Lately, I have been thinking about the weight of our reaching. We live in an era of optimization. We strive for deeper healing and clearer purpose. We treat our lives like projects to be managed and our souls like engines to be tuned.

But a quiet question has been echoing in my mind: If we are truly sparks of the Divine, can we ever be anything less than perfect and whole?

Sacred Tools

To be clear, the tools we use—the energy work, the meditation, the somatic work, the rituals, the prayers—are sacred. They are not just helpful; they are often the very things that keep us afloat. But there is a subtle, yet profound, difference between healing and curing.

Curing is about an end result, the removal of a symptom, the fixing of a break. Healing, however, is a return to center. It can happen on the grandest scale or in the smallest, quietest moments of self-compassion. As the poet Rachel Naomi Remen once suggested, “Curing is a specialized restoration of health... but healing is an integrative process that transcends the physical.” You can be incurable and yet be completely healed. You can be broken by the world’s standards and yet be radiantly whole in your spirit.

This is echoed in the concept of Maya from Indian philosophy, the idea that the world of brokenness and multiplicity is an illusion, a play of light and shadow. In this view, we aren't actually fragmented; we are simply caught in a dream of being separate. Healing, then, isn't about fixing a vessel that has shattered; it is the process of waking up and realizing the vessel was never broken in the first place. It is a shift in perception, not a change in substance.

Perfection

If we accept the philosophical premise of Advaita Vedanta or the Gnostic idea of the Divine Spark, we arrive at a startling conclusion: Perfection is not a goal; it is our origin.

In many mystical traditions, the work isn't about adding anything to ourselves. It is about subtraction. It is the Via Negativa, the negative way. We aren't building a masterpiece; we are chipping away the marble that hides the statue already inside.

For many of us, this is the most grueling, and rewarding, part of the process. It requires us to strip away every layer of identity we’ve spent years constructing. We have to ask: Who am I when I am no longer my job title, my given name, my experiences, my current beliefs, or my personality? Who am I outside of my familial roles?

But we must go even deeper into the subtraction. We must ask: Who am I without my pain? Many of us have formed our entire identities and our limitations around an illness or a trauma. We have become the diagnosis to the point that we are afraid not to have it as a limitation or a crutch. We use it as a shield, saying, "I can't, because I have this thing."

We must ask ourselves: Are you truly ready to be whole? In this light, healing is not a repair, but a readiness to release the identity we’ve built around the thing we think needs fixing. It is the brave decision to let go of the story of our brokenness so that we may finally remember our inherent divineness. It is a breathtaking prospect to drop the crutch and realize we no longer have an excuse to stay small. Have we lived in the shadow of the ailment so long that we’ve mistaken the shadow for our own skin?

When we begin to dissect every conditioned belief, every inherited practice, every attachment to our labels, and the heavy shroud of shame that so often accompanies them, we find ourselves in a strange, empty space. We must look at each piece of ourselves and ask: Is this truly my belief, or was it given to me? Is this my essence, or is it just a story of brokenness I’ve grown comfortable telling? As we discard the "shoulds" and the "must-bes," we are left with a profound silence. But in that silence, we find the answer: when everything else is gone, what remains is the Spark itself. The "Who are we, really?" is not a new identity to be built, but the eternal presence that was there before the world gave us a name or a diagnosis.

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." — Rumi

If we are already divine, then perhaps healing isn't about fixing a flaw, but about clearing the vision so we can see the perfection that was never actually lost. This mirrors the Platonic idea of Anamnesis—the belief that all knowledge is actually a form of recollecting things our souls knew before we were born. According to this, we don't learn how to be whole; we simply remember the wholeness that has been our true nature since the beginning of time. The flaws we see in ourselves are merely the dust on a mirror; the mirror itself remains pristine and reflecting the light perfectly.

Purpose

We see this same striving in our search for purpose. We treat purpose like a destination or a hidden treasure we haven't been clever enough to find yet. We yearn to do something great to justify our existence.

But what if our purpose is far more radical? What if our purpose is simply to be the witnesses of this human incarnation?

There is a concept in some schools of thought that the Divine created the universe so that it could experience itself through a billion different pairs of eyes. If that is true, you are fulfilling your purpose simply by tasting a peach, feeling the cold wind, or experiencing the ache of a heavy heart. You are the Divine having a human experience.

Zen masters often speak of "chopping wood and carrying water." Before enlightenment (remembering), you chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment (remembering), you chop wood and carry water. The doing doesn't necessarily change, but the attachment to the outcome does. We find that our purpose isn't a grand mission we must achieve, but the quality of presence we bring to the simplest tasks.

When we release the attachment to an outcome, we find a terrifying and beautiful freedom. Often, the reason we strive so hard is because we are afraid that if we don't heal, learn and grow enough, or find a grand purpose, our lives won't have mattered. But if our divineness is already an established fact, the pressure to become evaporates. We no longer have to justify our existence through results. This freedom allows us to engage with our healing and our work not as a desperate race to a finish line, but as a playful exploration of being alive. There is nothing to win, nothing to prove, and nowhere to go—only the grace of existing exactly as you are.

Remembering

Perhaps the thing to do isn't to strive, but to remember.

In Greek, the word for truth is aletheia, which literally translates to "un-forgetting." We spend so much energy trying to become something better, when the most transformative thing we can do is drop the heavy armor of striving and remember who we were before the world told us we were broken.

We are not projects to be finished. We are expressions of the Infinite, currently wearing the skin of a human, learning what it feels like to walk on the earth. There is nothing you have to do to earn your place here. You are already the spark. You are already the flame.