Your Hidden Potential.

Your life has been designed to work, and your hidden potential contains what you seek and all that you need in life.  It is OK to be who you are and choose what you have.  The Quakers call it the "still, small voice within," that place of full awareness within that is in touch with the entire universe and is the source of wisdom.  In effect, you don't have to keep searching for confirmation by focusing on being someone else or being somewhere else.  There is no place else to be and nothing else to get.  You will be able to grasp the levels of change in your life when you can allow yourself to be present in the moment, accept the world as it is, and trust that everything is as it was intended to be.  Thomas Merton put it succinctly:  "We have what we seek.  It is there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us."  Putting it another way, the Zen writer Senrin wrote:  "If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?"

Many people are dissatisfied even though they have what they believe everyone wants and should want--a nice home, a good job, and the like.  They are unfulfilled by their achievements or acquisitions and even their relationships.  But they don't know why they are uncomfortable or what it is they really want or how little effort they devote to what they really want to do.

What leads to this misplaced effort, to this lack of meaningful direction?  Many difficulties result from faulty self-images learned in your earliest years.  Much of your personality and your concept of yourself comes from the emphasis on some and the neglect of other features of your personality during your childhood.  If this emphasis matched your temperament, talents, and special skills, you have developed an accurate and realistic self-image.  If not, you have probably experienced much conflict.  You may, for example, have an inclination to paint but were conditioned to reject it.  The more you become aware of these suppressed sides of yourself, the more you will be able to accept and utilize your hidden potential.  While your choices as a child may have been limited, they need no longer be limited.  You decide what to do with your life.  In the last analysis, your behavior, not chance or the concepts of others, determines your concept of yourself and whether or not you will reach the goals you set.marshallunduemi@myopera.com