Extract from Chapter One of my new book.
Like so many spiritual seekers, I was hoping to win the spiritual lottery and finally wake up an enlightened being. I imagined this would fix me and my life and bring all sorts of wonderful prizes. I dreamed that I would never again feel sad or lonely or angry or frustrated. I was looking forward to the day when all of my worries and struggles would be over. I was convinced that one day the lights would come on and bingo! I’d stride out in confidence into a new world as a healthy, wealthy and naturally happy human being.
The irony is, the essence of all I had hoped for is actually what I discovered as my innate and primal identity. Consciousness, presence, life itself IS healthy, wealthy and naturally happy. It is not necessarily always physical health, material wealth and worldly happiness that we walk away with however. Waking up to our deeper essence offers a profound sense of the riches of heaven we may have dreamed of that to me, often simply feels like ‘rightness’. By this, I mean that whatever is unfolding in our lives, however life is showing up, even if it appears in the form of challenges or suffering, all appears along with this sense that this is just exactly how it is meant to be.
With full consciousness of the vast and open heart of our true nature, we come to see, feel and know the perfection of life, even when on the surface there may appear to be a great deal of imperfection. In fact, we simply begin to be the perfection that embraces imperfection, we begin to be the happiness that makes room for sadness, to be the love that embraces fear. And in that embrace, the transformation occurs.