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Your life has
been designed to work, and your hidden potential contains what
you seek and all that you need in life. It is OK to be
who you are and choose what you have. The Quakers call
it the "still, small voice within," that place of
full awareness within that is in touch with the entire
universe and is the source of wisdom. In effect, you
don't have to keep searching for confirmation by focusing on
being someone else or being somewhere else. There is no
place else to be and nothing else to get. You will be
able to grasp the levels of change in your life when you can
allow yourself to be present in the moment, accept the world
as it is, and trust that everything is as it was intended to
be. Thomas Merton put it succinctly: "We have
what we seek. It is there all the time, and if we give
it time it will make itself known to us." Putting
it another way, the Zen writer Senrin wrote: "If
you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for
it?"
Many people
are dissatisfied even thought they have what they believe
everyone wants and should want--a nice home, a good job, and
the like. They are unfulfilled by their achievements or
acquisitions and even their relationships. But they
don't know why they are uncomfortable or what it is they
really want or how little effort they devote to what they
really want to do.
What
leads to this misplaced effort, to this lack of meaningful
direction? Many difficulties result from faulty
self-images learned in your earliest years. Much of your
personality and your concept of yourself comes from the
emphasis on some and the neglect of other features of your
personality during your childhood.
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If this emphasis
matched your temperament, talents, and special skills, you
have developed an accurate and realistic self-image. If
not, you have probably experienced much conflict. You
may, for example, have an inclination to paint but were
conditioned to reject it. The more you become aware of
these suppressed sides of yourself, the more you will be able
to accept and utilize your hidden potential. While your
choices as a child may have been limited, they need no longer
be limited. You decide what to do with your life.
In the last analysis, your behavior, not chance or the
concepts of others, determines your concept of yourself and
whether or not you will reach the goals you set.
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