Is It OK to Feel Like Your Life Is Messy at the Moment?

Life feels messy at the moment, and maybe it is time we stopped pretending that we should feel completely sorted while living through it.

There is so much happening in the world that feels unsettled, and our individual lives don't somehow exist separately from that. Yet we have created this strange expectation that the more work we do on ourselves, and particularly the more spiritual we become, the more perfectly put together our lives should appear.

The Great Mother I experience certainly doesn't seem concerned with me presenting myself as perfect. In my meditations with the Great Mother, one of the things I have been shown is that humans, including the feminine teachers carrying wisdom now, can appear messy compared with expectations of the past because of the world we are living in. She continually brings me back to the reality of the structure of Earth currently. It isn't perfectly ordered, so why would the people living within it always be?

There can be times when people feel incredibly connected and know exactly what something means, only to find themselves confused again somewhere further down the road. Knowing something doesn't prevent us from making mistakes. Spiritual awareness doesn't suddenly remove the complicated business of living.

Even spirituality can look messy. The people we learn from can have extraordinary spiritual experiences, wisdom and insight while their own lives remain complicated, imperfect and sometimes dysfunctional.

We seem to expect the people carrying spiritual wisdom to somehow stop being human in the process. We put people on pedestals and then become disappointed when they fall off them.

This doesn't mean harmful behaviour should be excused because somebody calls themselves spiritual. Spirituality should never provide immunity from responsibility. If anything, recognising that we are an expression of God should call us towards our highest vibration of love and make us more conscious of how we treat one another.

But not every imperfection is evidence that somebody has nothing valuable to offer.

And then there is a harder question. What do we do with all the people we have condemned? If we believe that we are expressions of God, then surely the people we judge and condemn were made by God too. Recognising that doesn't mean removing responsibility for harm. It asks us whether accountability has to mean forgetting the divine in another person altogether. If we are trying to live from our highest vibration of love, what does love ask of us when somebody is imperfect, has made mistakes or has disappointed us?

We do this with many of the people we look up to. The people who raise us or teach us can become people we expect to know better, do better and have answers that they may still be searching for themselves. Growing older can bring the strange realisation that someone who guided us was also trying to navigate their own life at the same time. Someone can have great wisdom in one part of life and still be completely lost in another.

The problem isn't that people fail to give us perfection. Life isn't about perfection in the first place.

People can also mirror us. Sometimes what another person brings up in us shows us something about ourselves that we hadn't recognised before. What we admire can reflect something back to us, just as disappointment can force us to look at something within ourselves more closely. That doesn't make everything another person does acceptable. It means our encounters with one another can become part of how we understand ourselves.

Our role models were never meant to become the answer. This isn't about following one person, one teaching or one prescribed path. Someone else's experience can illuminate part of ours without becoming ours. People can guide us and mirror things back to us, but ultimately the journey is about finding ourselves.

We can find ourselves through living and making mistakes. We can find out what is true to us partly because we experience what isn't. Sometimes the life we thought we understood becomes chaotic and the structures we relied upon no longer hold.

This is where awakening can become messy.

We have created a polished image of spiritual awakening that doesn't always resemble the reality of it. Awakening can disturb an entire understanding of yourself. Things you once accepted can suddenly make no sense, and a life that once seemed to fit can begin to feel completely wrong.

Trauma can also become part of that disruption. Something happens that changes the way we see ourselves or the world, and suddenly the old structure doesn't work anymore. The awakening isn't the trauma itself. It can be what begins to happen when everything we previously relied upon has been shaken and we start asking questions we had never needed to ask before.

From the outside, that period can look dysfunctional. From the inside, it can feel even more so.

But what if the mess isn't evidence that the awakening has failed?

What if awakening itself can be messy?

When an old understanding of ourselves is breaking down before a new one has fully formed, there is going to be uncertainty. We may change our minds. We may realise that something we once believed no longer feels true to us. We may discover that parts of ourselves were built around expectations that were never really ours.

That process isn't going to look immaculate.

Someone doesn't need to have reached some imaginary point of completion before they can have something meaningful to share. An unfinished life doesn't automatically cancel the value of what they have experienced or understood. Sometimes seeing the humanity of somebody we admire is what finally gets us to stop following and start finding.

There is freedom in that.

We can take what resonates from somebody's wisdom without trying to become them. We can recognise when somebody has helped us and still disagree with them later. We can allow somebody to be significant in one chapter without believing they must hold the answers to every chapter that follows.

The answer keeps returning within.

That is something the Great Mother has repeatedly brought me back to. Her presence doesn't make me feel that I am supposed to become a flawless spiritual version of myself. What exactly would that even look like in this world? Quite the opposite. There is something much more truthful in being willing to see ourselves as we actually are.

We live in a world that constantly invites us to look outside ourselves. There will always be somebody willing to tell us what we should believe and how our lives should look. If we keep searching outside ourselves for the person who finally has all the answers, we can spend an entire lifetime moving further away from our own knowing.

Other people can help us enormously. They can open a door we hadn't noticed or reflect something back to us that we weren't ready to see alone. But nobody else can go inside us and discover what is true on our behalf.

That part belongs to us.

Mother Earth herself also challenges our strange obsession with perfection. Nature doesn't wait until everything is beautifully arranged before it creates again. What appears chaotic can still contain movement and change. Something can be falling apart while something else is beginning, and what looks like chaos during that process can eventually turn into something beautiful.

Our lives can be like that too.

Change is uncomfortable. Our instinct can be to put everything back the way it was simply because the old structure was familiar. But maybe it is time to embrace change rather than immediately trying to reverse it. Something that no longer fits can change into something that fits who we are now far better, and what initially feels like disruption can eventually become something more beautiful.

That doesn't make every difficult experience meaningful or every mistake secretly wonderful. It simply means that once we are standing in the middle of something, we can look within and decide what we are going to do with it.

That is where the Great Mother feels particularly relevant to me now.

She isn't standing at the end of an immaculate spiritual path waiting for me to finally become perfect enough. She is here in the middle of it, within the reality of life as it is now, including the parts that haven't been resolved yet.

So if your life feels messy at the moment, it doesn't automatically mean you have lost your way. Something may simply be changing, and something you once believed may no longer feel true to you.

We don't need somebody else's life to appear perfectly organised before we can recognise what they have to teach us, and we don't need to become a perfect version of ourselves before we can trust what we are discovering within.

Eventually, after other people have taught us and mirrored things back to us, we still have to look within.

And maybe being willing to look honestly at ourselves in the middle of the mess is far more spiritual than pretending the mess isn't there.