Making Peace With Perfection

Our culture's obsession with excellence keeps us toiling under the tyranny of perfectionism. Yet perfection itself is not the tyrant—it's our notions about it that rule us.

By Sally Kempton

Karen is a perfectionist. She's been a perfectionist all her life, she tells me with her slightly apologetic laugh. She works as a copy editor at a publishing house, and she sometimes goes over a manuscript 10 times to make absolutely sure she's caught every mistake. Her authors can't believe the things she catches-nor her habit of waking them first thing in the morning with anxious questions about the tenses in paragraph six on page 29.

Karen took up meditation to relax and reduce some of her anxiety. But meditation, it seems, brings up its own anxieties. In such a subtle practice, she wants to know, How can I ever be sure I'm doing it exactly right?

It's easy for me to recognize Karen's dilemma, being a recovering perfectionist myself. As a young journalist in New York, I used to rewrite my lead paragraphs over and over, looking for the perfect arrangement of sentences. In my early years of practice, I spent hours worrying about such an arcane issue as whether I could attain enlightenment sitting in Half Lotus instead of in the full posture. So I know something about the tyranny of perfectionism. I have seen the way it can creep into everything we do, replacing relaxation with anxiety and satisfaction with discontent, so that in the process of trying to make something better we actually destroy what we are trying to improve. As spiritual practitioners, we're supposed to know better. We're supposed to know that true perfection isn't something we achieve. It's a state that arises unbidden-a sense of fullness and unity that comes from the heart.

I was 10 years old when I had my first glimpse of what I call "real" perfection. It arrived in my backyard, quite unexpectedly, during a hot game of Capture the Flag. As I was running down the field, my sights on the flag, my heart suddenly exploded with pure happiness. It wasn't just excitement or the thrill of hard play. I had entered another zone of being. Everything I saw and sensed was part of a great field of fullness and joy that was also part of me. I contained everything I could ever want or need. This sense of abundance and unity arose out of nowhere. It came from the heart, but how had it come? What had I done to get there? How could I keep it?

I've experienced this state of fullness many times since then. It's for the sake of this feeling that I practice meditation and yoga, though even after all this time, it isn't something I can "make" happen. These days, people call this state "flow" or "the zone" because when you're in it, action is effortless and always unerring. You can't make a mistake. You can't dislike anyone or feel alien from anything. If someone asks a question, you know the right answer. You are perfectly content to be wherever you are. Even if something painful or sad happens, the feeling of perfection isn't destroyed.

In Sanskrit, one of the words for perfection is purna, usually translated as fullness or wholeness. Indian yogic texts tell us that everything in this world arises from and is contained inside one single energy, or shakti. This energy is always full, intrinsically complete, perfect, and joyful. What's more, it is present in all forms, thoughts, and states of being. That one energy is as much in the dirty dishes in your sink as in the notes of a Mozart violin concerto or the violet eyes of 19-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. When we are in touch with that energy, all dichotomies—light and dark, good and bad, male and female—are resolved, and all apparent imperfections are revealed as part of the whole. To celebrate this amazing fact, in India, a "fullness" mantra is frequently sung after auspicious events. Translated into English, it's "That is perfect. This is perfect. From the perfect springs the perfect. If the perfect is taken from the perfect, the perfect remains."

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

See All News & Trends Articles »