Category: Perfectionism

The past few weeks I’ve felt ungrounded, scattered, off.

I’ve been resisting all my regular habits.  I’ve got a case of the “don’t wanna’s”.

I don’t want to meditate, or exercise, or eat healthy, or even give myself self-compassion.

I simply want to stop feeling this way and I’ve turned to distractions for relief  (like Netflix, fried foods, my phone ) but they only leave me feeling yucky and stuck.

I’ve also turned to a subtle form of being critical of myself.  It can sound like tough love, “Come on, Jennifer, you know you’ll feel better after exercise, just do it!!”  While this can be effective for some people, for me it elicits the response, “you can’t make me” and I resist even harder.

So what do I do when I’m in a rut and I have challenging feelings that I don’t want to face?

I head to the lake.

One of the essential practices that helps me turn and hold the seemingly unbearable feelings that I sometimes don’t want to hold, is to find a space that reminds me that I can feel spacious and rooted.

Finding a space like this helps me to call on forces outside myself to help me remember and embody the fact that I am so much larger than this one experience.

I need to remember and get infused with a sense of wide-open-spaciousness and a sense of being grounded and rooted in my body.

While this is possible at any moment by calling on your own internal imagery to generate this reminder, I find that when I’m really struggling I need external support.

I need to BE somewhere spacious like at the edge of a lake, or a field, or under the sky.  I need to BE sitting on the earth with my back against a tree.

Our culture often implies that we need to be self-sufficient and source our own strength.

Sourcing our own strength is wonderful and a capacity to develop but it doesn’t mean that the capacity to find and allow resources outside of us to support us is any less valuable.

In fact, I think it powerfully reminds us of the beauty and strength of interconnection and is something that feeds my soul especially right now.

So I called upon the lake.  I sat underneath a canopy of cottonwood trees and felt the earth holding me up.  I took some moments to sit quietly and let the power of the space remind me I am more than this moment in time, more than these uncomfortable feelings and thoughts.  I let the egret standing still on the shoreline remind me to be patient and observant.  I let the power of this space with each inhale and exhale remind me that I too am spacious and grounded.

I left feeling more centered, capable, and connected.  

I’ve been a little kinder to myself and my experience since leaving the lake.

This is a practice I encourage you to take if you need the same reminder.

It’s such an essential and fundamental practice that I’ve included it in my online course: Become Your Own Best Friend: Tame Your Inner Critic and Awaken Your Authentic Self.

Our best friends offer us the space to be held in loving grounded awareness and when we cultivate self-compassion we need ways to generate that spacious, grounded feeling within.

For this month, I've unlocked Module 4- Presence Yourself: Getting Grounded and Expansive. This module is dedicated to this concept of grounded and spacious awareness.  Head to the course site HERE and on the course page click on Free Preview to take a peek and try it out for yourself.  My hope is that it offers a concrete way to generate a sense of confidence to hold whatever comes your way with more depth, ease, and space.

Hi, I am Jennifer and I am a perfectionist.

I probably will always have the propensity to aim for perfection but I am in recovery.

I had a recent experience that I want to share. I showed up to a meeting unprepared. I had agreed the week before to be the notetaker and was supposed to read our shared agreements at the designated time. I got on the skype call and was chatting away relaxed and enjoy the company of others when someone asked who had signed up for what roles and I realized one of them was me. I had totally failed to be prepared.

So I started to frantically set up the notes, adjust my screen so I could type and see everyone, and was feeling overwhelmed because my computer was being so slow and google docs was freezing on me.

As the meeting got started, and we jumped into an opening meditation, in the background of my mind I could hear that oh so familiar critical voice of mine, “Why are you so unprepared? You should have looked at what you were supposed to do? All the other women here are prepared and you don’t have your s*** together? “ ….and then the feeling of dread of the thought, “If I’m not perfect (and perfectly on top of my game) I’m letting others down and they won’t accept me and I’ll be left all alone and won’t survive” ----dramatic yes, but often our inner voices from childhood are in survival mode and still running the show.

So as this is running through the opening meditation and I’m trying to get my bearings on getting the notes set up for our call, the leader then asks for the notetaker to read the shared agreements. Well, that was the moment for me that changed everything. I did not have the notes in front of me, it would take me a moment for me to locate them while everyone waited. So I made a choice, I decided to stop beating myself up and ask for support. I shared my imperfection with the group saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t come prepared, it will take me a moment to locate the notes but if anyone has them in front of them would they be willing to read them in my stead”

So the shift from, "I’m all alone and only if I’m perfect will I be supported, cared for, and allowed to BE" shifted into a new and emerging belief, "life and others can be forgiving (especially in certain environments). I don’t have to rely only on myself and that others will honor me whether or not I am perfect or not". In fact, the modeling of imperfection was perhaps the biggest gift I could share in light of the group that we were in. Some people might have had some minor frustration but that was (theirs not mine) and no one was going to ban me from the group for this minor flaw in my performance.

This is my daily practice in my journey as a recovering perfectionist. I keep showing up as if life will support me and that I am ENOUGH in my imperfection and witness with delight all the ways that it shows up as TRUTH.

Are you a recovering perfectionist? Try this belief on for size and see how life can transform for you!!