The emotion of compassion springs from the recognition that the human experience is imperfect. ~ Kristin Neff | In today's audio meditation we explore the following idea about perfectionism.
Many of us grow up with a drive to become perfect. In order to feel worthy of praise or love we strive to achieve, accomplish and out-do ourselves or others. It can be quite alarming to find that no matter how high our level of success, no matter the size of our bank account and no matter the friends and followers we have we still make mistakes. We may still feel unworthy, like a fraud or imposter, always on the brink of being discovered to be less than perfect.
If we can gently look at ourselves from the eyes of compassion we can see how shaky the goal of perfection is to begin with. We can see clearly that life will always be full of challenges and obstacles, some of which we will conquer, but not without our stumbling and falling a few times.
While we can often give other people a break when we see them fall short of perfection, it takes a bit of practice to do the same for ourselves.