“In my work I often see people struggling unsuccessfully to overcome what they believe to be their human weakness. Yet for most of them, what they believe to be their weaknesses turn out to be the areas of their greatest spiritual strength.”
To explain how this paradoxical principle manifests in practice, Michael Tamura – who has the gift of reading the energy of the human soul and perceiving its purpose in life – shares cases from his healing practice. Here are some of them:
-
A woman who repeatedly fails in her marriages. Perceiving the purpose of this woman in this lifetime, Tamura understands that her greatest ability is the healing of human relationships, but this does not happen because she is completely unconscious of this gift. Instead, she tries to make her marriage work by marrying people who should be her patients and students, rather than her life partners.
-
Another woman whose primary purpose Tamura sees as stepping onto the large stage of life and speaking to large groups of people. “Yet, being unconscious of the purpose of her creative power, she has focused it on trying to love and make one person happy. Despite her good intentions, her energy overwhelms him and pushes him away from her.”
-
A man whose core potential is the gift of independence and helping other people to be free. Instead, he is constantly criticized by others for his rebellious nature and reproached for living alone, for being unruly and antisocial.
These are three examples of life destinies in which what appears as weakness is an expression of unrecognized spiritual strength and life purpose. The series of failed marriages of the first woman is the negative expression of her power to help people with relationship problems. The immense creative force of the second woman is directed toward making only one person happy and produces the opposite of what she desires. The man who carries the fire of freedom is lonely and rejected. The problem of these people comes down to one single thing: their strength has not been brought into consciousness and therefore manifests in its negative form.
“You may be a highly evolved soul, but until you fully incarnate into your present body, you are more like a teenager who knows everything but has not yet lived it. You know the theory, but you have not tested it in reality.
I see many souls who are highly evolved and enlightened struggling to live out their spiritual knowledge in human relationships… For most people seeking spiritual growth, their soul awareness is more developed than their body–mind awareness.
The good news, however, is that since you already have the awareness and skill developed in spirit, you simply need to learn how to weave them into your body.” (p. 65)
This represents an interesting reversal of the popular view that we should strive for spiritual development by increasingly freeing ourselves from the dominance of mind and body. As Tamura says, many beings do not have a problem with spiritual development; their real difficulty lies in embodying their spiritual knowledge in human form. Their greatest challenge is in the human realm, not the spiritual one.
In the example of the man whose greatest strength is freedom, this looks as follows:
“One of the difficult lessons for this young man as a soul and as a guide is to study the humanity of fear and people’s need for comfort and security, and to understand that even if he has released these fears and needs, those around him have not. If he learns to approach these human traits with greater understanding and to turn his love of freedom into a practical teaching tool that inspires greater awareness in everyone, then he will be able to move forward with his spiritual goals.” (p. 67)
I like this shift in perspective; it is very creative and, as such, it carries solutions.
“One of the challenges of fully incarnating as a human being is learning how to use what you already have properly in your human relationships. And the first human relationship you must learn to handle is the one with your own body. Avoiding human weaknesses and trying to elevate the body by denying its limitations will ultimately not work…
To fully incarnate as a human being, first look for what you already know and have within you, and practice what you discover in your life, instead of searching for what you do not know or do not have.” (p. 68)
It turns out that for a large part of those who seek spirituality, the main challenge is not spiritualization, but humanization. Probably many people need to walk the opposite path – that of spiritualization. But if the roughness and imperfection of the world hurt you far more than you are ready to admit, then Michael Tamura’s insights above most likely apply to you, and reading his book may offer you significant support. And if you do not have time to read, just remember this: you are here, on Earth, for the sake of becoming human.
It is said that only in the human world can a kind of love be born that does not exist even in the world of the gods. We have come here to give birth to this love. We do so by passing through the opposite of what we aspire to. Earth is a world of duality. Until we unite the opposites within ourselves, we will experience our rejected Self through rejection by the world and by other people. That is why the first step is to see what we perceive as our weakness and to honor it deeply. It is our most important teacher of humanity. Only when we accept it will the alchemy occur, and our greatest weakness will become our greatest strength.
And so, this is the question: “Where is my greatest weakness, and what is it teaching me?”
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
