Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment. Barbara Angelis De
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give up, resort to stuffing your face with junk food, or getting down on yourself. Maybe you exhibited patience, you were compassionate with people, you kept going, you didn’t lose your temper with anybody, you didn’t go off your diet, you didn’t do anything unhealthy to cover up what you were feeling.
So now how does the week look to you? It was a fabulous week, a triumphant week! You truly fulfilled your purpose that week by learning, meeting your challenges with steadiness and perseverance. You may not have achieved the material rewards you wanted, but you achieved something far more profound and lasting—you grew into a better human being.
Have you been feeling bad about yourself lately? Do you look at your life and conclude that you aren’t doing as well as you think you should? Perhaps you haven’t been looking at your life from the correct point of view. Perhaps you are missing your own great achievements because you’re judging yourself by standards that don’t even apply to you anymore. Secret Number Two suggests that it is time to change your paradigm of what success means to you.
Instead of defining your success by what you have achieved or acquired, why not begin defining your success by how much you are growing each day?
So how do you begin? Take your “should” list and throw it away. Then, replace it with just one commitment:
“Today I want to grow into the best human being I can be.”
Tell yourself, “I want to learn as much as I can and grow as much as I can with whatever comes my way.” Then no matter what happens to you on the outside, it can be a great day, a successful day, based on how you are handling the day on the inside.
How Can You Have a Successful Day from the Inside Out?
If you learn even one new thing about yourself today, it will be a successful day.
If you handle one situation with another person a little better than you have before, it will be a successful day.
If you have been more patient and compassionate with someone else or yourself, it will be a successful day.
If you gain a little bit more understanding about something or someone, it will be a successful day.
If you resist indulging in an old, unhealthy pattern of behavior or of thinking and instead choose a new one, it will be a successful day.
If you are kind to someone else, or to yourself, it will be a successful day.
If you love yourself even though you don’t do everything perfectly, it will be a successful day.
If you are grateful for the gift of being alive and for the opportunity to learn and grow, it will be a successful day.
This is such an uplifting way to approach your life. Instead of seeing existence as a series of tests that you pass or flunk each day, why not see it as an opportunity for growth, for learning? Then, instead of “bad days” or “good days,” you end up with days in which perhaps you have grown more or grown less, but all of them are successful days.
Remembering this principle has made a huge difference in my own life. Being a perfectionist and an achievement-oriented person, I used to have such a long list of “shoulds” for myself each day that I made it virtually impossible for me to feel successful, to feel fulfilled. The result was that I was having too many “bad days,” not because anything bad was happening, but because I was misunderstanding the purpose of my day, and therefore judging myself and the day incorrectly. Lately I have been consciously remembering Secret Number Two, and whenever I notice that I think I’m having a “bad day,” or even a “bad hour,” I stop and ask myself:
“What am I learning today?” “How am I growing today?”
Instantly, I discover something that I wasn’t seeing before, something I wasn’t appreciating about myself or the challenges I am facing. I always come away from these moments of contemplation feeling more love for myself.
How to See Yourself Through God’s Eyes
I like to think of this process as seeing your life through God’s eyes, and not your eyes. (If you want, you can substitute the idea of Universal Intelligence or whatever image of a higher power feels comfortable to you, but the concept is the same.) God isn’t sitting there thinking, “She didn’t make one darn sale today. She’s a failure in my book,” or “She’s ten pounds overweight again! She’s just blowing her life,” or “Oh no, another breakup with a boyfriend? What was I thinking when I created her?”
Do you really think if there is a cosmic force responsible for creating this universe that it would judge you on things as mundane as these? In fact, I don’t believe we are being judged at all. I believe we are being encouraged and cheered on and watched over and picked up each time we fall.
Learning to love yourself means beginning to see yourself through God’s eyes.
Several years ago, I was going through a painful time in which I had to admit to myself that I had misjudged certain situations in my life and made what I considered to be some serious mistakes. The more I understood the choices I had made, the worse I felt about myself. “How could I have been so stupid?” I lamented. “I’ve been working on myself for so long. I should have paid more attention. How could I have missed what is now so obvious?”
It was in this mood of severe self-criticism that I decided to sit down and meditate, which is my daily practice. I closed my eyes, and for a while just watched the continual parade of negative thoughts about myself march through my mind. Then at some point, I slipped into a very deep state of meditation and entered a space of peace and stillness.
Suddenly, I felt myself transported into a world of brilliant blue light. All around me, I could feel the presence of the most loving beings I had ever encountered. I knew instinctively that these were angels, spiritual guides whose job was to watch over human beings during our time here on earth. These guides welcomed me with such delight and seemed overjoyed to see me. I could sense a divine sweetness emanating from their eyes, from their voices, as if the only emotion they were capable of was love.
Still deep in meditation, I became aware that tears of sadness were falling from my eyes as I silently confessed to these beautiful beings how disappointed I was in myself, and how much I felt I’d let them and God down by not being a better person and learning my lessons more quickly. I felt all the grief and anger I’d been carrying over the past weeks pour out of my heart. These beings listened and nodded with great compassion.
Then I heard a soft voice begin to speak to me, and I knew it was a voice that spoke for all of them. The message it transmitted to me didn’t come in these exact words, for it contained much more than the words that I received. But I will share the essence of what I was given. It said:
“My child, we are in such awe of what you are doing on earth. We watch you in amazement and with great pride. How courageous you are! How persistent you are! How willing you are to grow, to experience, to feel! You are doing so well! You are not making mistakes. We do not see mistakes, only lessons learned, or lessons not yet learned. If all of you could only know for one second how beautiful you appear to us, how much we honor you for being willing to take on a human body and grow as souls, you would never judge yourselves again, you would never feel that you were failing. We love you….”
As I received this message in my heart, I experienced waves of joy and happiness washing over me. In that moment, I KNEW that what I was hearing was true, that you and I and all of us are being watched over with such compassion and being loved so unconditionally, beyond anything we could ever imagine. For a brief moment, I saw a vision of the