Perhaps you’ve worked hard to be more aware of yourself in the Now, and that for this effort you catch a glimpse of how quick you are to judge others, to criticize them for their “failings.” This pain that strains you — and those you touch with it — is itself a creation of a false sense of your own perfection. But your awareness of its punishing presence within you is the same as your invitation to transcend the negative nature that is responsible for it. So, if you want to realize the higher level of Self that reveals the need for further transformation, then you have work to do. You must actualize this new level of yourself by acting from your new understanding in a whole different way. Through such conscious action, you teach others around you about the possibility of living from a whole new order of self-understanding.

In each instance where you see that you still have more to understand about yourself, use your life to become a living example of those qualities of character that you need to learn. In other words, in order to transcend what you have seen as limiting you, you teach, by example, what you would further understand.

As just one small example, any time you refuse to give voice to a complaint, the world around you receives the lesson that there are superior ways to handle times of discomfort or disappointment that do not include expressing negative emotions. Your lesson — if you will teach it — is to see that you can use passing dark states to awaken to and realize an interior wisdom that knows how to use everything for its own growth.

Always strive to remember that anything you work to change in yourself cannot help but change everything.