Oh, this is a sweet one.  Not of the sort that is always easy to swallow, but so profoundly full of love that once you open the door on it, you will have no choice but to feel your heart expanding.

Most of you spend a lot of your time focused on what you consider to be your flaws, your weaknesses, your sorrows, your failures, your losses, your imperfections.  In an ongoing struggle to improve yourself, to become perfect—or what you think might approximate that state—you attend to that which you see as less than ideal in yourself.    Often this arises out of fear, out of a need to be ‘good enough.’

This week, we suggest that you turn your attention to that which is glorious and magnificent and flawless instead.  This week, we ask you to celebrate all that is just as it should be in you.  There are many blessings in everyone’s lives and it brings joy to contemplate them.  But you are often inclined to be grateful for things external to yourself—things like the love and friendship of others, the beauty around you, the material security and comfort you have been given.  This week, celebrate that which is perfect in you.  If you explore it, you will find that you are an utterly amazing being.  So much that is strong and wise and loving and generous and radiant…..   Focus on that and you will find the need to berate and punish yourself for your ‘failures’ not only departs, but it can be seen as the absurdity that it is: a particularly brutal way in which you are out of alignment with the divine.

Look around you:  at the bird that eats at the feeder or lights on the power line, at the trees that grow in the park or in your yard, at the streams that criss-cross the land, at the clouds that form and re-form, passing overhead.   Look at the shape of the hills and valleys and at the geese that wing through the sky.  Are they not all perfect?  Are they not all exactly as they ought to be?  Why in the world and beyond would the divine make an exception for you?

You are nothing more or less than a manifestation of the divine.  One of trillions.  Each unique and special and yet at the core, always that same perfect light.   Always One.  You have come into form to carry that light in a particular manner, but when you struggle, using your human will to be ‘good,’  or ‘better,’ you are relying on both a judgment and a power that is paltry and myopic to guide you.   Allow yourself, dear ones, to rest in the arms of that which created you in perfection, and which can see you with the same clarity that you access when you look upon nature.  Allow yourself to see your own beauty and make much of it this week.  Stop chastising yourselves, stop being unkind.  To love yourself, as you are, is not only right, but it is reflects a greater truth that you deny when you focus on what is wrong, on what needs to change.

And of course, there are things to change that will make you happier, that will add to the richness or comfort or depth of your lives.  But we assure you—the fastest and most efficient way to affect those changes involves being aligned with the universe and its greater flow.  You are loved, you are good, you are a joy to behold and to know—as you are in this moment and without reservation or proviso—and until you embrace this essential truth fully you will be fighting a strong current as you attempt to alter yourself and your life.  Ironically, stop trying to change and the changes that are really useful will come to you, and without any significant suffering or struggle or deprivation or pain.

We know that for many this is a frightening prospect.  If you let yourself rejoice in who you are now, you fear that you might stop there, and then how will you ever reach your goals?  How will you ever be worthy?   But try it, dear ones, just for this week if no more.  You deserve no less than the full experience of the love and appreciation that are yours always.  Everything changes when you live from love instead of fear.  Everything changes when you allow the divine in you to lead.  And the divine always, always leads with love.

Which we send you in great measure.