The Transformative Magic of Your Life Story: Embracing the Beauty and the Ugly

Posted on:  Mar 25, 2016 @ 10:00 Posted in:  Everyday Magic, Path Basics, Pathwork

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We humans are not good or bad, beautiful or ugly, perfect or imperfect, but some complex weaving of all of these things. To witness, embrace and hold space for the totality of our being is a very potent practice that can bring the transformative magic of healing and change to our lives and world.

You’re not good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but a complex weaving of these things. Transform your life by becoming big and wise enough to embrace all that you are.

I am on a hike with a dear friend in a wild area close to the ocean. A creek runs through a small, verdant valley, guarded over by towering evergreen trees. We stop walking, stop speaking, and gaze in slack-jawed wonder at this miniature Garden of Eden, arising from a fertile meeting ground of dappled sunlight and rich, moist soil. The beauty is visceral, a shining green luminescence that thrums up against my own shining core.

“We are this beautiful inside,” I tell my friend.

Later this same day, another dear friend shares a story about having to explain to her ten-year-old son what an army is. Her explanation went something like this: “I am so sorry to have to tell you this, but we give money to a group of people who use it to buy weapons that they use to kill other people.”

This is not a judgment of the courageous individuals in the armed forces who risk their lives in service to their countries, but more a paring war down to its simplest terms and seeing the horror, the ugly, at its core.

We humans are this ugly inside. Not just in relation to war, but in the many terrible, destructive things we do to each other and to our planet home.

Both of these statements are true. We have a whole lot of beauty and a whole lot of ugly inside of us and in our world. These two polar forces, inside and outside, battle for dominion over our soul.  And it is here, in these opposing forces, that you find the transformative magic at the heart of your life story and our human experience.

This is never an easy conversation to have. If you are like most people, you’ve been socialized to push away and transcend the bad and the ugly, and to aspire to the good and the beautiful, while skating around the edges of the uncomfortable, unsavory parts of your own personality and our human society.

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