Excellence: inherent natural ability to thrive

One Perspective

In every day life, excellence - the human impulse to strive with the input of pure awareness - is often confused and overpowered by an egocentric mind that lingers around achievements, recognition and goals.

Excellence is an innate gift, it is each person's unique charisma that unfolds naturally. Following excellence, the ordinary in each day is transformed by the non-dual perspective of the extraordinary.

In earlier years, the writer was motivated and energized by goals and a hunger for achievement and recognition. A good day was measured by productivity. He dressed for success, went to workshops, applied techniques and was productive but empty.

Looking back from a perspective gained through years of life experience, the writer could see that his attempts to reach goals expected by family, friends, spouse, society and his own false sense of identity only frustrated him and suppressed his feeling of aliveness. He had not taken the time in stillness to recognize the true longing of his heart. He had been looking in his intellect for happiness, for excellence of being, but would never find it there.

The Split Feeling

It starts with the first breath. Being born helpless and with a blank mind, the baby - still with a presence of the sacred - starts mimicing the conditioned behavior of its surroundings. Then fear propaganda, with all its controlling measures and mechanical categorization, collects its toll. The egoic mind becomes an object of single interest and is inflated by the opinions and reward system that misleadingly elevates human perspectives to seem superior to nature and one another.

In his teens, the writer rebelled against the death row of conformity and became a seeker of truth. Like so many through history, he contemplated with the power of thought to find God. What he truly found, though, was confusion generated by all the different opinions and interpetations written in countless volumes.

Facing the early passing of his two brothers created emotional turmoil, an underlying sense of being victimized by life. Contraction blocked the writer's creative impulse and he gave into the manipulating web of the mind. The painful experiences from the past continued to influence his choices in the present. For more then two decades he was trapped in the worship of perfection introduced by organized religion.

Breaking Free to Thrive as an Individual

In the pursuit of perfection, the constant noise in his thoughts had crippled the writer with overcrusting depression until he realized that spirituality does not exist in the intellect.

Life, though, sent various messengers who ignited the spark in the writer to value his own excellence and trust to be guided by the built-in navigation system of the intuitive voice.

He left behind all that had defined his life. His journey from the southeast corner of America to the northwest was not nearly as far as the journey within. He dropped possessions and his familiar comfort zone but could not drop the lingering sadness, a lonliness that came with not belonging.

In his exhaustion and inner pain of failure in relationship and career by the standards of society, he longed for the solitude of nature. In that stillness he slowly recovered an open receptivity that was his by birthright. The cloak of depression lifted.

As he was willing to let go of controlling the outcome, intuition grew stronger with each day. The intuitive voice navigated him through lessons that led him to recognize the gift, the excellence that rises with awareness in a stilled mind.

The excellence, or consciousness within, unfolds like a leaf on the tree or a flower blossom opens to the rays of the sun. In the writer's experience excellence is an inherent natural motivation empowered by the love of life.

Aligned with that pulse, his actions became effortless. The journey of the natural initiation through a non-dual awareness is the way of universal love.

~ by Kati and Gary R. Smith