on the outer self, the ego, and the details of our material world. We seek to perfect the trivial. Or we demand perfection from others. All of this is misguided.
This world, this realm, is not perfect and never will be. That is not its purpose. If you spend your life on Earth expecting perfection from yourself and others, you will live in constant disappointment and bitterness and lose touch with your soul’s wisdom.
Or you can spend your life seeking true perfection as you once knew it on the other side: the perfection of spirit. This is soul alignment. It allows perfect wisdom to flow within you and through you to others. This type of perfection aligns you with divinity and empowers you to become a source of endless love and wisdom. This is the true perfection that you’re ultimately seeking, not the false perfection of an imperfect physical world that your ego lens focuses on.
AN INVENTORY OF TRUE PERFECTION
You already know everything. You already know the parts of your story you’ll regret. You already know which pieces you’ll be proud of. And you already know that your story ends someday.
Take an inventory of true perfection in your life. Are you focusing on spiritual growth above all else? Are you asking for divine guidance in your moments of greatest pain? Are you reaching for love and forgiveness when you feel angry and blameful? Are you a channel of divine inspiration in your work? Do you use your unique inner gifts to change the world?
If so, you’ve achieved true soul perfection. This is what you came here to achieve. It’s the only perfection you’re meant to strive for. Once you achieve this, your life aligns with grace and divine order. You see light where others see darkness. You know the answers to all questions. You become fearless in adversity. Your heart urges you forward. You accomplish what you came here to do.
If you’ve gotten caught in the painful trap of false perfectionism, forgive yourself for being misguided, for forgetting what you came here to do. You didn’t go through the enormous effort it took your soul to condense into a physical body and walk through this dense physical world simply to rearrange meaningless details.
How do you know they’re meaningless? Ask yourself if they will matter to you at the end of your life when you review your lifetime. When you see the ripple effect of each action you took on Earth, each word you spoke, you’ll understand then what was essential. You can understand this now, if you so choose.
WHERE ARE YOU SEEKING PERFECTION TODAY?
Do your efforts leave you disappointed, depressed, angry, or afraid? If so, you’re not seeking divine perfection. Turn that powerful human drive for perfection toward your inner self, your soul’s growth.
Seek to have a perfectly loving heart and a sense of inner peace from living in alignment with your Higher Self. Seek to become a fearless channel of divine wisdom and to find work that helps enlighten the world.
Now your perfectionism is being used for your highest good and the good of others. It’s serving its true purpose—correctly focused, like a powerful laser, on exactly what you came here to do and who you came here to be.
Copyright ©2023. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission of the publisher,
Park Street Press, an imprint of Inner Traditions Intl..
Article Source: Through a Divine Lens
Through a Divine Lens: Practices to Quiet Your Ego and Align with Your Soul
by Sue Frederick
In this guide to aligning with your soul and seeing life through a divine lens, Sue Frederick presents mindful practices and spiritual tools to shift your perspective and step into your power. She explains how each of us arrived in this life with a soul intention to live up to our greatest potential and do great work that helps others—but often we hit bumps in the road that disconnect us from our soul’s wisdom and allow the ego lens to take over and destroy our confidence. Yet, as she reveals in detail, each crisis is an awakening, an opportunity to shift from feeling like a victim to feeling that your soul came here to experience these exact challenges in order to evolve in just the way it needs.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as an Audiobook and a Kindle edition.
1644117320
About the Author
Sue Frederick is a lifelong intuitive, an ordained Unity minister, a certified past-life and between-lives soul regression therapist, a certified creative arts therapist, a career intuitive coach, grief intuitive coach, and master numerologist.
She’s the author of Bridges to Heaven: True Stories of Loved Ones on the Other Side; I See Your Soul Mate: An Intuitive’s Guide to Finding and Keeping Love, and I See Your Dream Job: A Career Intuitive Shows You How to Discover What You Were Put on Earth to Do, and the memoir Water Oak: The Happiness of Longing.
Visit her website at CareerIntuitive.org/
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