THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE A SPIRITUAL BREAKTHROUGH : Breaking down the myth of “perfection”

Anjashi Sarkar
7 min readDec 12, 2024
Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash

The most asked question in my profession as a life coach and healer is “Why do we have to endure impossibly severe pain before we even get to the first brink of spirituality?” I have always answered it in the simplest of words, “If it didn’t hurt, you would have never moved.”

The society around us, from the moment we are born, is quite vigilant. It makes assumptions, conclusions, ideas and opinions on anything that is visible. Whether or not, you are someone that can be categorised as “odd” or “weird” or preferably the much cultured label, “stand out”, you will be on the list of dinner table conversations of at least five people you know. I am taking five as a number for the purpose of analysis. Out of these five, there will be one who is trying to get somewhere in life but is failing miserable, the second could be someone who appreciates you and thinks your achievements are worthy of discussion, the third could be someone who hates you, the fourth maybe an old friend who just came across your recent endeavours and the fifth, most interestingly, is the one family member who judges you galore no matter how great you are doing in life.

When you see growing up, you are told that if you pass the examinations, you are going to get a degree good enough to get into a college and then become a professional. The ones who don’t do well are looked down upon. I have seen people who have failed consecutive years in school and their parents have always been a bit embarrassed about how “dull” their child is. I am telling this to you with so much pride today, that these “unintelligent” kids have set empires and broken every glass ceiling there ever was. And I am saying this even if I had been an academic rank holder all my life. I have immense respect for these people because not only did they shut everyone’s mouths, they also made sure that nothing, absolutely nothing, was strong enough to kill their mettle.

People you meet on an everyday basis are obsessed with perfection. They want the best of everything even though they are quite average. There is nothing wrong in being average. The first rule of nature is that change is inevitable which means if someone is already perfect they are almost boring because there is never going to be room for improvement or evolution. Not that perfection is a curse or something to be looked down upon, but somehow the beauty in imperfection is unparalleled. It gives you a chance to explore other facets, to move the bar higher up and probably set new benchmarks for innovation.

It baffles me how loosely spirituality is taken these days or how everyone just speaks of it without knowing anything of it. The ones who truly are spiritual do not talk of it because they know it is a journey and one doesn’t have to find a spot to end it. It is a life long process and even after that (in other dimensions). Why is pain the factor behind that awakening then?

There are three realities of life, as far as I have understood in these many years of existence: life, pain, death. The feeling that binds the first and the last is pain. A dead man has no feelings. A living person experiences life and pain is the one thing that moves something inside of him, the discomfort makes him choose amongst options and change comes as a by-product.

Is there no spiritual awakening without pain then? Of course not. There cannot be a new structure until the old one has wiped itself out. Consider this example- you are in a relationship where you are feeling love and you think you can do everything for this person, you might even take a bullet for them. As much as it is close to obsession, it is also dishonouring yourself because you’re God’s greatest creation. So when people say I could even give my life for so and so person, I immediately know they are acting out of ego. Because the need to be validated at this point in time by expressing love in such a manner that you put the other person in a spot because they feel overburdened by your emotional response wins over a uncomplicated stance of life: living it. Anything in excess cannot be spiritual. Anything in lack also cannot be spiritual. Therefore, when these statements rise to the surface, just know that it is not what they are claiming it to be. If you think the tendency to over love or over give is something to be proud of, it really is not. It is just a self-validating mechanism to seek love like it were scarce. Something like, I love a lot and love like a maniac but I get hurt in the process because no one loves like me like I do, nobody is forcing you to. You are doing it because you think (in your limited consciousness) that doing more will make you more worthy of blessings. It does not work that way. The feeling of worthiness must come from the way you intend about things in your life. Hence, anything without intention and purpose is just ego. This also explains why the people who do the least win more because they don’t REQUIRE validation. They do it because they wanted to without expectations. Your overall mindset to do more comes from greed and not a sentiment of genuine love because if you need an external source to be happy, you might as well live like a person who has no name or identity to themselves.

Before a spiritual breakthrough, the one thing that captures your consciousness and makes you a slave to the desire, does everything to systematically break you down. Thus, a billionaire loses his empire, a lover loses their beloved and an athlete gets terribly injured. The common factor between all of these people is the thing that they are most attached with has to GO. Otherwise they would have let it consume them and their identity would have been limited to everything that they are attached with. They wouldn’t be able to hold their existence without the presence of one thing that they loved the most.

Human beings are selfish. And that is not love. Selfishness drives them to operate from a place of fear, which is on the exact opposite side of the awareness fulcrum (I think of life as a fulcrum where you always get to decide on which side you want to be in- love or fear, power or force, faith or cowardice). How does one differentiate then? By looking on the inside and turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to what everyone says is “impossible”.

Being spiritual is not a matter of convenience. I see this with many clients and all through these years of coaching, the only ones who have actually evoked their spiritual side are completely unrecognisable. When you say you are spiritual, you must also understand the significance of the word or the state of mind. You are not bound by rules or regulations and your mind is a complete firecracker. You make your life into a movie worth watching because that “pain” inside was necessary to upscale the way you were living ordinarily. You think your only job was to come to this world, grow up, get paid for the work you do, marry someone, have kids and die? This is what keeps people from attaining spiritual knowledge. Your petty matters are nothing less than the ramblings of a phalanx of pubescence. I say petty and without mincing my words because I feel if you cannot handle emotional battles, you might as well stay away from them, work on yourself mentally and physically and then jump into the battlefield. If you have stepped in, don’t be a coward. It is an insult to your own intelligence and the Almighty who has given you the greatest gift- life itself. How can one think that emotional challenges are proofs that He doesn’t care? How ungrateful does one have to be to even think of something like this? This is why I say human beings are selfish. They think God exists until their lives are going well, once thunder strikes suddenly the Creator is a joker.

The hurt before your awakening will cause a wreckage waist down. It will force you to kneel and it is imperative it happens this way. The only reason being, if it didn’t happen, you would have been comfortable in a mediocre life with no aspirations and zero interest to serve the community or to even give back in the slightest way. The pain is a medium through which your arrogance and pride are slashed. That chase for perfection makes people act barbaric, become insensitive and overtly megalomaniacal. That creates havoc. Society then goes under a civilisational crisis and people do strange stuff to stay relevant. All those bizarre incidents you see on the news are just the surface level craziness. Because this generates fear and spirituality cannot thrive in it. There are two sides of this world- the spiritual and the sleeping. When you are sleeping, you are hounded by everything that stops you from reaching your best potential. When you are claiming to be spiritual, you also have to channelise the pain to become someone who sets the record straight. Because it is easy to be a part of the crowd that believes in following. To be able to lead is the genuine mark of spiritual rank.

For coaching: anjashi.work@gmail.com

Instagram: anjashisarkar

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/anjashi-sarkar

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Anjashi Sarkar
Anjashi Sarkar

Written by Anjashi Sarkar

LoA/ Manifestation Coach & Blogger, Podcaster, Author, Editor, Researcher. Support indie publishing: https://www.paypal.me/anjashi

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