As children, we called it “make believe.” People encouraged us to be imaginative and creative, to fantasize and enjoy. Then, as we aged, the guidance changed. Grow up! Be realistic! “Making believe” became the more serious game of “making beliefs”: judging, drawing conclusions, deciding what’s good and bad, right and wrong. All our emotions and behaviors then follow from the beliefs we create.

Parents, priests, teachers, corporate executives and politicians compete busily to teach us or sell us beliefs so that they can influence our feelings and behavior. They know, and we soon learn, that winning the games of power, both personal and political, depends on what we choose to believe.

Everyone wants to be able to improve their lives in some way: to heal something, to start something new, to find their soul purpose. As long as we are alive, this process continues. Everyone has a next step waiting to be taken, and everyone absolutely everyone has trouble accomplishing it. In fact, we spend an inordinate amount of time making up reasons and excuses for not moving forward.

Being stuck can be extremely painful. The desire you have to change a habit or improve your life comes from your soul. When you do not move forward with it, you block the very expression of your soul. The frustration that accumulates over time because of dysfunctional patterns of self-sabotage merely represents the surface issue.

When my mother was a young woman, she suffered a severe case of rheumatic fever that caused her to gradually lose her hearing in both ears. By the time I was born, the loss was pronounced, so I grew up with a mom who was nearly deaf. She took it all in stride and used to tell us, “It’s not a problem for me because Divine Spirit gives us two ways to listen-with our ears and, more important, with our heart.” In my family, the second approach was emphasized. “It’s interesting,” my mother would say, “that when you use your heart, your ears work better, too.”

People think that their life will only be perfect when they have achieved everything they want, when everything is completely going the way they want it to go. They are looking at the perfect state of life as something that is in the future, that they don’t have it now but they need to move towards it. The truth is even when they have reached that state, there will still be new desires that will arise to be achieved. It is an illusion to think that the perfect life is something in the future instead of being present with us.