I am thinking back over the love yourself challenge, and about perfection. Today I planned a strong physical practice to start my day–badly wanted to wake and move for 90 minutes of asana. But waking, a recurring hip problem had flared up, making it possible to put only partial weight on my left leg. The internal voices started right away: “Don’t be lazy–push through.” “Why, body, are you failing me?” “I am healthy and strong–this shouldn’t be a problem.” And not least–“I hate feeling old.” It was a hamster wheel of self-criticisms and chides I spun round and round with for 30 minutes. I made myself stop and opened the 30-day cleanse guide I began in February during our love yourself challenge and found that day 27, this day, was for restorative yoga, with blocks and a blanket and a wall. It even included a loving kindness meditation. Ok, I thought, I can do this. And I need this.
As I lay in the final pose–after 35 minutes of restorative chest, back and hip openers–with my legs up the wall and my lower back supported by a block, I was washed suddenly with complete gratitude. I felt gratitude for my patient, supportive husband and my goofy children; for a family who cares if I show up; for students who come to learn and grow and for teachers who continue to offer all they have. Finally, there were no voices. The hamster wheel had stopped spinning. All that was left was pure, sweet gratitude and total body relaxation.
Loving and nourishing myself is a challenge on many days. I forget that to be nourished means that I don’t run dry and become distracted, frustrated, spent. Or rather, I don’t forget that truth ever; I forget to live it. In wanting to make everything around me, including myself, perfect, I stop taking care of nourishing myself. Poet Donna Faulds wrote, “Perfection is the prerequisite for only pain.” Ah yes, the pain of not enough. Tara Brach, author and meditation teacher, writes that we spend much time living in a “space suit” that separates us from our true nature and keeps us caught in a trance where fear and shame are more prevalent emotions than love and connection. In this way, we live with the idea that “something is wrong with me.” She writes “Over time, we will recognize trance more quickly when we get lost in it, and we will know that blaming ourselves–or others or the world–or striving for control or perfection is not the way out. Rather, the suffering of trance reminds us to come home into this moment and reconnect with the larger truth of what we are. The experience of waking up to our true self can be hard to describe. As the Indian teacher Sri Nisargadatta says: ‘On realization you feel complete, fulfilled, free…and yet not always able to explain what happened…You can put it only in negative terms: Nothing is wrong with me any longer.'”
Today, after this respite, I taste a bit of freedom, like I’ve peeled off the space suit for a time and nothing is wrong with me any longer at all. Instead, I notice the sweet juiciness of an orange trickling over my hand; the shiny gleam in my sons eyes as he laughs at his sister’s popsicle crusted nose; the student whose back hurts but looks so beautiful and strong in downward facing dog. Not perfect, but nourishment all. I just had to pause long enough to notice and love what life was offering me.