28 Jan Imperfection – January 29 2020
Most people spend their whole lives using their strengths to cover up and hide their weaknesses. They expend tremendous energy in keeping themselves a house divided. But if you surrender to your weakness, therein lies your pathway to genius. A person who knows and utilizes his true weakness and uses his strength to include it is a whole person. He may seem rough around the edges, but there are so few people like that that they lead their generation.
Moshe Feldenkrais, physicist
and creator of the Feldenkrais method,
Awareness Through Movement
It is a mark of maturity when we are willing (and able) to own our shortcomings. As Mr. Feldenkrais points out, some of us are never able to. We actually hide from our weaknesses as we hide them from the world. And we miss one of the reasons for having a life.
The Veda would say that every aspect of our life has been chosen by us in order to learn what it is we are meant to learn here in the world. As if before we were born, our Higher Self chose the perfect life to give us just those challenges that will help us to grow, and to build exactly the tools we’ll need to live the life we are meant to live.
If I come out of childhood already knowing how to love, how to succeed, able to have a full and beautiful life, what will I have to pass on to others? What tools will I have to share with my son on how to mend a broken heart, how to find one’s life’s work, how to seek God in all my affairs, how to see myself with a sense of humor and take myself with a grain of salt?
As an actor, if I never have had the experience of fear in performance, how can I help some other actor who is unable to give herself permission simply to be?
As a lover, if all my relationships–between myself and my parents, myself and every lover and friend I’ve ever had–all have been ‘successful’ and filled with nothing but love and kindness, how will I have compassion for my beloved when she stumbles in her ability to be present with me?
When we try to live without embracing our ‘weaknesses,’ as they are called above, we keep ourselves from the lessons we are meant to have.
How do we begin to stop hiding from ourselves?
- By finding the place within of non-judgment – of ourselves and of others.
- By being willing to live in the discomfort of knowing we are less than perfect.
- By having the courage to take on the feelings of shame that often accompany that first embrace of our imperfections.
- By letting go of the habit of looking at ourselves through the eyes of others in order to see how we’re doing, and asking ourselves instead: how might I look through the eyes of God?
- By embracing an idea of the world/nature/Totality as benign and loving, wanting nothing more for me than my complete happiness.
- By insisting in each moment to step past the ego mind and its attempts to keep us small.
- By remembering always that love is the currency of the universe, that learning to spend this currency unconditionally would describe 99% of the job we have here on planet Earth, and that loving unconditionally is what we are most perfectly designed to do. Imperfections and all.
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Perfection, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Today I will try to see through the eyes of unconditional love, through the eyes of God.
