“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”

~ Sam Keen

If you use You Tube, perhaps you’ve seen these ads popping up during the past week for Poo-Pourri. It’s a spray being advertised to women under the slogans, “Save Your Relationships” and “Girls don’t poop.”

There may have been a time in my life when this post would have roused my inner feminist or my inner activist to scream at the patriarchy and the faceless corporation.

Now, I feel like there’s a bigger problem and a more accessible solution.

It isn’t just about the poop spray, nor about women or men, or advertising. This is about what we’re doing with our time on this planet and how we’re choosing to spend our moments.

Unfortunately, Poo-Pourri and other such products sell and continue to sell because most people, at this time in this culture, are spending most of their time and money on becoming someone else.

It’s not the fault of the Poo-Pourri company any more than it is the fault of the car dealership that people buy cars, or the cake shop that people buy cakes.

Demand breeds supply. Our shame about ourselves has helped this industry grow.

Most people these days hate the way they smell, look, and think.

This shouldn’t look like this.

That shouldn’t smell like that.

There shouldn’t be hair there.

Those should most definitely not be growing there.

Our culture is full of women waxing their faces, buying poop spray, and hoping that their children don’t end up looking like them. It’s full of men bottling their emotions, buying expensive watches, and hoping that one day they’ll have enough money to feel like a real man.

And it shows in our relationships. The same critical, judgmental, never-perfect-enough attitude that people take towards themselves, they take towards their partners.

Day after day, people scramble for relationship advice, desperately trying to get sex tips or conversation tactics to keep their most important connection from fracturing.

At the end of the day, it’s really about the bigger problem.

Until we can learn to love ourselves, to accept ourselves completely and unconditionally—even with those extra 10 pounds, with that hair there, and with the smell of our poop—we won’t really be able to experience love.

Behind each and every relationship problem is the inner set of what I call crucial questions inside the mind of each partner that say—“What if?”

What if I gain 10 pounds? What if I lose all my money? What if I fail? What if I get wrinkles? What if I get angry? What if I get a brain injury? What if I change? What if I’m not who you think I am?

Until we can learn to answer “I will love you anyway” to our own selves, we won’t be able to do it to anyone else. And until that happens, we’ll keep going round and round in this little rat race, never knowing the possibilities of powerful, passionate love that uplifts and inspires us.

All in all, we don’t need the perfect person or to become the perfect person. All we need is to realize the truth about ourselves.

If we all knew just how powerful, beautiful, and capable we were, and if we only stopped for a moment to realize the inspiring, chaotic potential within every moment of this short, exhilarating thing we call life, we wouldn’t even think about poop spray.

We wouldn’t feel like we need anything more than just to suck the sweet juice of life out of each living, breathing, beautiful second.

And so we come upon the greatest tragedy of our time. This tragedy is not, as many may say, that poop spray and celebrity gossip are more important to people than starvation, war, and disease elsewhere in the world. No, that is not the tragedy.

The greatest tragedy of our time is that people care more about poop spray and celebrity gossip than they do about drinking up their full potential; about being happy and living a meaningful life.

They feel more for plastic replicas of human beings than they do for the beautiful spark of life that they already are.

You’re already everything you’ve ever wanted to be.

Your awareness of yourself awaits.

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Assistant Ed: Kathryn Ashworth/Ed: Bryonie Wise