By C.V. Doner, Phd.

Those of us chasing madly after spiritual maturity, enlightenment, (or near-perfect levels of self-improvement) are chasing our tails. We will never find "perfection" by seeking it because we already have it. We just need to recognize and accept it.

What we're looking for is a feeling (or deep knowing) that we are, after all, who God made us to be. In other words, that we're really, truly OK. Relax. You are OK, just the way you are.

But you insist not. After all, you haven't arrived yet at your destination - at a certain level of achievement - be it spiritual, financial, behavioral, relationally or whatever. One reason you know beyond a doubt that you haven't attained spiritual maturity or enlightenment yet is that there's still so much "unfinished business." You still smoke, eat or drink too much, you don't exercise enough and you can't fit into most of your clothes. You're not patient enough, you gossip and say silly or hurtful things, you swear more than you pray, you do stupid things and have made some really bad decisions. You waste time and money. You're undisciplined, untidy or disorganized. You don't read your Bible or go to church enough. You don't meditate, visualize or pray enough. You don't read enough self-help books. You have lousy relationships with some members of your immediate family. You have inappropriate sexual thoughts, and on top of this, you often feel lousy, insecure, drained, anxious, depressed, lethargic, etc.

If this isn't enough, you're constantly beating yourself up for all of these things (and more that only you know about) which you perceive as failures and character flaws.

No wonder you don't feel enlightened or spiritual! Obviously, you're a mess, a failure and a hypocrite - and that's on a good day! Clearly you haven't met "THE STANDARDS" (and you've been trying for 10 or 20 years). At this point you're probably thinking there's something fundamentally and irrevocably wrong with you (as most of your family and acquaintances, since the day you were born, have programmed into your subconscious mind's playback tapes to remind you).

It seems to be an airtight case - you're broken. Damaged goods. Too much baggage. End of story.

The only problem is, where did this assumption come from that you're supposed to "have it all together" (and I mean all) , that you should always be right, always loving, always competent, always disciplined, always strong, i.e. virtually sinless? Who created all these impossible standards anyway? You did, of course, with a little help from your friends. You just assumed that such standards must exist, and that unless you met them, you're somehow not OK.

For many of us, these unexamined standards were applied to us as children - sometimes mercilessly and almost always inconsistently, if not irrationally, by parents, siblings, teachers and the playground "mafia." One way or another, the message was loud and clear - you're not OK the way you are. The fact that not one of our would-be "teachers" or detractors was perfect didn't seem to dilute their ability to make us feel somehow less than OK, let alone perfect. The fact that many of these insidious messages were learned as young children, before we could rationally analyze or reject them, gave them additional power in our lives because our subconscious dutifully recorded and integrated them into our memory system. Thirty years later we're still playing the same tapes, thinking that the information is coming from us.

So what's the answer to this all-pervasive human dilemma? Choose to embrace a new paradigm: that your life is not a mistake . After all, there are no mistakes in God's universe. Everything is exactly the way it's supposed to be. Otherwise, God and the universe are an out-of-control failure. The fact that there are no mistakes in God's universe also includes you . You turned out exactly the way you're supposed to! But what about all the bad things that happened to you? What about all the poor choices you repeatedly made? Well OK, so you do have some issues to work on, don't you? You probably do want some transformation in your life (healing, growth, wisdom, maturity, etc.) This in fact, is part of your purpose in life - to overcome your particular "issues" and God-given challenges through the process of transformation. After all, if you and the rest of us were already at our idealized level of perfection, we wouldn't have all that much to do now, would we? Life would be a bore!

Part of enlightenment (i.e. spiritual maturity) is accepting that you are on the way . You are at this particular point in time with this particular challenge for a reason. That reason is to provide you the opportunity to continue to improve and to transform into a Christ- like conduit of God's redeeming love and compassion. Here's the key: if we don't accept and love ourselves the way we are right now , it's much harder to mobilize the motivation, energy, will and clarity to begin the hard work of personal transformation. In other words, the "not OK" mindset saps your ability to move forward. But once you accept the way things are (and what choice do you really have other than to accept reality and make peace with it?) we are free to acknowledge areas that we choose for improvement and move forward confidently, empowered by our own self-acceptance. The simple rule here is if we don't love (accept) ourselves, we will remain so obsessed with our shortcomings, so negative in our state of mind, that moving forward into a "newly envisioned future" is all but impossible. And, until we accept ourselves, it is impossible to effectively accept others.