Project Creative Vision

Finding Antidotes to Perfectionism in Joy, Delight, Faith and Surrender

Every summer I go to Vermont for a yoga retreat with my wonderful teacher Peentz Dubble. It has become a time of renewal for me and a place to reconnect with old friends and fellow yoga practitioners.  It has also become something of a touchstone for me, as I carry the energy of the retreat and the intention I set for myself there throughout the rest of the year.

This year, though, as I was preparing for my pilgrimage to Vermont, I realized that, in a strange way, the retreats have also, in the past, been somewhat stressful for me.

I practice the Iyengar style of yoga, which is a style that's characterized by precision and extreme attention to alignment.  Because of that, I can become so focused on technicalities that I lose the playfulness and joy that is inherent in every pose and the practice generally. 

But I knew, of course, that the real reason for the stress was my particular attitude toward my practice.  I myself had made it stressful by allowing the practice to bring out the perfectionist in me.  For a perfectionist, an Iyengar retreat, with 7 hours of yoga a day, can be at once, well, perfect, because there is no end to perfecting each pose, and a challenge, because there really isn't such a thing as a perfectly-executed yoga pose.

But if you fail to challenge your perfectionist tendencies, you’re in for a boot camp, rather than relaxation and renewal.  In a concentrated form, done from the ego-mind, yoga can lead to sore muscles and mental tumult, rather than peace and equanimity.  You can end up having very little enjoyment and a whole lot of stress.

So this year, I set myself an intention to go only so far with my technical dedication and to focus instead on enjoying the beauty of each pose just as it was, with all of the imperfections I would bring to it. I decided to challenge and surrender my perfectionist tendencies (which tend to get exacerbated when I'm surrounded by other students) and find joy and delight in whatever form my pose assumed.

Feeling Our Life, Finding Our Life's Work

My amazing coach Hillary Harris forwarded me this short article from DailyOM the other day, and I'm reprinting it here with DailyOM's expressed permission.

Rather than highlighting what I found important in it, just read on - every sentence is a pearl of wisdom.

Feeling Our Life, Finding Our Life’s Work
(© 2004-08 DailyOM - All Rights Reserved
Sometimes it takes us the better part of a lifetime to discover our life’s work, even though we may have been doing it our whole lives without necessarily realizing it. Our life’s work is not always what we do to make money, although we often think it should be, and sometimes this way of thinking prevents us from seeing clearly what it is. It may be the work of having children, caring for them, and running a household. The way we know our life’s work is by how we feel when we are doing it.

When we are doing our life’s work, we feel an uncanny sense of ease and alignment. This doesn’t mean that the work is always easy, and it doesn’t mean that it’s the only work we have to do; it just means that there is a conviction deep inside us that tells us we are in tune with our innermost self. When we are engaged in our life’s work, our bodies feel more alive, because our energy is devoted to a cause that, in turn, feeds us. We may be tired after engaging in our life’s work, but we are almost never depleted. We feel grounded in the world, knowing that we belong here and have something important to offer.

When we are deeply unhappy, depressed, or subject to one illness after another, this may be due to a sense of disconnection from our life’s work. At times like these, finding the work we are meant to do is an essential act of healing. Most of us remember a time when we felt fully engaged in some act of work, service or creativity, and it is here that we may rediscover the work we are meant to do now. On the other hand, it may be time to explore what inspires us through volunteering, taking a class, going back to school, or just doing whatever it is we long to try. We all have callings, and when we find them, we owe it to ourselves to nurture and protect them, because while they may or may not be our livelihood, they are the keys to our well-being.

(Reprinted from DailyOM - Inspirational thoughts for a happy, healthy and fulfilling day. Register for free at www.dailyom.com.)