You don’t need to be perfectly healed to be happy and flourish.

Chasing a state of internal perfection, free of shadow or wounding, creates a deep state of dissatisfaction and chronic stress (a kind of stress we don’t actually know how to name) in our pursuit of freedom or a “stress-free” life, a life where we imagine we will finally be happy, worthy, and flourish.

The unconscious is vast and infinite, just as the realms of consciousness and light.

We will forever spiral in and out of darkness and light, grief and eros as long as we are alive.

When we mix up a work ethic and economics with our mental health, disguised as “mindset” issues, we will constantly need to forage in the dark for the shadow parts preventing us from getting what we want at some future time.

It perpetuates the message of not being good enough right now in a way that constructs a subtle energetic of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn that has us constantly seeking for problems we need to fix, beliefs we need to shift, emotions or energies we need to stalk in order to clear.

This keeps us in a loop that feels like a hallway of funhouse mirrors where we cannot tell the difference between life’s reflection or direction. It can leave us thinking that everything going wrong is in some way due to ourselves—that the reason is in some part of our psyche we haven’t yet fixed, healed, or wrangled into internal submission to fit the cultural agenda.

Recovering from anything, be it a traumatic loss, the death of a loved one, a breakup, a job loss, a major transition, codependency, addiction, or complex trauma, there is a point in the spiral of grief and growth where we must learn how to engage with life and learn how to flourish and be happy. Regardless of our past or our pain.

Our “shadow” isn’t something we necessarily even need to go searching for, because when we decide to learn how to really live for ourselves, to truly nourish and nurture ourselves, the grief that is present in our dissatisfaction, which keeps us in the wheel of searching for that “perfect” internal and outer life, reveals itself to us—to be released, to restore us to that eternal flow of life and love and loss.

Love and loss are always present with us.

To love and live is to experience loss and great lettings go.

There is love in our grief and grief in our loving, always.

Loss isn’t a reflection of some personal failing.

It’s a natural part of life.

In our evolution, when we surrender to our unfolding with the wisdom of creation, there are natural points of shadow review, metabolizing pain, and meeting our separation from love that surface—where we explore intimacy with the love of the Absolute, find peace in our relative humanity, and work out our anger with God and life.

We change through this process. We become something that cannot be predetermined or controlled, and it’s usually much more beautiful than we can imagine.

This is our great human journey with the seasons, which isn’t necessarily convenient for the sake of economics in a culture that profits off of our dissatisfaction, which has us searching for something to fill the hole—something that makes us feel there is something wrong with us.

When we embrace our grief, the loss of what needs to go into the fire in order to serve the light of more life, we become more graceful at rising like a phoenix over and over and over again. The initiative territory becomes familiar and we can build the infrastructure to contain this in our lives.

The more we love, the more we grieve.

The more we let go, the more we become.

With this freedom, we know what matters, what is true, and where love is guiding us to become fully what we came here to be.

This power of the human heart is a great responsibility, for the more we embrace it, the more our hearts open, the more we will care for this planet and be responsible stewards not only for ourselves but for all the animals and plants on the planet whose lives are beginning to depend on us—on our hearts breaking back open to them, instead of hunting where no life can be found.

Don’t be fooled, you don’t need to be completely healed to be happy and flourish. Life and God, whoever this is for you, would not be so petty.

Perhaps instead of hunting in shadows, there is much we simply need to let go of.

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