You Can Live The Victorious Life Now
Since Your Imperfections Actually make You Perfect
Our imperfections make us human. It is an acceptance and appreciation of the impermanent, imperfect and incomplete nature of everything, including ourselves. Truth is, we are never created to be perfect. We are always works-in-progress, same as in our relationships, work, careers, family and lives. And when things don’t work out, we can always pause, reflect, introspect and even grieve and regret, then change, innovate, transform, evolve, or simply choose to try again, or give up.
Perfection cannot be attained because it does not exist. Many people actually believe it possible to achieve perfection. You can never become the perfect person; just as you will never meet the perfect boyfriend or perfect girlfriend to become your future perfect spouse. Still, people cling on stubbornly to the delusion that they can achieve the eternally unfulfillable perfection, leading to perpetual feelings of unfulfillment. This causes great mental health issues in relationships and life.
Mental health relates to learning how to manage and deal effectively with life. Dealing with the challenges in what life imposes upon you — worry, pain, sufferings, unhappiness, loneliness, grief, and negative emotions. Our responses to these determine the state of our mental health.
Mental health is the the struggle against reality as it confronts you. You cannot change what has happened or is happening; the only effective solution is to face it with a victorious Wabi-Sabi mindset.
It is not that life is existentially imperfect. Life is just life. Our hopes oft-times that it can be definitely better make us shout out for better alternatives. No, there are no better alternatives offering good vibes, more love, less pain, less disappointments, no grief, no sickness, and more luck, happiness, joy, and blissfulness.
“The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known losses, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” — Elizabeth Kubler Ros
Wabi-Sabi is not about retreating from life; or to surround yourself with objects, natural or artificial, which are broken or aged; or to re-arrange your furniture to fit some format according to supernatural “laws” of energy flows; or to embrace man-made religious beliefs and superstitions which provide false cocoons of hope or future outcomes.
Ascetism and monasticism do not help anyone either. Neither did denying yourself what you are attracted to whether it’s food, drinks or activities or reading or just travels.
Wabi-Sabi is a concept from Japanese aesthetics, which perceives beauty in imperfection, appreciate simplicity and accept the transient nature of all things. The timeless wisdom of Wabi-Sabi, which originated in China before it became Japanised, is particularly material to address today’s mental health in our search for new strategies to obtain practical meaning beyond materialism so as to better engage life’s challenges more victoriously.
Accepting Wabi-Sabi means learning to live a victorious life through all the human senses of sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and intuition to engage, not withdraw from, life as it happens. The discipline of Wabi-Sabi removes unnecessary and unhelpful thoughts to pave your path to victorious living.
Positive mental health wellness is achieved as Wabi-Sabi Mindfulness emboldens and empowers an unhurried calmness to soak, enjoy and absorb the energies of the world around you to facilitate your celebration in the art of doing and not the result. You will find beauty in imperfection and to accept the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death even as it promotes self-reflection and development. Some find in Wabi-Sabi an aesthetic sensibility which discovers a melancholic beautiful quality in the impermanence of all things.
The victorious impact of Wabi-Sabi mental wellness is living in the moment and finding meaning and enjoyment in everything that you do. It liberates everyone who demand too much from themselves.
THE 5 STEPS TO VICTORIOUS LIVING
Here are 5 keys to help you let go of perfection expectations and embolden you to engage in the acceptance of your current state, and empower you to deal with emotions or dissonance resulting from imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness.
1) EMBRACE DESIGNED IMPERFECTION.
This is the heart of Wabi-Sabi. Life is full of the uncertainties of ups and downs, highs and lows. The beautiful flower is actually flawed with asymmetrical petals. But who cares? Its beauty does not lie in perfection. Neither is yours.
Embrace who you are. warts, flaws, imperfections and all. Imperfections are driven by the continuous fluxing of the yin-yang energies in the real world and ourselves. Joy comes when you accept the fact of Wabi-Sabi Law that “nothing lasts, everything changes and nothing is perfect”. Embrace the beauty found in the loss of the leaves on a tree in the winter, quickly; and await their return in the Summer.
To attain positive mental health wellness, know that human sufferings would also follow the Wabi-Sabi Law, your pain, loss and grief will also soon give way to joy, happiness and recovery, and victorious living.
2) DIVE INTO THE DARKNESS
The greatest privilege of living is to be brought to your knees, and to the brink of life. At the edge separating this world and whatever next, I once paused to stare into the future and confronted the Reality in its natural, dark nakedness. The purpose of life was never clearer — LIFE HAS NO PURPOSE. I was, and had always been, alone. This Truth set me free for my journey into the dark of life.
Only once in your life would you find yourself in that Dark place. You will have only 2 options — Quit or Enter. Darkness wins when you quit. The only way is to plunge into the Darkness with the last gram of your energy. As you ready yourself for the final journey, as you stare into it intensely, at that dark area just between your eyes, the Darkness will stir, slowly as first before suddenly coming alive. Behold, the Darkness stares back. And Yes, it is ALIVE. You shudder. Hesitate. If Darkness were indeed alive, then there is Hope, maybe, and perhaps another Future, probably. Can there be a Future beyond Hope? Possibly, you wonder.
Doing nothing, you cannot achieve anything. Wabi-Sabi emboldens your resilience. It looks at your brokenness, notices the cracks in your flaws, the rough edges of your imperfection and let the light of hope through the cracks. It doesn’t matter if you have tried and failed 9,999 times. Try the 10,000th time could be the Wabi-Sabi breakthrough you need to grasp and grab the solutions to your brokenness and sense of hopelessness. Yes, I have bad days too. All of us do. I use the limitless power of Wabi-Sabi in my inner consciousness to make the difference and push myself through the challenges, even as the Journey seems daunting at time. The habits of Wabi-Sabi will reveal insights into the nature of reality or consciousness to make the inevitable victory possible.
3) BE YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF
Authenticity is one of the most desirable gifts of Wabi-Sabi. To attain Wabi-Sabi, you will have to battle against the inauthenticity from your obsession with perfection. We hide our true broken, flawed and aging self from others so often such that our fake self comes across almost authentic. But you have fooled nobody, least of all yourself. Wabi-Sabi says “it’s OK to be naked”. Start scraping and removing the layers of yourself using the Wabi-Sabi stripper. You will finally re-discover yourself in the end and realise who you truly are.
As Wabi-Sabi becomes you, you will begin to living naturally, spontaneously and authentically by embracing the truth and reality of permanent change, imperfection and continuous decay. You will learn to accept and embrace the beauty in the flawed, irregular and incomplete. Soon, your consciousness strengthens for you to experience and behold the extraordinary beauty in the ordinary, even as you make war against the superficial consumerism and inauthenticity found abundant in the material culture.
Thus, you have nurtured Wabi-Sabi authenticity by embracing the limits of three simple realities: “nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”
4) BE THE ORIGINAL YOU
Remember that the man/woman in the mirror is flawed, imperfect, aging and broken. Each one of us was born as the most beautiful and cutest baby. Over time, we begin to compare and modern marketing tells us that we have become uglier by the day.
Modern marketing of personal and life-style products makes you feel too fat, or too thin, or too tall, or too short, or facial features non-symmetrical; eyebrows too natural, eyes not at same level, nose not in the middle of your face, your ears unbalanced, one foot bigger than the other, one leg longer, another arm too short, one hand bigger, mouth not aligned with face, unshapely body, breasts too high or too big or too small or too ‘different’ or not enticing enough … well, Wabi-Sabi says “look at Nature where there is beauty flourishing in diversity, differences and NOT symmetry or same-ness.” But you want to look better, more desirable and more beautiful … like some actors or models. Seriously?
Remember you were born an Original, why strive to live like an Imitation?
You are Version 0. There is no Version 1 or 2. Compare no more. Wabi-Sabi is here. All things are beautiful. Nothing is permanent. Everything ages. Wabi-Sabi emboldens self-esteem. Wabi-Sabi self-esteem is the best defense against the encroaching forces to make you an imitation of what other people want you to become. Without Wabi-Sabi, you strive to become a copy of what others want you to be for you to embrace their imperfections, replacing yours, until you become a shadow of yourself as an Imitation. The end result is your mental wellness suffers as you lose your naturally imperfect joy, positivity and beauty.
5) BECOME WHAT YOU THINK
What you think, you’ll become. Your intersubjective reality is a social construction designed by your thought. And who you are is decided by what you think. Self-reflection is the core of the self-creation process. The right thoughts create the Wabi-Sabi in you.
Through Wabi-Sabi, you shall attain a deep understanding of true natural beauty in the context of things, objects and emotions, and you’ll become willing to see beauty in the ordinary, imperfect and impermanent. Wabi-Sabi habits mean learning to live with less, and care more for all things natural, to positively impact mental health by strengthening human essence, vitality, networking, social engagement and sharing with connections.
Your Wabi-Sabi worldview profoundly impacts your capacity for love, compassion, connections and community service to enhance and boost better mental health wellness for living a truly victorious life.
