Perfection Or More Understanding?

Welcome to Insights and Implications!

Hello Everyone,

Do you sometimes feel like you’re failing at Insight Principles? Below, we talk about why that can’t really happen. We hope it helps.

All the best,

All of us at Insight Principles

Perfection Or More Understanding?

When we check-in with our clients, we often hear the expression, “I keep falling off the wagon,” or “I keep failing at this.”

The general sentiment is that there is a place or level of perfection to reach when it comes to insight principles. Although this is a reasonable perspective – especially given our pass/fail culture and educational system – we’d like to suggest a more accurate and helpful way of looking at things.

Do you ever get hungry? If the answer is yes, does your hunger mean you failed at the food digestion thing? Likewise, if your muscles get sore after exercising or doing chores around the house or garden, did you fail at the muscle thing?

Of course not.

All innate systems can be compromised. This is not a failure, but a normal and natural occurrence. It is simply how the system functions, and is barely worthy of commentary or critical assessment.

When you get a muscle cramp or pain, for whatever reason, you usually (and naturally) stop the activity that led to the “failure”. You might even try some on-the-spot remediation (stretching, massage, etc). Or maybe you keep going. No big deal, right? It’s just how muscles work. Your soreness doesn’t represent a failure.

Our mind is no different. Thoughts flood into the mind all the time, and, given the invisible yet powerful nature of thought, it is easy to get caught up or react. When we forget how the mind works, which is easy to do, we sometimes feel knocked off balance.

Just like we’ll always get hungry, we’ll probably always have times of feeling off-balance mentally. If you have understanding, it’s no big deal. It’s just what happens to us sometimes. You can’t really fall off the wagon or fail at having a normal human experience. The more you understand this, the more the ebb and flow of your mental life will seem ordinary and normal.

You get hungry, your muscles get sore, and you get knocked off-balance sometimes. It happens.

No big deal.

-Robin Charbit