Hi,
It's Brooks.
Thanks for joining me.
It's good to be here with you.
Today we're going to talk about how there is no room for perfection in spirituality.
And by spirituality,
I mean life.
Spirit to me is life,
The flow of life.
And spirituality is regarding the flow of life.
I like to keep it really simple like that.
And I think simplicity is a beautiful way to ponder and be curious about our spirituality.
Now,
It's normal for perfection to come into this process because we're raised on that concept of perfection.
We go to school and we're graded.
Getting an A is the thing.
Failing is like,
Oh my god,
You can't fail.
There's repercussions.
But there's so many accolades around perfecting a study.
Learning in an exemplary way.
And we have a lot of years of that training.
And then we get to spirituality.
We hear about this and we become intrigued and we use our training of how we learn stuff.
From when we went to school,
You know,
From that studying and wanting to be the best and wanting to be perfect and right.
But that doesn't fit in the exploration and the discovery of who we are.
The curiosity of the flow of life,
The source of life.
But still that perfection could easily raise its head and it often does.
And we try to adopt what we think are all the right things we need to do to be spiritual.
And sometimes that means trying not to be angry or,
You know,
Getting upset at ourselves for not being compassionate or being petty or having judgments.
But spirituality is the curiosity about life itself.
And life itself encompasses everything.
All the experiences,
All the emotions.
Nothing is left out.
It's a whole.
So in this curiosity about life,
About spirituality,
We can be curious about our perfection.
When that rises up,
You know.
When that feeling is,
Oh I need to be spiritual.
Or that person is more spiritual than me or I'm more spiritual than them,
You know.
When those kind of things come up,
We can be curious about them.
Not that we have to erase those things and be perfect and not being perfect.
Curiosity is noticing.
Curiosity is openness.
So we're being curious and open about all the things that rise up within us.
All the things that we notice.
All those thoughts and feelings.
The actions that we take.
Being kindly curious about ourselves.
And that's spirituality.
Because that's the flow of life within us.
The many facets of life flowing through us.
Now we start to think of it that way,
There's an ease and a comfort in it.
And the perfection begins to drop off.
That old training that we received in school,
Perhaps from our parents.
Maybe even from a religion that we were raised in.
There could have been an aspect of being perfect in that too.
So we recognize that training when it shows up.
And usually we notice it because it feels uncomfortable.
That feeling of needing to be perfect and right and not be wrong doesn't feel good.
There's a tension in it.
A discomfort.
And we recognize it again as one of the many facets of life.
Like if you're walking through a botanical garden and we're looking at all the different plants.
That curiosity when you see the different plants.
Which ones are in bloom,
Which ones are not.
Maybe some plants are thriving,
Some plants are dying.
And then there's plants we've never seen before.
There's just so much going on.
And there's so much going on within us.
It's like a tapestry of many different qualities.
And we start to see that fullness of life within us because of the fullness of experiences.
Of different actions that we take.
A huge range of feelings.
We see that there's the fullness of life within us.
As we begin to let go of the conceptual ideas of what we should be and seeing what we are.
And we begin to adore the life that flows through us.
And that's a loving way to be curious about the spirit,
About spirituality.
And it's a simple way to love ourselves.
Here I am.
This is me.
This is the many things that flow through me.
Essentially I'm everything.
So I wish you the best in this curious look at yourself,
This curious look at life,
This curious and kind spirituality approach.
I wish you the best.
Take care.
