Lifeletter 107: The Addiction to Perfection

I talk with people almost every day who want to move forward, transform, be authentic and transparent, or bring forth a new creation. But they’re not. They are not speaking up, they are not moving forward, and they are not doing what they really want to do. They are just kind of treading water. When we take a good look at what seems to be holding them back, they usually speak to me about their fear. “I feel so exposed when things don’t work out,” a woman said to me. “I don’t want to keep feeling so inadequate,” someone else said this week. “When I try to move into this new place, this new way of being, the risk feels overwhelming. I can’t deal with the anxiety.”

So all of this beautiful, creative, inspired energy gets dammed up behind a wall of fear, and has nowhere to move. I’ve certainly been here. It feels to me that a lot of the things we struggle with: depression, insomnia, worry, self-criticism, are not what we think they are at all. They are just symptoms of blocked creative energy.

If we go on believing that fear is the problem, we make fear into some kind of demon. What’s really at the heart of this is our whole relationship with fear and anxiety. And our addiction to perfection.

I was working with a woman recently who was right up against a wall with her anxiety. I’ll call her Erica. The first time we met I asked her what she had already tried. “Well,” she said, “Here we go: I’ve tried meditation, I’ve tried hypnosis, I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried medication, I’ve tried past-life regression, I’ve tried Emotional Freedom Therapy, I’ve tried yoga and deep breathing, and I’ve tried alcohol and cocaine.”

“What a great list, “I said. “How did all of those things work for you?”

“They didn’t” she said, “They worked for a while, and then they stopped working.”

“Now you know.” I said. “You don’t need a book or an expert to tell you this—you can speak from your own experience. This is the secret that most people don’t want to know: we cannot control our experience in the way we would like to. We can’t get rid of things that way. It’s not that there’s something wrong with us—it just isn’t possible. The more you try to control anxiety, the worse it gets.”

“Then what do I do?” Erica asked. She was a beautiful young woman, a singer, who wanted to be able to sing in front of people without being crippled by anxiety.

“You stay with what you already know, “I told her. “Your anxiety is not going away, and neither, obviously, is your desire to sing. So you have one possibility before you: learn how to get up in front of these people, and be with your fear. Change the demand that you are carrying, the part of you that says I have to be in a perfect state before I do what I really want to do. You’ll wait forever if you believe that.”

We spent a few months together, working with her willingness to be with her anxiety, not to push it away, but to welcome it, and allow it to move, flow and vibrate as she sang. Again and again she bumped up against a place of hopelessness in relation to her anxiety, a feeling that she should really be able to control this thing, get a handle on her fear. She wanted to show up without her fear, so she could feel perfect.

Whenever she reached that hopeless place, we would sit there together. It was clear to me that this hopelessness was not a bad thing. It was a potent reminder that everything she had already tried had not really worked. She would encounter the hopelessness, and then move through it to a place where she was once again willing to be with her fear.

I noticed how much easier it was for me to work with her whenever she remembered that controlling and managing her own experience had not helped at all. I started to feel this living, breathing energy emerging through the hopelessness. It was as if some part of her was unfolding, some aspect of her being that was truly willing to be with herself, just as she was, without fighting and struggling to get rid of anything.

Along with this rising energy, I noticed a lot more kindness, tenderness in the way she was relating to herself. Whenever we are focused on changing what we feel, there is a basic antagonism in the whole field of our energy, because we are at war with our own experience. For Erica, anxiety had been the enemy for a long time. Now she was learning how to welcome it, in spite of everything her conditioned mind was trained to do.

I started to experience this hopelessness as something creative, authentic and empowering. It’s an edge that we all meet, in our learning and evolution—a place we normally want to avoid. But until I can really see what is not working, until I can allow myself to feel the cost of what I have been unsuccessfully trying to do, I’ll keep on doing what I’ve always done.

When Erica finally gave her performance, it was the best one of her life. She spoke of what is was like to be up there in front of a group of people, knowing that she could be fully present and sing from her heart, without having to make the fear disappear. Without having to be perfect.

When we start to recognize in our bones, in our hearts and bodies, that we can never be perfect, then we don’t have to believe that there are these enemies within us. We can pull out the white flag and wave it, we can release our ongoing need to fight and struggle and judge. We actually start to trust the healing, liberating power of presence. We discover what it is to be open-hearted, in relation to ourselves, and in relation to life.

If I am willing, even just a bit, to give up my addiction to perfection, another way is possible. A way of gentleness, non-violence and deep friendliness.

When I was much younger, living in an ashram in the Himalayas, I put myself through all sorts of austerities and self-torture in the name of awakening and healing. I had an idea of spiritual perfection that had nothing to do with reality. The violence that this idea created went on for years and years. I probably would have slept on a bed of nails, if I could have found one.

After many, many years of this, I encountered a great deal of hopelessness and defeat. And I realized there was another approach. In those days I called it “the soft way.” I didn’t really know what it was, but I could feel it calling to me. I couldn’t open to it for a long time. It took a lot of defeat and hopelessness before I could really enter the soft way. It stills feels like a miracle to me, after so many years of the hard way. I’m so grateful that I discovered this way, even though it took me most of my life. Some of us are slow learners. I’ve had students and clients who were much quicker than I was to fall into the soft way.

Of course we still slip back into believing that we have to be perfect. Our whole culture runs on strategies of struggle and control and needing to get it right. Knowing that I will fall back into old ways of being is part of the new way, the soft way. I am not expecting perfection. I don’t have to get it right. I know I will be taken over by old patterning, and in the very moment that I recognize what has happened, grace has entered the field. There is space for something to bloom in me, to flower, that is natural and full of beauty. In that moment, the possibility is born again: to remember the truth — I am not perfect, I am not in control, and all of my power and freedom lies with my willingness to be with what is.

with love

Shayla