A few years back I remember reading a quote by the great poet Rumi.
“As you live deeper in the heart, the mirror gets clearer and cleaner.”
Sometimes a great quote will just stick with me, especially if it makes a profound impact on my journey, but a quote will also stick with me if I feel like it has elements of wisdom I have yet to tap in to.
This quote is the latter for me.
I have loved the idea of mirrors and other people mirroring back to me, but I struggled for a long time to see how mirrors worked.
The hardest part of the mirror has been to see everything I see in others, in myself also. I started to see that people who recognized “good” in me, were focused on being good people so that’s what they would see.
Because we think we know ourselves and we live by our labels we are typically quite certain about who we are, our ego traps us into that label and we completely ignore the ways the opposite side might show up.
But it’s always there.
We are all complete human beings.
We are full of both the good stuff and the bad stuff.
Until I could see both sides inside of myself I didn’t understand the mirror.
Until I could dig deep and find the ways inside of myself that were the same as the people who I was pointing my fingers at, I couldn’t find forgiveness or compassion for any of us.
Your heart is where the truth lies.
The deeper you live in your heart the more you discover the truth that we are all the same. The more you find that we are all the same, the cleaner and clearer the mirror gets.
This part of the journey is all about cleaning that mirror and learning about who you really are.