Perfection: Are We Perfect As We Are?

I recently had a dream and in that dream there was a situation where I paid 60 pounds for this diamond shaped stone. I was then told how it would be worth more if I got it valued. So once I had bought it I went to a jeweller to see if it was actually worth more or if I had just been taken for a ride. Once I had got there, I asked how much it might be worth and the guy began to write down, on what looked like a napkin, how much it would be worth. At first it started fairly small, and then he wrote a different price down and gradually it began to rise to the hundreds and at this point a great smile started to appear on my face. All of the thoughts that I had about being duped had long disappeared from my mind. And each time the value went up, I asked if that was really how much it was worth with the enthusiasm of a child and he smiled and continued to raise the price of the diamond shaped stone. During the last moments of the dream, I can remember that the amount he was writing went into the millions. It just went up and up.

As I reflect on what this dream was all about, it occurs to me that this is a metaphor for our own innate worth, and is a reflection of what our value truly is – limitless.

We have all picked up the baggage of life, no matter how young or how old we are, that has tainted our true worth and given us a distorted perception of who we truly are.

And whether this began as a child, with our parents pointing out what they thought wasn’t right about us and how we should be like our siblings or someone else’s child and matching up to everyone else during our school years. And then slightly later in life our relationships at work, with friends and our intimate relationships, we can have the same experiences of not being good enough. We also have the constant views of society and the media showing us images of what perfection is.

It is easy to see that if we are told something enough we can begin to believe that it is true, and from these powerful imprinting experiences in our life we can carry this sense of not being good enough, that can influence and sabotage every area of our life. With are success, relationships, confidence, health and how attractive we see ourselves also being affected by these perceptions.

And through all of the conditioning we have received, it can make it extremely difficult to observe ourselves and detach, so that we can start to question what was actually going on in these moments and if any of it was actually true. However, with reality mirroring back to us what we believe about ourselves, it can become almost impossible to see and experience that what we have been told is not the true. It can feel incredibly overwhelming and can lead to us creating a self perpetuating prison.

I would say that these moments of being told that we are not enough by others, is just a projection of how they see themselves and the result of unconscious behaviour and not that people are consciously malicious. With them having experienced the same treatment and not having questioned the validity of it, they have become and continue to be the very example of what they despise. And the pattern of unconscious behaviour continues, very often from generation to generation.

Through the process of  removing the images we have about reality and about who we are and how much we are worth, we will begin to see that inherently there is nothing wrong with who we are. And that the person we have been told we should be has no real significance or meaning to us. This then gives us the opportunity to get in touch with our own unique gifts and value.

As it becomes easier for us to be authentic, the need to plan how we are going to be or what we are going to say starts to diminish and allows us to speak our own truth, which enables us to be who we really are. And being ourselves is so much easier than living a life of imitation.

A by-product of this is that we will find that the images the media shows us of what perfection is will no longer have the power to control how we feel and how we see ourselves. And Instead of comparing ourselves to others we will be able to recognise the gifts of others without feeling threatened by their greatness.

I feel that we all have something incredibly precious to offer the world, no matter what we have been told by others. And by not expressing ourselves, not only are we hiding our gifts from the world, we are also depriving the world of our gifts.

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Oliver J R Cooper
http://www.oliverjrcooper.co.uk/