Seeing Perfection in Our Imperfections

[Guest guest]

Good Morning!

 

Seeing Perfection in Our Imperfections

 

Starting on my holistic journey in my 20's, I had different

motivations when seeking a whole state of living.

 

My pursuit of yoga was not only to reach ultimate longevity but was

to remain stretched and perfect all my life. The perfect specimen.

 

But as we go on practicing month after month, year after year, we

notice something we may find disturbing at first: Our bodies do not,

in fact, get endlessly better and better, upgraded year after year

like software programs. Instead, they change in cycles. Some days we

are flexible. Other days we are stiff. We pull a hamstring, and

forward bends are out for a month. We slip a disk moving into a new

apartment and can't do backbends for the rest of the year.

 

Hence, life itself--in all its glory and passion--interferes with the

perfection of our formal yoga practice. We get pregnant and give

birth. We get ill and grow old. We spend mornings fixing breakfast

for our children instead of doing Sun Salutations. We visit our aging

parents instead of going to Bali on a yoga retreat. And one day we

notice, with shock, that we can't do a yoga pose we used to be able

to do with ease. We stare at an old photograph that shows us in a

deep backbend, our hands clasping onto our ankles. And we feel a pang

of envy for the person we used to be.

 

If we look deeply at our lives, we see how our minds and our bodies,

our mates and our families, stubbornly resist our attempts to whip

them into shape. We discover that mastering Lotus pose will not

necessarily save our marriage. We notice that doing yoga doesn't mean

that we won't ever get sick or die. We may even find that as our yoga

practice makes us more sensitive to our inner experiences, we feel

more rather than less emotional pain; we become aware of grief and

longing that we didn't even know were there.

 

And so we start looking to our yoga to give us something other than

perfect bodies and charmed lives: an ability to meet whatever is true

in our bodies--and our lives--with grace, awareness, and compassion.

 

And at this point, our yoga practice really begins.

 

We come to realize that yoga is a process, not a product. Our lives

and our bodies are not golf courses, endless expanses of pruned and

sprayed green grass. Rather, they're forests, thick with underbrush,

rot, and decay, out of which new life continually grows.

 

We learn to embrace our crooked ribcage, the catch in our right

hamstring, the way our left shoulder is perpetually slightly higher

than the right. We make space in our hearts for our bouts of

depression, our tendency to procrastinate, the jumble of unmatched

socks in our dresser drawer, the unfinished novel on our hard drive.

 

And eventually, if we're lucky, we begin to see the perfection of our

imperfection. We begin to touch our lives with a kind of tenderness,

like cradling a baby bird in our cupped hands. And in doing so, we

give ourselves--and the world--a gift that is far more precious than

seeking perfection.

 

Andrew " Guruji " LMT, MT-BC, CA

Peacefulmind.com

Alternative medicine and therapies

for healing mind, body & amp; spirit!