"All my life I had regarded my need for attention as a terrible defect, an ugly lust. And yet, if I hadn't finally managed to get attention focused on me, would I have been able to rally people to protect the homeless or bring meditation to the synagogue or do any of the things I was proudest of? It was the this thing I hated most about myself that was enabling me to do good in the world, all the work I thought of as God's work. Could it be that what I had always thought of as a neurotic need, a need I had struggled against all my life, was really my divine name? What if, instead of trying to suppress what I thought of as my greatest weakness, I turned a soft eye on the way I was made? Would I, like Jacob, see that it was actually my greatest strength?
"This was the most important transformation of all, the transformation Jacob undergoes when he wrestles with the angel of God and discovers that his inclination for grasping and dissatisfaction is really his divine name: Yisrael, He struggled with God. This is the transformation we undergo when we realize that our inner darkness, the quality that we see as our ugliness, our evil, is precisely what is most meaningful about us, what is important, what is holy about us. It's just that in our unconsciousness what have come to act on it inappropriately, to cover it over with a base human inclination, and that's what we really hate.
"Each of us has a divine name. Mindfulness is the key to unlocking its secret. The term in the Talmud for mindfulness is kavanat lev, 'the directing of the heart.' Real mindfulness comes about not by an act of violence against our consciousness, not by force, not by trying to control our consciousness, but rather, by a kind of directed compassion, a softening of our awareness, a loving embrace of our lives, a soft letting be.
"What would happen if we were willing to look more deeply at the things we don't like about ourselves instead of beating ourselves up about them? Maybe, just maybe, they would turn out to be strengths and not weaknesses after all.
"Our impulses, even what seem to be our basest impulses, are divine in origin. The impulse itself is almost never a problem. The problem is that we just don't see it in the proper light, we have not become mindful of its true nature, and we act on it unconsciously and inappropriately. But the impulse itself is from God.
"What is it about ourselves that we really hate? What is it we would do anything to change? And how is the very thing we hate our divine name? How might it express our purpose in life, the reason God brought us here? This is the kind of question we might spend our whole lives wrestling with. But if we turn a soft, loving eye on the thing we can't stand about ourselves and keep it there until the thing we can't stand falls away, this wrestling will become a loving embrace and our divine name will emerge in its stead."