Maybe Spirituality Was Never Meant to Give You the Perfect Life

More than twenty years ago, when I began taking my spiritual journey seriously, I thought I had discovered a path that would eventually teach me how to get life right.

I didn’t necessarily think of it in those words at the time. But looking back, I can see it clearly.

I believed that if I became conscious enough, healed enough, meditated enough, listened carefully enough to Shaltazar’s wisdom, and learned to understand the Unseen world, I would eventually arrive somewhere more peaceful, certain and abundant.

Spirituality seemed to offer the possibility that if I could understand the deeper workings of life, I might finally learn how to navigate it more consciously.

Twenty years later, I see things very differently.

My spiritual journey has given me more than I could ever have imagined, and I am deeply grateful that I chose to walk it. It has opened me to dimensions of life, love and meaning that I may never have discovered otherwise. I would not trade this journey for anything.

But it has not given me a perfect life.

I still experience fear and confusion. I still make choices without knowing where they will lead. Bodies age—and I am definitely learning that one. Plans and values change. Things happen that I would never consciously choose.

And strangely, realizing this has become one of the most important parts of my spiritual journey.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking spirituality to make my human life perfect and began asking a different question:

How can I bring more of who I truly am into the life I am actually living?

I suspect I am not alone.

Modern spirituality can quietly reinforce the idea that if we align ourselves correctly, heal enough, or manifest consciously enough, life will eventually cooperate with us.

And when it doesn’t, spirituality itself can become another source of pressure.

Maybe the Goal Was Never Perfection

I no longer believe the purpose of my spiritual journey is to create the perfect human life.

Human life takes place within duality—and, as I have come to understand it, that is by Source’s design. Love and fear, joy and grief, connection and separation are not signs that something has gone wrong; they are part of the experience we came here to navigate through the gift of free choice.

No amount of spiritual development removes us from being human. We will still face uncertainty, make choices we regret, and sometimes have no idea what to do.

That does not mean our spirituality has failed.

Perhaps it means the journey was never meant to do what we expected it to do.

The Divine, as I understand It, is Oneness, Unity and Unconditional Love. Yet we live in a world where we experience separation, individuality and choice.

And within us there is something deeper—a spark of the Divine, a formless dimension of ourselves that seems to remember something our human personality often forgets.

Connection. Love. Oneness.

Perhaps this is why we are drawn toward spirituality. We sense there is more. We search for meaning and try to understand what lies beyond what our physical senses can perceive.

But the more desperately I searched for spirituality to give me the life I wanted, the easier it became to overlook what might already have been happening within me.

What If Spirituality Is About Relationship?

Today I see my spiritual journey much more as a journey of relationship—not only between my human self and my formless self, but with other people, with all of life around me, and with the greater Unseen reality of which I believe we are all a part.

Perhaps the most important of these is the relationship between my human and formless selves, because the more harmony I find within myself, the more deeply I can experience my connection with everything beyond myself.

My human self feels, desires, fears and wants certainty. It often wants life to go a particular way.

My formless self seems quieter. It feels connected to something larger and less concerned with controlling every outcome.

Perhaps my spiritual journey is not about allowing one to defeat the other.

Maybe it is about helping them learn to live together.

And as that relationship changes, so does the way I experience everything beyond myself. I begin to feel less separate—from other people, from nature, from life itself, and from what I sense exists beyond this physical world.

For years I used the phrase “mastering the duality.” Today I understand that differently.

I don’t think mastery means defeating duality or rising above my humanness. Maybe mastery is really integration: learning to navigate human life while allowing the human and Divine within me to become less divided.

I am no longer trying to become spiritual enough to escape my humanity.

I am trying to become whole enough to include it.

You Are Allowed to Be Human

This understanding has made me more accepting of myself.

If human life includes free choice, then it must also include choices that lead somewhere we did not expect or want.

Choices have consequences. But I no longer see difficult consequences as evidence that I have failed spiritually.

One of the most important things I have learned from Shaltazar is that the Love of Source is unconditional.

We do not earn it by making spiritually correct decisions, and we do not lose it when we are frightened, confused or struggling.

We do not have to create a perfect life to prove ourselves worthy of Divine Love.

That Love was never dependent upon our performance.

There is something enormously freeing in that.

The spiritual journey stops feeling like a test.

We choose. We experience. We learn. We become more aware. And we choose again.

I have also come to believe that even the choices we later regret are not spiritually wasted. They are part of what we came here to experience—living in a world of duality, choosing freely, and discovering what those choices teach us.

That doesn’t mean our choices don’t matter. They do.

I still want to choose consciously and increasingly from love rather than fear.

But I no longer believe spirituality requires me to get life right.

Maybe Nothing Has Gone Wrong

This matters especially when we have been on a spiritual path for years and life still doesn’t look the way we thought it would.

We may have meditated, healed and worked on ourselves—and still find ourselves living an imperfect human life.

Before deciding that something has gone wrong, perhaps there is another possibility.

Maybe the purpose was never to create a life in which nothing difficult happens.

Maybe the invitation is to discover how we meet what does happen.

Can I remain connected to myself when life becomes uncertain? Can I listen inwardly without demanding that I know where everything will lead?

Those questions feel much more important to me now than whether I am manifesting everything I desire.

The Human and Divine Walking Together

Perhaps spirituality is not about escaping the human experience.

Perhaps it is about bringing more of our whole Self into it.

The human part of us does not need to disappear, and the Divine part does not need to take control.

Maybe they are learning how to walk together.

The human self experiences life. The formless self brings another dimension of awareness to that experience.

And through their relationship, perhaps something new becomes possible.

Not a perfect life.

A more integrated one.

A life in which fear does not eliminate love, uncertainty does not eliminate trust, and being human does not require us to forget the Divine within us.

Perhaps Oneness is not something I need to escape this world to experience. Perhaps it can emerge within me as my human self and my formless self learn to live in greater harmony.

Maybe that is what “mastering the duality” was pointing toward all along.

Not conquering duality. Navigating it from an increasing sense of inner Unity.

A Different Kind of Spiritual Life

After more than twenty years on this journey, I am becoming increasingly comfortable with how much I do not know.

The Unseen world remains mysterious. The nature of Source is beyond anything I can fully comprehend.

And I no longer need spirituality to give me all the answers or guarantee that everything will work out the way I want.

What I want is a deeper relationship with the Divine within me—and through that relationship, a deeper connection with the life around me and the mystery beyond it.

I want my human self and my formless self to know each other better.

I want them to move through this life with greater harmony, love, trust and Oneness.

Maybe that is a different definition of spiritual growth.

Not creating perfect circumstances or getting everything we desire, but becoming increasingly whole within whatever life brings us.

Maybe the purpose of spirituality is not to create the perfect human life.

Maybe it is to help the human and Divine within us learn how to live that life together.

September 26, 2026