Seeking Jordan will be available in hardcover March 15, 2016. You can pre-order it now from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

Loving the Flaw

Loving the moment is embracing, with equal measure, the doubt and the certainty, the loss and the connection, the sin and the sacrifice, the fear and the courage. Loving the flaws protects us from being the flaws. Seeing the beautiful pain and opening to its perfection, keeps it from defining us. The more we love the ark, the more we live in the light.

The pettiness, the anger, the selfishness, the cruelty must be seen and loved. If these parts of the self are rejected and made “not me,” they grow to envelope, to become the self. The way to the divine always leads through what is wrong, what we are desperate not to be.

There is nothing at the end that wasn’t at the beginning. Each thought, each feeling that is banished becomes a monster that we feed. We nourish them with fear, disgust, shame, and—most of all—avoidance. The things we fear to think and feel grow large. Haunting and powerful. Until they become nearly everything there is.

Matthew McKay
by Matthew McKay

Matthew McKay is a clinical psychologist and a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. In 1979, he cofounded Haight Ashbury Psychological Services in San Francisco and served as its clinical director for twenty-five years. Currently he serves as the director of the Berkeley Cognitive Behavior Therapy Clinic. He has explored spiritual and afterlife issues in two previous books: Why? and Your Life on Purpose. He is also the author of professional and self-help psychology books, including Thoughts & Feelings, Messages, Mind and Emotions, Self-Esteem, Prisoners of Belief, and many others.

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