Have you ever experienced that moment where someone says something to you and although you’ve heard the words before, somehow this time they penetrate your thick skull and hard emotional armor?
There are times in my life when I can clearly remember the exact life changing words that someone has said to me.
Words that stopped me in my tracks – thick skull penetrated, armor dropped…..
Words that may have saved my life.
The words arrive in the cochlea of my inner ear and the thousands of sensory cells living there just sort of line up correctly to take it in and slam me with awareness.
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Enough to make things really change.
Like, BOOM!
A spiritual mentor taught me this is called a BFO – “Bright Flash of the Obvious”.
A couple months ago a friend took me by my shoulders, looked deeply into my eyes and said, “Your perfectionism is going to kill you.”.
BFO! I heard her.
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I heard it on some sort of cellular level.
I will probably be able to hear that exact sentence she spoke for the rest of my life.
Simple words put together, expressed honestly, and said at just the right time.
The perfect storm of being ready, having all those inner ear sensory cells lined up in a way that I not only actually heard the words being spoken via the auditory nerve, but actually absorbed them in some deep internal processing mechanism and realization occurred.
So when my friend said that perfectionism was going to kill me, it was like the last straw on the camel’s back because I’ve been carrying this heavy load of perfectionism for most of my life (some sort of weird strategy for survival, I’m sure) and practicing to let it go for A LONG TIME!
The process of letting go, you know?
And practice.
And surrender.
And, thus, practicing letting go of the bondage of self.
My limited understanding is that detachment more or less means doing the right thing because it needs to be done, but not being concerned about its success or failure.
I’m not sure I’ve ever just detached or let go without some painstaking work and suffering.
And I’m certainly a total novice at not being concerned about success or failure.
But I keep showing up for the process.
I keep practicing.
My experience is that the BFO’s usually come on the heels of that work and/or the need to stop suffering.
But this is what practice is all about, right? Allowing the process to inform the outcome.
My friend, Amey Matthews, the most amazing yoga sutra teacher, suggests that through practice and surrender we learn to moderate the movements of the mind so we are not subjected to their constant and fairly random movement.
She told us that when we believe that the mental activity is who we are, that gives rise to the issues we then face. For me, issues of control, which lead to suffering.
We become attached to our own mental machinations of who we are and what our worth is. We are trying so hard to create (control) some kind of outcome that we miss experiencing the process that eventually leads to whatever outcome is supposed to occur.
For me, bondage of self occurs when I am trying to create an outcome…. I get bogged down in whatever “story” I’ve created to live in. This current chapter seems to be about releasing those bonds of the mental activity around achieving perfection in order to be ok with myself, somehow validated.
But Amey also reminds us that yoga is not about improving ourselves, but about accepting the fact that we are perfect as we are and yet, understanding there is always work to do.
Or maybe we could call it inquiry to do.
We don’t just sit back and hope for the best, we practice and surrender.
It takes some faith.
If you’ve shared time in the yoga classroom with me then you are well aware that my practice is not perfect and neither am I.
But I keep showing up to inquire.
I’m willing.
Yoga practice, along with another defined spiritual practice in my life, has allowed me to come face to face with deeply held conceptions of what is right and wrong, what I think my teacher (substitute any important person here) wants, trying to be the best student (again, insert best whatever it is I am doing) in class, watching the fluctuations of my mind, noticing my deeply seated judgments about the way things should happen, how intensely critical I can be about myself, and being curious about what is happening right now.
So, for me, a BFO comes as a result of practice and most of the time, a lot of personal suffering which ultimately leads to surrender.
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I have been “working” on this character issue, or what my spiritual practice might call a character defect, for a long time in lots of varying ways and my relationship with perfectionism has been changing for quite some time.
And sometimes the weariness of holding on just becomes too much and the crap begins to fall away. The heavy perfectionism cloak really dropped from my shoulders when my friend spoke so honestly to me – “your perfectionism is going to kill you.”
In that moment I was entirely ready.
Those are awesome moments.
I call them “God” moments.
A budding sense of self compassion is growing. I’m amazed and grateful.
It’s a relief to feel like just another human walking this planet doing her very best breath by breath.
And those moments, where the clouds lift and the sun shines brightly on what it is to not only be, but also accept one’s humanness allow for some amazing new doors to open.
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I have always wanted to paint.
I have never tried because I thought I would somehow fail. You know, I wouldn’t do it perfectly.
OK, no shit Sherlock…
So there I was wasting time on facebook when I saw that my friend, Cindy Mori, had one spot left in a painting workshop at her studio.
I jumped at it.
It almost seemed like I had no choice.
I really had no idea what to expect.
Two things happened, well actually three:
- I was able to show up for something that I figured I might not be “good” at, forget about being perfect.
- I absorbed from the class a method of painting that aligns absolutely perfectly (like how I snuck that in?!) with not being perfect. In fact, I heard strong encouragement to be messy, just put paint on the paper, and allow the process to inform the outcome (ok, this would not have worked for me at some point in the near past, trust me on this!)
- I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE PROCESS of not necessarily trying to paint something I think I should paint, but to allow for the thing that needs to be painted to show up. That’s a whole different level of surrender, folks!
The painting has become another great teacher for me. It’s not about success or failure. It’s not getting bogged down in my own little mind story about me.
I feel the layers of perfectionistic attachment falling away even further as I explore this new painting journey.
For me it solidifies another yogic idea that we can only ever be in the state of attention or in the state of distraction .
When I paint, I experience a strong state of attention.
I wake up in the morning and want nothing more than to get to my easel and play with this process, allowing for even more layers of the perfectionistic cloak to drop!
I am not tied to making it anything more than it is.
It’s about allowing the process to inform the outcome!
Joseph Campbell wrote, ” We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Yes, I did some work to get to the surrender of holding so tight to the never ending job of trying to be perfect, but I am grateful to all the things that got me there, including the suffering (although I’d like that part of become more and more optional).
Mostly I am grateful for the opportunity to practice the willingness to change so that I allow myself to live on a more even playing field with every other human, so that I can be open to the experiences that I wouldn’t allow myself to have when trying to be perfect at every little thing.
Namaste’
