The New Year for me began with some hard questions and deep soul searching.   Over the years, as I have matured as a spiritual practitioner, I regularly stop and examine my life to gain clarity in relation to my core values.  One thing that I deeply value is my commitment to truly embody the teachings, the spiritual principles that I teach and share with others.  I am a true advocate of inspiring others by who I am, not just by saying who I am.  This belief began when my spiritual journey was more private and personal.   I have found that the more I am asked to serve in a leadership role, as my journey has become more public, this call towards authentic embodiment has begun to take on even more importance.   As this New Year rolled around I found myself deeply immersed in the following questions.  Where am I in this practice called life?   Am I really the living embodiment of what I teach?  How successful am I in actually living what I practice?

It was not an easy process but it was quite revelatory.  This commitment to living my practice is a powerfully double-edged sword.  On one hand I am called to be more than I think I am.  I am called to grow beyond who I am right now.  Through my faith, through my beliefs I am continually asked to show up in a new way – in a more compassionate way.  All the major faith traditions teach us to be more loving, more peaceful, and more compassionate, both to ourselves and to our fellow man.   I believe that path is an integral part of why we are all here in the first place.

On the other hand however, I am also deeply and profoundly human.  I have frailties and foibles and weaknesses.  I fail, miserably and often.  I may strive to be more loving and yet in my humanness I instead contract in fear.  Personally, I am not all that comfortable with those parts of myself that are less than ideal.  I struggle with my human ineptitude, at my mistakes and my failings.  They are hard for me to accept.  And yes, I learn, grow, and develop through these mistakes, through these failures – I know that my failings are actually the path to my deepest growth.  But am I actually able to embrace that? Really accept that and hold it in love and compassion?  This is what I call the razor’s edge between who we are and who we are becoming. 

It is so easy to see how we don’t measure up.  How we can so completely and utterly fail to embody what we truly believe.  That chasm between where we are and where we want to be yawns in front of us, and it is nearly impossible to see ourselves on the other side.  We stare across the void and fear that we can’t traverse it – no matter how hard we try.  It’s just too wide, too deep, too dark, too overwhelming.  Our humanness is too flawed, too much of a handicap.

Navigating that razor’s edge between growth and evolution and a true, authentic acceptance of our humanness takes practice…a bit ironically perhaps, it involves making mistakes and experiencing failures.  It is dependent on them actually.  If we are in a process of becoming more peaceful, more loving that means that there was a time when we were less peaceful, less loving.  We have to accept that yes, we are human but not use our humanness as an excuse to avoid growing and evolving.  It’s a delicate balance. A space where we are challenging what we think we know and who we think we are, while simultaneously holding who we are right now and just how little we actually know, in a state of deep compassion and grace.   

It’s not easy.  I have been living the roller coaster this past month between who I am called to be and who I am right now.  Meeting that in love has at times proven to be deeply challenging.  I have suffered in my inability to hold my personal growth and evolution in love.  It is a difficult thing, to recognize and face your own insufficiency and to begin to love it, to place it in a context of compassion.  

Ultimately, it is the act of compassion itself that bridges the chasm between what is being called forth and what is actually expressing right now.  In compassionate awareness the void, the chasm between who we are and who we are called to be simply vanishes.  We enter a true state of Grace.  From there we can allow ourselves to incrementally move towards that greater ideal and most importantly, we can actually make the mistakes necessary to actually become it. 

As you walk that razor’s edge with yourself I invite you to be gentle.  Be compassionate.  Gently remind yourself that that is the heart of what we are all truly being asked to become more of anyway.