I can deny deny deny for years, but eventually life will put me in a situation where I can't hide from myself any longer and I am forced to look fully into the mirror and learn to accept that I am not perfect and still have lots of work to do.
Perhaps the greatest "spiritual growth" hurdle most us must leap, eventually, is the one which allows us to (paradoxically?) accept all of ourselves, just as we are. Such acceptance does not mean that we no longer grow, learn, heal.... Or that we no longer want to grow, learn, heal... If anything, such growth and healing accelerates with such self acceptance -- or so the best teachers I know of seek to share with us. (And my deeper intuition resonates with that.)
My challenge, lately, is that I've allowed myself recently to be partially duped by the misperception of the nature of my motivation -- and even "heart". I even had this self-appointed guru recently declare to me and some of my friends that ...(about me) "His heart is not open". And I was weary at the time of having stuff projected onto me, and a little off-balance, so I unconsciously accepted this invitation to misperceive the nature of my own heart. That is, I unwittingly bought into the absurd notion that ANY person's heart can be said to be "not open". But if we all look and feel very deeply, carefully, we'll see that the
essential nature of every heart -- of heart generally -- is openness. So this man was not
seeing my heart at all -- and his perception can only be understood as a distortion and projection.
I learned ... or began to learn..., a lot from this experience. I am learning that there are two valid levels to things ... which have to be understood in their togetherness not to be entirely mistaken. The true heart is always free and open. That's its nature. But when we don't deeply realize this, we can affect our access to this awareness -- but doing so is akin to having the sun (or stars) obscured by clouds. The clouds merely temporarily obscure the sun or stars -- they do not alter the nature of either.
I am learning that whenever I fail see and know the non-obscured nature of the heart (usually by feeling unworthy of love, or distanced from it), I'm pretty much caught in the same projective tendencies my "guru' friend misperceived me through. It becomes possible for me to imagine a heart as something incomplete, deficient, broken, "closed".
To refuse the projection of my "guru friend" -- but an acquaintance, really --, it is necessary for me to forgive him along with those in the room who accepted his invitation for us all to see my heart as "closed". Clearly, then, it is especially crucial for me to forgive myself for being duped, momentarily, but the same projection. And the only way to do that is to see (and be) the heart as it is -- open, fresh, loving, innocent, tender forgiving, kind... and wise.
This is the gift of love which we can give to ourselves and one another.
... a parting of the obscuring clouds. Nothing more or less.
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Edit:
Another thing I'm learning is that it is all-too-common to think (and feel) that our transcendent true human essence (our true heart) is radically separate from our conditioned lives and selves -- that the personal and the transpersonal are flung wildy far apart. In reality, our Perfect Freedom can only be found where we live, in our ordinary everyday lives. It does not exist elsewhere. And wishing it to is a flagrant abandonment of our true, essential nature (which is ultimately not possible, since it can only be obscured by clouds at most).
It becomes clear though all of this that the kindest thing we can do -- and the most honest and true -- is to see everyone as Brilliantly Utterly Gloriously Heartful and Free.
To offer this Mirror of Love.
