Tara Brach - Relating Wisely with Imperfection (2015-10-28)

Episode Date: October 30, 2015

Relating Wisely with Imperfection (2015-10-28) - Our survival brain reacts to perceived imperfection with aversion and anxiety, and if we are habituated to this reaction, we become imprisoned in the identity of a flawed separate self. This talk explores the healing and transformation that is possible as we learn to regard imperfection with mindfulness and compassion. Free download of Tara’s new 10 min meditation: “Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease” when you join her email list.

Greetings. I'm Tara Brock and I'd like to welcome you to these podcasts. While the talks and meditations are offered freely, we'd very much appreciate your support. To make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org. Thank you. Namaste and welcome. I'd like to start this talk with a reading from author and teacher, Zen teacher Ed Brown, who's also known as being a great cook at the Tasahara restaurant. And he says, when I first started cooking at Tasahara,

I had a problem. I couldn't get my biscuits to come out the way they were supposed to. I'd follow the recipe and try variations, but nothing worked. These biscuits just didn't measure up. Growing up, I had made two kinds of biscuits. One was from Bisquick, and the other was from Pelsbury. For the Bisquick biscuits, you added milk to the mix, then you blob the dough and spoonfuls on the pan.

you didn't even need to roll them out. The biscuits from Pelsbury came in a kind of cardboard can. You wrapped the can on the corner of the counter and it popped open. Remember those? Then you twisted the can open more and the pre-made biscuits on the pan. They baked and that was it. I like those Pelsbury biscuits. Isn't that what biscuits should taste like?

Mine just weren't coming out right. It's wonderful and amazing. The ideas we get about what biscuits should taste like or what a life should look like. compared to what? Can biscuits from Pillsbury? Leave it to beaver. People who ate my biscuits

could extol their virtues, eating one after another, but to me these perfectly good biscuits weren't just right. Finally, one day came a shifting into place, an awakening. Not right compared to what? Oh my word, I'd been trying to make canned Pelsbury biscuits.

Then came an exquisite moment of actually tasting my business. without comparing them to some previously hidden standard. They were weedy, flaky, buttery, sunny, earthy reel, as Rolka's sonnet proclaims. They were incomparably alive, present, vibrant, in fact, much more satisfying than any memory. These occasions can be so stunning, so liberating, these moments when you realize your life is fine as it is, thank you. Only the insidious comparison to a beautifully prepared, beautifully packaged product,

made it seem insufficient. Trying to produce a biscuit, a life with no dirty bowls, no messy feelings, no depression, no anger, was so frustrating. Then savoring, actually tasting

the present moment of experience, how much more complex and multifaceted, how unfathomable, a thought, a feeling, ants crawling on the ground in sunlight. As Zen students, we were spending years

trying to make it look right, trying to cover the faults, conceal the messes. We knew what the biz-quick Zen student looked like, calm, buoyant, cheerful, energetic, deep, profound. Our motto, as one of my friends said, was, looking good. We've all done it. We've all tried to look good as husband, wife, or parent,

trying to attain perfection, trying to make Pillsbury biscuits. Well, to heck with it, I say, wake up and smell the coffee. How about some good old home cooking, the biscuits of today. Handle each ingredient with sincerity and wholeheartedness. The results will take care of themselves.

Savor them. This is very close to the meaning of one of the great Zen teachings, which is that to be free, to truly be free, means to be without anxiety about imperfection. Imagine for a moment. Just for a moment, reflect. yourself, what would it be like if you knew all the flaws and the conditioning and the stuff of your life but you truly were not anxious about it? There wasn't an aversive add-on,

this is bad, it should be different. I mean can you just for a moment glimmer what it would be like to be without anxiety about imperfection? Because if you can even get a glimmer, that's that taste of freedom that's really possible on our path of waking up. So this particular talk and reflection will be how to evolve ourselves to this freedom. And really we'll be asking ourselves, how do I relate to imperfection, to what I perceive in myself or others? What's my reaction? And how can we evolve ourselves from a kind of reactivity that makes things wrong or bad to holding this natural humanness in a way that actually frees us to keep waking up. What does it really mean to be without anxiety about

imperfection? So I was on a radio interview last Monday and the theme was transformational leadership and I was speaking about the grip, the suffocating grip of our shoulds and expectations and how we're always comparing ourselves to some ideal or standard, feeling that gap and then feeling bad about ourselves. And the inquiry, the interviewer brought up, is something that I've encountered over and over again as I've been teaching about radical acceptance, because this is a form of radical acceptance. And what she said was, well, what would happen? She said, if we put aside all our shoulds and our judgments and our anxieties and our aversion about ourselves, maybe we would stop improving. Maybe we wouldn't become the people we wanted to be if we put

aside the shoulds and the anxiety. So the idea is, I may be all lazy, fair and at ease about my biscuits, but what if they're, you know, filled with their GMOs, there's gluten in them or sugar or this or that, you know, is it really wise to not be anxious about that stuff? So, question to you, right, this moment is, how many of you have kind of sensed, hey, I kind of need to hold on to those judgments, even the aversion, or I might not improve? How many has that occurred to? Yeah. So, I say that, because this is an important point.

You know, it's really nice to talk about accepting ourselves and loving ourselves just as we are. But we have very, very deep programming to hold on to our anxiety and judgment about how we are. And most of us have a sense that if we let it go, something worse could happen. So we hold on to the shoulds and the blaming and the shaming of ourselves because we're looking at these addictive behaviors and thinking, it's not going to go away if I go get easy on myself. Or we might look at how we really aren't being successful in the way that we had dreamed. Or we might look at how we're falling short as a parent and thinking, you know, I'm going to ride myself for this.

I don't want to hurt other people. So we're afraid we won't change if we let go of our anxiety and our judgment. And so there's a part of us, a wisdom part of us, that intuit that there are other ways to keep inspiring ourselves to grow, right? Just nod your head if you're with me on that. There's part of us that knows that, but our emotional self doesn't. doesn't want to take the chance. It's like we already have our strategy for how we try to make ourselves a better person. And even though if we look at it close up we can see all the problems

with it, we're hooked on it. From a developmental perspective, aversive judgment, anxiety, that whole cluster is driven by our limbic brain. It's our emotional survival system. So it's our primary tool of the ego to try to control ourselves so that we get what we need and we protect ourselves and defend ourselves. And it works enough so we are hooked on the strategy. And you have to keep doing it in order for it to keep working some. In other words, if our way to try to keep ourselves in line and minimize bad habits and on, is to keep judging ourselves and being angry at ourselves or shaming ourselves.

Then we have to keep doing it because there's the next day that we have to deal with, the next potential failure around the corner. So it's the primary tool of the egoic self and it keeps reaffirming a deficient, problematic egoic self. It keeps us in a very small identity as long as we're using the strategy of anxiety about imperfection. At the core of that strategy is what I've often called the trance of unworthiness. It's that core sense of inadequacy. And we know, even though we're hooked on the strategy of trying to prove ourselves and do better, we know that no amount of accomplishment can

ever assuage the trance of unworthiness. As soon as we've accomplished something, we might have a few minutes of, you know, some biochemistry that gives us a sense of buoyancy, but then we have the next thing that we have to prove. So we know it doesn't work, but we're hooked. So there's some, in addition to it doesn't work, there's some ways that there's profound suffering with the anxiety about imperfection. And one of them is that it creates huge tension around making mistakes. Now, if you listen to anybody that's a good thing, that's a creative artist or that has been innovative in their life, had breakthroughs, it has to come from making mistakes. You have to take risk, you have to play an edge, you have to fumble to

learn from things so you can grow. And yet when we are really anxious about imperfection, we get very, very tight about making mistakes. So we miss out on the lot. I remember my son, Narayan when he was in grammar school and he was not so confident in himself and he would never try out a sport or a hobby that he wasn't pretty sure he'd be very good at. So that meant he didn't try out a lot of things. And as I said, it's the willingness to make mistakes that actually builds our capacities. So I used to read him things to kind of encourage him to sense mistakes as totally fine and cool. And I'm going to read you something that's kind of in that genre. And it says, thank God for church secretaries with old-fashioned typewriters, because this is what actually

appeared in church bulletins. So these were announced in church services. The sermon this morning, Jesus walks on water. The sermon tonight, searching for Jesus. Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don't forget to bring your husbands. A race and bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow. You get it? The women of the church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon. This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar. This is at a spiritualist church announcement. The regular meeting of the Clarivoyance Society will not take place.

this month due to unforeseen circumstances. Let's see if there's any others. The low self-esteem support group will meet Thursday at 7 p.m. Please use the back door. Anyway, you get the idea. So we're really exploring the suffering of mistrusting ourselves, of being anxious about imperfection, that it becomes not okay to make mistakes,

which rules out a lot of humor and creativity and adventure in our life. Also, when we're mistrusting ourselves and letting it not be okay to be imperfect, we absolutely have that same view of others. We have very little tolerance for others and we don't allow others to be themselves. To the degree we mistrust ourselves, we don't trust others. And so that judgment imprisons ourselves and others in this kind of flawed identity. I want to read you something that was at the beginning of a book called The Threat of Grace. It starts with the story of an Austrian woman named Clara.

She's made pregnant by her married uncle who, when his wife dies, he marries her. All of Clara's children die soon after birth. Finally, the fourth child lives but is sickly. She nurses this child for two years obsessively. He tried to get away from the nipple. She forces it as if that might be what makes him live. She's also obsessive about having a spotless house. And she lived in fear of her husband's beatings.

Her son's exceedingly fearful as an adult. He's a vegetarian, afraid of microbes, of germs, of dirt, felt the blood in his veins was dangerous, would bring about defects, feeble-mindedness. afraid of gossip about his incestuous family. Okay, this is the anxiety about imperfection. He never had children, afraid of tainted blood. He was terrified of cancer, which took his mother's life,

horrified that he had suckled that diseased breasts. He was afraid of moonlight and horses, of snow, water, and dark, of judges, Americans, old men, and poets. How could anyone live with so much fear? Seized on one all-encompassing explanation for the existence of sin and disease and for his failures and disappointments. There was no weakness in his parents, in his blood, in his mind. He was faultless.

Others were felfth. He could not change his china blue eyes, but he could hang the world they saw. He would identify the secret source of every evil and rooted out. He'd free Europe of pollution and defilement. Only health and purity would remain. Are such grim and comic fact significant? or merely interesting. Here's another. The doctor who could not cure Clara Hitler's cancer was Jewish, a threat of grace by Mary Russell. There's violence when we get hooked on that anxiety

about imperfection. We violate ourselves and we violate others. Different degrees. That's extreme, but there's violence to it. So, again, from the an evolutionary perspective, developmentally, it's natural that we would experience imperfection and vulnerability. Creatures in herds that run with herds, the ones that are the weakest on the outline, they're nervous, they're anxious. We don't want to be vulnerable. That's really natural. It's natural that when we're not facing life and death, the default of the mind is to compare with others in a sense our ranking. since higher or lower, we are herd animals.

And because there's always somebody somewhere that's better, we always have that sense of not enough, not good enough. So that's all natural. It's natural that we're anxious about imperfection. And we have the capacity in our more recently evolved brain in the frontal cortex to recognize that and wake up from that trance and regard that imperfection

in a healing and freeing way. because that's where we're going with this. The big inquiry is how do you relate to imperfection, to the natural flaws, the natural conditioning of being human? Are we stuck in a kind of egoic level of being anxious about it, judging it, being aversive to it? Can we begin to wake up out of that? And I'd like to explore a bit,

how do we unhook from the egoic? strategy of judging imperfection. And what we're going to explore is how we can interrupt that strategy, because we all have it to some degree. Most everybody I've met gets hooked in feeling bad about themselves or judging others, aversion, anxiety towards imperfection. We interrupt by pausing when we notice it. We interrupt by deepening our attention

and instead of being hooked inside the judgment anxiety, noticing it with mindfulness and compassion. Now, I want to note here that within the egoic level of judging imperfection, being aversive to it, there's a buried intelligence, that the fear and the anger we might experience towards ourselves for our imperfection, They have an intelligence and the intelligence is saying, hey, I'm not aligned with my potential. The intelligence is saying, hey, there's an obstruction to me completely being who I can be.

So we're not trying to get rid of emotion. We're trying to be able to let that intelligence guide us but not being possessed by the narrowness of the emotion that says, I am bad. Does that make sense? We'll keep going a little and see if, how it sits for you. So an example would be, let's say you have a habit of procrastination

and you're facing a deadline. The egoic response to that would be this is a problem, I'm wrong, I'm bad, this is going to have bad consequences, getting down on myself, fear of failure amplifies, there's some movement of wanting to go get things done and meet the deadline,

but then the fear part is aggravated, my nervous system so I'm kind of frozen, so that's that push-pull, and then the result is, well, either freezing and missing deadlines and having to cover for ourselves, the strategy works partly and we managed to do it, but we're so tense that it doesn't come out of our deepest intelligence. It's not as good a job as could then. And the whole process has reinforced the trance of I'm a deficient person and I need to be anxious in order to get anything done. Okay, that's the egoic approach. Now here's the more evolved approach would be okay, so you have a deadline and you have this habit of procrastination.

To see all that in pause and say okay, here's the situation, habit that's causing potential suffering. So you kind of put a frame around that and then you pause more. And then you pause more and deepen attention. What's under the procrastination? Can you just be with the fear that's hard to jump in? What is that? Being with that fear. What's under the self-aversion?

Oh, the fear of failure. To begin to bring mindfulness to that, kindness to that. And in those moments of coming into our senses, of pausing, of seeing clearly what's happening, of kindness, there's increased presence. rather than being the victim who's the bad person who's procrastinating and the judge of that bad person, we've enlarged our sense of who we are and there's more of a witness, there's more access to intelligence, there's more compassion, there's more of a chance to operate differently, to have a different pathway. So that's the power of interrupting the pattern with mindfulness

rather than going the old strategy of using self-aversion. It says Carl Rogers said, it wasn't until I accepted myself just as I was, that I was free to change. Interrupting the pattern of anxiety about imperfection, putting ourselves down for imperfection, interrupting that with an accepting mindfulness is the precursor to transformation.

So, I can describe, this also in terms of really looking at social activism because the same question has come to me. You know, if I am not anxious about imperfection, if I don't look at the world's problems with anger or anxiety,

will I ever be motivated to do anything? How many of you have thought about that when it comes to questions of acceptance? Will I be passive? Okay. So about five years ago, I started getting together with a community, a mixed-race community, small group of 15 of us to look at issues of racial injustice.

And it was really to personally get to know, well, what's it really like to be you? That kind of looking into the suffering. And then more recently, I've been involved with a white awareness group that just actually ended to, again, heighten our awareness of our own implicit bias, to be able to really sense, well, how much. am I participating unconsciously in a system of white privilege, to be able to actually look and see the inequities that we weren't seeing how there really is not fair and equal access to education, two jobs, to justice. Some of you might have read the two articles all in the last

week about how African Americans are much, much more likely when driving to be stopped and arrested and more likely as pedestrians to be hit. How many of you saw those two articles? Can I say, yeah. This is not an equitable world and yet it's very easy to be blind to it. So we were in these groups to just what we're talking about to look at societal dis-ease and imperfection. And the big inquiry really was, and how are we reacting to this? And I can say honestly that at the beginning five years ago in this multi-race group. The white people in the group reacted a lot with a sense of, I'm bad. I was part of the race that kidnapped people from their continent and subsequently has really caused enormous amount of oppression and suffering. I feel guilty.

And whatever I say here, I better be very careful so I don't say anything incorrect. This is called white guilt, white fragility. So that was very prominent at the beginning. We were relating to imperfection from a place of anxiety and self-aversion. Over time, there began to be a little bit of an interrupt of that patterning with mindfulness, especially in our recent work in the white awareness group. Now, this is all still in process. I'm not giving you a story that has a, we're at the end of it now and everybody's wide awake and evolved and living in, you know, pure consciousness. But what happened was we started noticing more and more that that guilt wasn't serving, that self-aversion wasn't serving, that we're all conditioned. We didn't sign on, but that doesn't

mean we're not responsible. But it was when we could wake up out of the guilt and just care and grieve and want things to be different because we, it matters. matters, it was that, the mindfulness process that allowed us to then have our conversations and have our actions come not out of guilt but more and more out of care. That's just an example because what's called engaged spirituality and I feel like it's essential for transforming our earth, what it means is that we have to take action. If we're spiritual people, that means we care about suffering and we take action. But it needs to be done from a different consciousness than the suffering was created out of.

It can't come from the same anxiety, fear, and therefore violence that we're trying to change. So how do we shift from the egoic self that's aversive towards imperfection, afraid of it, to that wider sense of consciousness, that deeper sense of consciousness? And the first step in each of our lives is to start exactly where we are, to be able to notice, well, where are my life, am I getting hooked? Where am I in some way feeling like I'm falling short, I'm not enough, whether it's in parenting with a partner at work, with our bodies, the way our bodies look, with addictions? Where am I falling short in my mind and locked into an egoic sense?

of being insufficient and separate and small. Where is that happening? We start there, and that's exactly where we bring our attention to if we want to wake up out of this patterning. So I'm going to give you a story of one man's process with this that touched me, the way it unfolded that I found very, very useful. And actually the story I'm going to give you is not a man. This is a woman.

I said, man, because I had the word actor, and it's such an old-fashioned thing to say actor, male. This is a woman. We were doing some phone mentoring. She had practiced meditation for quite a while, and she wanted to deal with the stress of how to... The fear of failure, and it was always there for her. Afraid, I'm not going to audition well.

Afraid the public won't like the performance. Afraid others are going to get to work with the best producers or have better publicity. So comparing mind, and it was really, really thick. So when I asked her, well, when would you feel like you were finally good enough that you could drop that? And she basically said never, because even when one project's done, I have to get the next project and I have to do well on it and keep reproving my worthiness.

So there's this kind of obsession with self-promo and how well she was doing. and she fixated on her weaknesses that she needed to improve her singing voice that she felt a little overweight that she didn't have as fleshed out experience in comedic roles and, you know, it wasn't as articulate interviews as some others and now it was, I'm failing as a partner and I wouldn't be a good mother

because I'm so obsessed with myself. So that was a starting point. That was anxiety about imperfection. And so I asked, to the question, you know, what would happen if you let go of the judgment? You know, what would happen if you weren't so fixated and anxious? Much like I asked you earlier, and she said, I'd never improve. It's the only way I'm ever going to improve is if I stay on my case. Now, part of her knew that wasn't the truth, but that's how she was feeling. But because it

was affecting everything, including her relationship and her capacity to enjoy her life, she said, my wise self knows that I don't need to live this way. It's just really hard to unhook. So I asked her if she was willing to dedicate a month. And the reason I said a month is because, as many of you know, and a lot more research has come out about this, that to change a habit pattern, if you really give yourself a month,

you can begin to shift it significantly. So I thought we'd start with a month. and I said, let's have you for this next month dedicated to being without anxiety about your career. I was going to give her some tools, but the intention is to let go of that second arrow of, okay, so here's how things are going, and the second arrow is condemning how things are going.

And I told her that if her imperfections got worse, I promised her that she could go back to her judging. I gave her total permission at the end of the month. it doesn't work, you can go back to judging. And here's how we walked through it. I'm going to have you walk through it in the same way. I'm going to have you, and you might start thinking of this, choose where you know you get hooked on reacting to imperfection.

You've probably already been figuring out your areas. So for her, I said, you know, come up with a situation where you just locked into judging yourself, really aversive, because it either takes the form of anxiety or aversion usually. Okay. Our anger is another form. And she said it was very easy because the night before bed she had had two big bowls of cereal and milk, which is one of her kind of binge foods.

And it made her feel weak-willed and bad. So she, so then I said, okay, now just put a framer in that and name that. You know, this is anxiety about imperfection or aversion. towards imperfection. And then I said, remember that you're not alone. Because here's the deal. Every one of us has the same conditioning towards grasping and aversion,

and we have genetic tendencies and cultural tendencies towards what we call imperfectness. Every one of us is dealing with it. So I said, just remember you're not alone. So that's step one, just name, okay? this is the suffering of anxiety about imperfection. And then the next step was to agree to feel it. Feel what it's like in your body.

So she went inside and under the feeling of, you know, I blew it and I'm bad and I'm weak, well, to shame. She just felt really embarrassed and ashamed of herself for not being in control, basic sense of being flawed. So I invite her to breathe with that, to feel exactly how it's, feels to be caught in shame and the fear that she wouldn't be able to get things under control.

And I asked her to sense how much of her life she was living with that and how much it affected her life. And that's when she had what I sometimes call the ouch experience when we really get, oh, I'm living with this clutch, this ache and it's, I'm moving around the world with it and it's affecting my capacity to enjoy or be intimate. And so for her, I said, just acknowledge this is suffering, that this hurts. And that was her language. She said, this hurts. Okay? Again, step one, you come up with your situation and you just say, okay, anxiety about imperfection. Step two, you really feel it, what's going on in your body, feel that it hurts. Step three, I asked her to call on that wise self and sense how she wanted to respond to the part

of her that was suffering. How do you want to respond to the place of her that was suffering? How do you want to respond to the place in you that feels ashamed about imperfection, that feels anxious. And her response is, I want to hold her like a child, tell her to trust herself and that it's okay to relax, that she's okay. So I said, okay, so do that, go ahead. And, you know, just internally, just sense that your wise self is holding her, sense that your wise self is giving her that message, trust yourself, it's okay, you can relax. And she did that and I could see viscerally, I could just sense that, you know, there was a lot more space and I said, now notice what's happening and be aware of that and she goes, yeah, there's more space

I feel more at ease, I'm more kind. So then the last piece, I said, what would your life be like if you trusted who you were? If you were imperfect but it was really okay. It was okay to be imperfect. You could trust your essence. I said, who would you be then? And she, first thing she said, she opened her eyes and there was a twinkle and she said, at least I'd be a good mother then.

Which is true, because if you can hold your inner child, you're going to be a good mother. Then she closed her eyes and she started whispering, you know, like, this is the question, who would you be if you were without anxiety about imperfection? And I'm going to ask each of you that. And for her, she started whispering, she said, I'd be naturally creative, I'd be loving and I'd be free. So I'm just going to name those steps again. And these are not, this is not a new sequence of steps that you've never heard before

if you've been listening to the podcast or here. These are really the steps of bringing a mindful, compassionate attention to where we're stuck, that we recognize and name it. Okay, this is anxiety about imperfection. And remember if a seventh century's end, master talked about it, that means you really aren't alone, okay? All right. So that's step one. You just name, this is what's going on, recognize it. And then step two, allow yourself to feel how it's living in your body.

Because there's a clench and a pain and an ache and a sense of loss because you can't live so fully. And if you can feel that out, if you can get it, this hurts. It hurts to live with anxiety about imperfection. If you can get that, then you can kind of call on that wiser place in you, call on the more compassionate place in the sense how it wants to be in relationship to that suffering place. And generally there'll be some version of kindness, some message. Often for me it's placing my hands in my heart and sending a message because it's so powerful and there's been a lot of research about it. the power of just gently having warmth and pressure at the heart center.

And sending a message to yourself, it's soothing. And the last part is then to, and this is where it takes some intuition and inquiry, who would I be if I wasn't living in this old egoic strategy? Who would I be without anxiety about imperfection? Let's check us out. Let me, I'm going to have you walk through it. We don't have that much time, but just get a time. taste of it and then you can practice more on your own. And Carl Rogers, it wasn't until I accepted

myself as I was that I was free to change. So we're exploring how do we wake up out of that trance of feeling down on ourselves for imperfection, how to regard imperfection from a wiser place. and you might scan the areas where you have anxiety about imperfection or where you get aversive towards yourself. Again, it might be ways that you feel that you fall short in terms of your contribution to the world or particularly at the workplace. Might be in relationships,

ways that you get reactive, that you're not available for intimacy, you're not able to be as authentic, or vulnerable or real as you want to be. It might be an addictive behavior. It might be a very specific way you feel you're falling short with your children or with a partner. The only way that we can change a pattern

is by investigating and deepening our presence to it. So we begin with the step of just bringing to mind in a very close-up way one domain where you react with anxiety about imperfection. And you might just name it. Remember, the shaman described it if you can name a fear, it has less control over you. Just to name it.

Okay, so this is what that seventh century Zen master was talking about. And then let yourself come closer to it so that you can mindfully and directly feel what is it like when you're turned on yourself for this. What are you believing about yourself? What does it feel like in your body, in your heart? When you sense a kind of failing or failure, a bad personhood, then some way you're wrong or bad or flawed. And when you're feeling that, what happens to the ways you're relating to others? Can you sense how much it separates you from others? How when you're anxious about

imperfection, it separates you from your heart and actually from your intelligence, your full intelligence. Can you sense how this insecurity affects your work, your being with others, your ability to just enjoy moments? And you might sense how long you've been living with it, how pervasive it is, and just to acknowledge this is suffering, this hurts. Just as anyone that was bearing witness, the kindest grandmother, the wisest teacher, would be able to look to that place of anxiety and suffering and say, that is really painful. I'm sorry.

That's the ouch. It hurts. And if it helps you to put your hand on your heart and come into a wiser relationship with your inner life, can be very powerful, very light and tender touch. And just sense through the eyes of the most awake, evolved, why is this kindest part of your being? Just you're looking through that, why is this kindest part of your being, how you want to

respond to the place in you that has been caught in feeling deficient, the place in you that lives with insecurity or mistrust or fear. How do you want to relate to that place? Is there a message that might be healing right in this moment that comes to mind? You might go ahead and send whatever words of kindness or wisdom, feel that touch, maybe that you imagine some holding or embracing, whatever you sense is a wiser, kinder way of regarding this part of you that feels stuck. And you might sense the space and tenderness and presence that opens up as you come into

a wiser relationship with yourself. And you might ask yourself, as we've been exploring through this talk, who would you be if you weren't anxious about imperfection? Who would you be if you trusted your deep essence and really accepted the particular ways your conditioning is playing out? Who would you be? And what might your life be like if you weren't anxious about imperfection. And you might imagine in the days and weeks to come if each time you felt yourself caught in that, that you could pause and begin to really shift into a new way of relating to your inner life, one that gave a lot more options, a lot more freedom. And you can continue to listen with your eyes closed or if you'd like to with your eyes open

to this final part of our reflection, which is that as we change this egoic pattern, as we wake up to really experiencing our beingness, who we are beyond that, we can't do it alone. The programming that has us anxious about imperfection came in relationship. We were told how we were supposed to be and what was wrong with us.

And so in a way we really need others to be mirrors that help remind us of who we are and help us out of the trance. We need each other for that. And I love the part of the story of the Buddha's awakening, where Mara's the god of the shadow side, what you might call all the real imperfections and challenges we run into greed, hatred, delusion, and onward. The Buddha had woken up through the night under the Bodhi tree

as Mara challenged him over and over, and the Buddha kept meeting everything with compassion and with wisdom, the final challenge was the greatest challenge. And that challenge was doubt. Basically, Mara said, who do you think you are to deserve to really be an awakened being?

So that's doubt. That's the basic deepest anxiety about imperfection, that basically I'm flawed, I'm not okay. That was what Mara, was throwing at the Buddha. And in that moment the Buddha put out his hand and he touched the ground and called on the earth goddess, which is the whole web, living, loving web of life, to bear witness to his essential goodness. And as the myth goes, you know, the heavens, you know, blackened and everything shook, ground shook and there was lightning bolts and

so on. And it was at that moment that Mara receded and the Buddha fully awakened in trusting his essential, radiance, purity, and goodness. It was okay to have the different imperfections moving through, like waves of the ocean. He trusted his ocean-ness. And that story is a great one because it says that even the Buddha had to reach out for a larger loving energy to mirror back as goodness. And so it is with us too.

We need each other. There was one man who came from a very dysfunctional alcoholic family. Father was alcoholic, abusive. His mother was always overwhelmed and frightened. And when he was young, he was left with his grandmother a lot. So his family was chaotic. But when he was with his grandmother, he'd go and he'd start off really high-strung and upset

and have difficulty with his temper and so on with his grandmother. But she just hugged him. and she would come down and she'd say, oh look, what a strong, bright spirit, lights your eyes. Look, what a strong, bright spirit, lights your eyes. Well, he forgot about this. He himself struggled with alcoholism, got married, got divorced, and he went to therapy because he was feeling such shame at repeating his father's patterns. But there was one day when he remembered his ground,

he looked in the mirror and he remembered his grandmother's voice, you know, saying what a strong, bright spirit, lights your eyes. And there was something in that mirroring. He said to me, he remembered the story of the Buddha touching the ground and that she was his earth goddess coming down to remind him of his goodness. And that was a kind of a turning point that he started making choices from a different place.

We need reminders. We each need others. to remember and reflect our goodness and accept us just where we are. One awesome thing about Eeyore is that even though he's basically clinically depressed, he still gets invited to participate in adventures and shenanigans with all of his friends. And they never expect him to pretend to feel happy. They just love them anyway. And they never leave him behind or ask him to change.

So to be part of this evolutionary healing, we need to start with ourselves, but we also need to help each other remember. Wes Angelozzi says, go and love someone exactly as they are. Just go and love someone exactly as they are. And then watch how quickly they transform into the greatest, truest version of themselves. When one feels seen and appreciated in their own essence, one is instantly empowered. Go and love someone exactly as they are. So as with the actor I described, habits begin to change in less than a month with regular

training of attention. It's a deep habit to control ourselves by judging our imperfection. but if we have a commitment to noticing it when it arises, the healing and freedom that comes from out of the pain and suffering of that habit is tremendous. So I'll offer a particular freedom challenge, which is to take the next month, if you'd like, to consider that right at the center of your practice, to awaken from the anxiety about imperfection.

Every day, just take some time in your meditation to scan and notice where you're hooked. Is there anywhere right now that I'm feeling anxious about imperfection? And take some minutes just to name it and to recognize that this is suffering and to offer care and to imagine and sense into who you could be without that. And if you do that every day, I guarantee you the trance will begin to become more transparent and you'll begin to see more and more the goodness and radiance and beauty of that essence who you really are. So let's just close together, a very simple way.

Take this moment to pause and invite yourself into presence. Feel your breath. feel your body, feel your heart and your intention to really manifest your full potential for living, for loving, for being awake. These are the words of poet Danafalls, why wait for your awakening? Would you hold back when the beloved beckons? No, I can't step across the threshold you say, eyes downcast, I'm not worthy, I'm afraid and my motives aren't pure. Do you value your reasons

for staying small more than the light shining through the open door? Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the radiance of your true nature. Perfection is not a prerequisite. it for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your stories of separation and failure. This is the day of your awakening. Namaste and thank you for your attention. We hope you've enjoyed these teachings. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule and special online offerings, please join my email list by visiting tarabrock.com.